Devoid of a Plan

I decided not to post anything yesterday for the simple fact that the news was dominated by Jim Callaghan's death, the Pope's struggle with Easter Sunday and the continued fallout from Howard Flight's gaffe. Enough has been said about those.

This morning, it seems Michael Howard is going to be out and about proposing how he would pledge extra maternity pay. An interesting proposal from the Tories... interesting in that it's the kind of thing old Mrs Thatcher would not be too impressed with.

The Tories are trying to paint the impression that they have changed. Maybe they have, but it is not from one ideology to another. It's one of my favourite subjects, but once more it demonstrates how parties have gone from one ideology to no ideology at all. Conservatism has always been pragmatic, so that would be their defence, but the past few weeks, with the Tories jumping on issues that might become popular, have just given credence to the fact that there is no grand vision or principle that can be seen behind any major party's plans any more.

It just makes voting that little bit tougher to decide. How are we supposed to believe what anyone says, when they present you with a set of ideas for dealing with today's problems? How are we supposed to judge how they are going to react to the problems of tomorrow? At least when there was ideology, we could see how they would consistently apply their fundamental principles and would have some idea where the solution would come from.

Perhaps this is how we have all been fooled by Tony Blair. We thought he'd be a social democrat when we elected him. Anyone who thought he was going to be a socialist was very naive. But in fact, he only presented us with faux-social-democrat solutions to the problems of 1997. Then once elected, he demonstrated how he was, in fact, an authoritarian democrat.

But we still kept on voting for him. And we're about to do it again...