“Play the ball not the man” – we can be bold enough to make a stand and do battle for our views and beliefs. But we must strive to be mature enough not to resort to unnecessary personal attacks upon people with opposing views. The “ball” is our personal view and the “man” is someone with the opposing view. The phrase derives from the world of soccer.
The starting point is unfortunately how the Conservatives have approached the matter. The UK economy is now an outright disaster, entirely thanks to George Osborne enabled by the Liberal Democrats. At a personal branding level, Osborne would like to be viewed as a great strategician within this party, but actually there is no strategy in any orthodox meaning of the term using by business, finance and management, let alone politics. Osborne is a tactician, and even then it is firefighting partly as a result of self-inflicted errors. One is unable to call somebody a great tactician who has made a million U-turns, like following the recent Budget.
George Osborne has personally attacked Ed Balls, because he would like to put the image of Balls and Brown as aggressive mobile phone chuckers playing havoc with the economy. The Tories do not produce a narrative on how money was spent as an emergency measure to save the banks, and nor do they wish to tell the truth to the public, in the same way they lie about how we ought to go bankrupt like Greece. Osborne would like to make mendacious, highly vindictive, personalised, extremely nasty smears rather than engage with Balls about why Balls was right. The chain of events is as follows: put VAT up so that consumer spending is decreased, pull investment in the construction industry by stopping projects such as ‘Building Schools for the Future’, create a high level of unemployment as a price well worth paying, receive fewer tax receipts, and spend a high level of benefit; whilst giving your mates a tax cut, and taking people silently off the register for their disabled benefits, leading to a record number of appeals in tribunals.
They are aided and abetted in this immoral activity by the BBC in this. The BBC provides inaccurate, highly biased and imbalanced reports, completely contrary to their own editorial guidelines. They on a regular basis confuse real news with entertainment, and prefer to report on their own reporters than the real issues facing this country. Therefore, Labour has a very limited means of getting its message across, arguably apart from the new media. Whilst some excellent blogs exist, not everyone (particularly the elderly) have access to the internet, so still remain disenfranchised by politics. Whilst it does not matter that politicians effectively spin things with very little evidence, as indeed Lord Lamont conceded regarding George Osborne’s direct accusation that Ed Balls was directly involved in corrupt activity, they can continue to argue that people are ‘apathetic’ about politics. People are not apathetic about politics, in that they cannot wait to see the Liberal Democrats obliterated on May 8th 2015. David Cameron is hated by much of his party, and whilst one term governments are extremely rate this government is most unusually incompetent.
A further problem is that many people are now warming to Gromit. This means that people prefer to listen to Miliband over a judicial inquiry for banking, Murdoch and the NHS, than listen to the corporate-funded Conservative Party which would rather hire-and-fire people without notice and seem to have become senior members alleged of very serious crimes. So Labour is forced to get personal, because they have such little scope to explain the arguments. And whilst Maurice Glasman produces incoherent rants about intellectual issues which nobody can understand, and Stephen Twigg appears to wish to consign members of society to ‘military schools’ , you can understand why voters feel frustrated.
