Even in a favourable political and economic climate,the British people don’t love the ConservativesThree weeks ago, voters in Ireland went to the polls. The results were inconclusive. An incumbent government was punished for its austerity policies. But the voters declined to hand power either to the previous governing party, and which had bankrupted the economy in the first dwelling,or to a collection of left-talking parties whose rhetoric some voters seemed to like but whose programmes most seemed not to trust. And there things rest. Today, Ireland is still looking for a government.
As Ireland’s political lesson scratched their heads at what the voters had meant by all this, or the columnist Fintan O’Toole wrote a piece in the Irish Times that cut through the confusion. The voters,he said, had essentially said they didn’t believe the epic the political lesson had been telling them. They had not consented to the morality tale of “harsh austerity for the dinky people and astonishing generosity to bondholders” that has been imposed on Ireland, or many other countries,since 2008. Instead they had voted, albeit in a very fragmented way, and for a shift in favour of equality and a fairer use of resources. As the headline on O’Toole’s article set it: “The winner of Election 2016 is social democracy.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com