Quote of the day 9th July 2017

"I suspect the Left overstates the degree to which Corbyn and Corbynism is popular. Labour benefited from low expectations during the election campaign. There was a sense in which a Labour vote was a cheerful protest vote precisely because so few people thought that Labour might actually win the election. Voting Labour was the best way to send a message to a government that foisted an unwanted election on an unhappy people.

It was not necessarily an endorsement of everything in the Labour manifesto even if, individually, many of those policies polled well."
 
"Consequently the actual contents of the Labour manifesto and the party’s specific policy proposals were of relatively little importance. Labour offered an alternative – in terms of rhetoric as much as anything else – and that was more than enough. The contradictions in Labour’s offer mattered little; nor was it deemed necessary to explain how, precisely, that offer might be paid for. Labour’s weakness – that is to say its evident distance from power – became a paradoxical strength."
 
"Elections are a two-step process in which voters make two decisions. First, is the government good enough to deserve another term? Secondly, is the opposition good enough to deserve office themselves? In this election, voters answered both questions in the negative."
 
"The evidence that voters thirst for purity, on either extreme, remains dubious."
 
"It’s reasonable to think that a more plausible Labour party could actually have defeated May last month. Then again, if she faced a more plausible Labour party she wouldn’t have called an election in the first place."
 
(Alex Massie, from an article on CAPX which you can read in full here.)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nick Herbert on his visit to flood hit areas of Cumbria

Please note that the post below was published more than ten year ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by the
Read more

Quotes of the day 19th August 2020

Image
"Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise."  ( Cato the Elder , who lived 234 BC - 149 BC, quoted in "Lives" by Plutarch.) There is a similar saying by Germany's Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck: Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have put the same saying in a more humorous form: "Wise men profit by the mistakes of others, while fools will not learn even from their own blunders." See also this thread on the "Quote Investigator" website . Let us all be wise and learn from the events of the last few days.
Read more

Quote of the day 24th July 2020

I was moved to put the passage below forward as a quote today when I saw a horrible post on twitter from someone writing that it was "excellent" that someone who took a different view from her about Brexit had died. I won't write which way round it was so that all the Remain supporters can assume the post was from a Brexit fanatic welcoming the death of a remainer and all the Leavers can assume it was a Remainiac welcoming one less Brexiteer. There's been plenty of nasty stuff on both sides but if you catch anyone of your own viewpoint  posting something like that who might listen to you, please do call them out on it - and point out that they're giving everyone on your side of the argument a bad name. Anyway, here's the quote from John Donne.
Read more