Simple Minds

One might hope, if one didn't know better at my age, that a year and a half in office would enable even the Bullingdon Club and its pet oiks to realise that government is rarely so simple a matter as the tabloids and other repositories of national wisdom would have us believe. Unemployment is not always a simple matter of the proles' lacking moral fibre; public health is not always a simple matter of letting the processed-food companies have their way; defence of the realm is not always a simple matter of bombing a few wogs; coping with social unrest is not always a simple matter of turning on the water cannon and easing our prisons' undercrowding. Even the time-honoured British sport of not quite being in Europe is not always a simple matter of giving school-assembly sermons and then diving for Washington's apron-strings when things get sticky, as both Angela Merkel and Nicolas de Racaille have recently had occasion to point out.

Alas, Daveybloke and his Cuddly Conservatives continue to take a disquietingly primary-school approach to the rather complicated mess in which their chums in the City have landed us. During a recent burble to business leaders in London, the Head Boy himself proclaimed, among such expectable pandering measures as permitting arbitrary dismissal of employees for the first two years and fining workers for bringing cases to employment tribunals, that "We've dealt with the flow of regulation by instituting a 'one-in-one-out' rule, so any Minister who wants to bring in a new regulation, has to get rid of an existing one first." Read that again, if you will: Daveybloke has got up before one of his favourite client groups and burbled that what matters to the Government, apart from the need to keep the rabble in their place, is not what the regulations say, or what effect the regulations have, or how the regulations are enforced, or whether the regulations originate in Westminster, in Brussels or in Magna Carta, but how many regulations there are. It's a pity the Bullingdon Club and its pet oiks are unable to apply this childlike logic to some other little local difficulties, like pensioners in fuel poverty, students in debt and families forced onto the breadline; simply put, we could do with fewer of those, too.