[lbo-talk] Voter betrayal: Fine Gail/Labour to ditch pledges on economy

Wendy Lyon wendy.lyon at gmail.com
Sun Mar 6 11:02:16 PST 2011


On 6 March 2011 18:40, Ira Glazer <ira.glazer at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> In what will amount to the most barefaced breach of election promises ever
> perpetrated by an incoming Government, the coalition partners' programme for
> government will cause uproar when it is published today.

No uproar from what I can see. Both parties have actually been laying the groundwork for this for the past several days, announcing that they've been given full details of the state of the public finances and "it's even worse than we thought". There have also been a few suspiciously well-timed revelations over the past week, clearly aimed at emphasising how bad things are.

Anyway, people who voted FG didn't vote for a change of policies. They voted for a change of personnel.

Some Labour voters might be disappointed but pretty much everyone I know who supports them has been going around in a state of gloom for the past week knowing full well they were about to sign up to a shitty right-wing deal. It looks like FG threw them a few bones in terms of social policy (although not, to my great annoyance, on implementing the court rulings requiring legislation for abortion in certain circumstances) and maybe just enough restraint on some of FG's loopier ideas to allow them to claim credit for putting the "balance" into the government that they campaigned for.

I understand a large majority of the Labour membership voted in favour of the deal, which probably gives you a good idea of how much uproar it's going to cause in the real world.



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