to avoid the angry mob, vote for the angry mob party

Alternatively: I myself would not dream, for instance, of carving a swastika into your pet kitten. My associates, sadly, have no such scruples.

Or so says Julian Glover in the Groan. AFAIK, Glover’s a Tory: I presume as the Guardian comment editor he’ll have some contact with the Tory leadership too, which doesn’t mean so much that the piece was written with official prompting or approval but that it was written by someone who would consciously avoid doing any harm to the Tories’ prospects in the forthcoming election.

Which makes it all the more strange that he’s contravening the official narrative that the Tories “have changed”. On the contrary, he says, it’s only by constant and strenuous effort by the leadership that they can be kept from running amok and that these efforts need to be rewarded by the voters if they are to continue successfully. Vote Dave: baboon tamer.

This is a very odd thing to be writing a few months before an election you’re supposedly confident of winning. It doesn’t help that the example he uses – a populist right takeover of the Australian liberals – so far doesn’t seem to say what he thinks it does.

Incidentally, I believe this is in line with current Tory policy on reasonable self defence.

Comments

[Alex]

Also, it's worth pointing out that practically the whole staff that implemented John Howard's quasi-Rove god'n'guns strategy in Australia is now working for the Tories.

[Leinad]

Heh, god'n'guns - hard pitch for Howard considering he presided over a ban on all semi/fully automatic rifles in his first year in office.

Crosby-Textor, whose dogwhistling worked a treat in the 2001 and 2004 elections went over to cook up "Are You Thinking What We're Thinking?" for Michael Howard.

The denialist takeover of the Libs was in part driven by tactical decisions taken by the Labor party - specifically they didn't sell their emissions trading regime with any force, preferring to put the onus on Turnbull and the Liberal moderates to do the grunt work.

The party denialists seized on this, convincing enough of the caucus that they were going to alienate their base and hand Rudd a major policy coup in exchange for kind words and a pat on the back. However, on the last day they fucked up - the original plan had been for the more moderate Joe Hockey to take the leadership off Turnbull but he was deeply ambivalent about it and frittered his support away, leading to the much more hardline Abbott eliminiating him in the first secret ballot.

The weak support for the Government's ETS in that poll is somewhat misleading - two other questions had the Government's approach to climate change beating the Oppositions, and support for carbon trading of some kind is still strong, but Labor, by leaving a huge vacuum for most of last year has created huge confusion about it's scheme and that's opened the door to a fear campaign by Abbott and his denier cadres.

Oh and the scheme itself is a lemon, larded with subsidies and free permits for all major emitters and only capable of mickey mouse reductions by 2020.

[Leinad]

Addendum: Glover's talking bollocks re: a Liberal surge and an early election.

The hard Right has definately been revitalised by having a firebreather in power but this has lead to a consolidation of the base vote - Abbott is poison to moderates and swing voters, particularly women and at the current rate of Coalition gaffes Labor is going to be quite happy to drag pre-campaign sparring out to August.