How's The Coalition Government Doing?

[Gromit]

Cameron and Clegg have given their mid term assessment, what is yours?

Also,

Monday's report had a section missing. They were hoping to quiety release an annex to it today which lists all the election pledges they have missed/u-turned and generally failed to deliver on.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9789256/Coalition-misses-70-election-pledges.html

Do you think the omission and the plan to sneakily add it at a later date, was a tad dishonest?

[douglas9401]

They come across as a couple of incompetent middle managers who are lucky to have a job at all. Both have been promoted well above their abilities and will be kept for the duration of this manufactured fiasco we're living through but when everything's allowed to settle down again they'll disappear from public view.

[modeller]

Talking about sneakily doing something. Do you remember this ?

Jo Moore: Labours Chief Press Officer and special advisor to Stephen Byers.
"It's now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors' expenses?[1]"
Do you know what day that was ? It was 9/11 and she did it within an hour after the attack.
She did it again a couple of months later when she wanted to bury some bad news at the time of Princess Margaret's funeral.

[emmie]

don't think they are doing all that well, having said that we had 13 years of the other lot, so not sure how to judge it.

[Quizmonster]

Well, they've been in power for 32 months and, even according to The Telegraph, they have carried out at least 32 U-turns. That's an average of one-a-month, so "How they're doing" is pretty clearly omnishambolically!

[emmie]

well New Labour had 13 years to change the country, make it better, and managed to bring it to the brink of collapse, good that eh?

[BlueToffee]

It isn't!

[Baldric]

Considering the mess they inherited from Labour, it could be a lot worse.
The worst financial situation since the late 40's and a note on the desk saying; "Sorry there's no money left, we've spent it all"
That just about sums up those feckless barstewards
and getting out of it was never going to be painless!

[modeller]

I don't like either of them but neither can keep their party election promises /aims/pledges because of the mess we are in and because the coalition is not a party. They can only do what they both agree on which inevitably means a woolly compromise.
However I still prefer them to self serving Blair.

[Quizmonster]

Obviously, I don't know how old you are, Baldric, but perhaps you should be made aware of a previous such note. The following were the scribbled words of Reginald Maudling, the departing TORY chancellor in 1964, to his Labour successor...

"Good luck, old cock.... Sorry to leave it in such a mess."

So the near-identical Labour comment you draw attention to from the time of the 2010 election was merely a copy of that, though perhaps the later version was rather more polite!
If the note you KNOW about proves Labour are "feckless barstewards", then presumably the note you DON'T appear to know about proves exactly the same about the Tories!

[youngmafbog]

QM, you are really scraping the barrel on that one. Just what has a note written some 49 years ago got to do with the current mess (left by Labour).

So they copied a note, couldn't even be original in that then.

And do you really think any of the parties are the same as they were in 1964?

Not sure if it was sneaky or not. I am not happy whith Cameron and I hate Clegg. However, as pointed out neither is the Govenment they are a coalition and aas such 'U-turns' will be made.

Bette than the Blair/Browni attitude of 'I dont care what any of you think, do as I say not as I do'.

[ichkeria]

Abysmally. At least there's just over 2 years more of it to go.

In fairness tho' on the omission of the failures I suspect that was simply a case of 'Not enough space' to accommodate them all in their original format(!)

[Bazile]

cr*p

[Baldric]

The Labour party have a track record of almost ruining the Country financially every time they're in power, and of having blinkered supporters who can see nothing wrong with them, and forget that fact when convenient.

[emmie]

perhaps we should play the game of see what failures we can come up with on both sides. Blair promised much and didn't deliver, remember his weasel words, education, education, education, really can't see that much has changed, except we have an enormous amount of young people without work, that obviously didn't happen overnight.

Building hospitals, schools, using Private Finance Initiative, fine except to say that when you look at the deals that had to be done, the cost to those institutions have been enormous, over and above the costs of actually get them built.
No way to say this except that mass immigration has not been the happy event that Blair seems still to think it is, because there was not, nor still is, provision for those coming in to settle, find jobs, homes, schools.
And they have created a serious underclass who rely solely on benefits as a way of life, which is now being picked over but the present incumbents, who will be lambasted all the way to the next election for picking on the poor?
I don't care for the current coalition, it's a mish mash and i would rather have seen Cameron not make the alliance with the Lib Dems, but he did and now for the moment we are stuck with it.
The other thing one can say is that the welfare system is a leviathan and does need revising, paring down, pretty much the same way that sacred cow the NHS does, but no one has the balls to really do it. They tinker which is no good at all. I want to see a total curb on immigration, and a total claw back of powers from Brussels, then Cameron might see some of his core voters come back from UKIP or not voting at all.

[emmie]

why would troops be deployed on our streets, any reason they should be. They only normally get called into action here when the bstards strike, like the airport workers, or indeed the feck up with the security services at the Olympics. They were there in force, polite, and very efficient.

[Quizmonster]

Youngmafbog, are you really still convinced that "the current mess", as you call it, had nothing to do with the criminally greedy and incompetent bankers...whose folly has been further compounded over the years since 2008 with scandal after scandal? Should Labour just have let them sink, with the catastrophic effect that would have had on all of us with loans, mortgages and so on? Or are you just silent on their contribution to "the current mess" because so many of them are the very people who fund the Tories?

[emmie]

so the Labour party are not funded in any way by those those other than the unions, no businessman or woman who lobs money into their coffers?
they had long enough to curb the banks if they so wished, but didn't.

[emmie]

http://action.unlockdemocracy.org.uk/page/-/publications/Donations%20Report%20Q1%202012.pdf

[Quizmonster]

Click http://garstontowers.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/david-cameron-pictured-with-norman.html
Any time someone with right-wing sympathies refers to Labour's supposed financial incompetence and the necessity for the Tories to ride to the nation's rescue, I have another look at the picture linked-to above. Nowadays, I have a special titter when I see, lurking in the background, just who the Chancellor's Chief Treasury Advisor was on that day...Black Wednesday. Jeremy Hunt recently managed to shunt his responsibility onto his SpAd who had to resign, so I can't imagine why Norman Lamont didn't do likewise to David Cameron. It would have been the Glaswegian-style response, "It wisnae me, it wis him!"
Since some seem to think that referring to a 3-year-old note is OK but referring to a near-identical note from 49 years ago is not, I must ask for your indulgence in offering a 21-year-old photo. After all, one has to go back that far to reach a time when the Tories actually won a General Election! Bear in mind, also, that there was no worldwide banking meltdown going on at the time, as there was in 2008.
Tory financial competence? Yer 'avin a laff!