Emphasis on safety and security provokes ’scaremongering’ claim The British Government is considering introducing a national ID card to prevent terrorism and identity theft. The announcement in yesterday’s Queen’s speech has provoked accusations that the Government is scaremongering in the run up to the May general election.
Whether ID cards are a useful way of countering terrorism and fraud is one question. Whether they are an infringement of civil liberties is another. But opposition parties accusing the Government of using scare tactics in an election which Labour is almost guaranteed to win seems a bit pointless. Surely the Tories and the Lib Dems should be finding more creative ways of attacking the Government.
Watching Tory Leader Michael Howard being demolished by Jeremy Paxman on the BBC’s Newsnight programme yesterday was utterly depressing. Will the Tories ever recover from their 97 collapse? Will the Lib Dems ever look like a realistic opposition? Or will we be faced with fewer and fewer people voting Labour every four or five years?
Perhaps the answer is for one of the opposition parties to do something radical.
I interviewed Joe Trippi the other day. He was the man behind the failed Howard Dean presidential bid. Trippi is an inspirational speaker and a passionate web devotee. He believes that only by putting power in the hands of the electorate can an outsider galvanize enough support to mount a credible challenge to the establishment. Of course, Trippi did it online.
When the Dean campaign began, Dean had 432 known supporters. Thirteen months later, that figure had jumped to 650,000. In one year he came from nowhere to become the most credible candidate to challenge Kerry and Edwards–until he finally shot himself in the foot with his infamous scream in Iowa.
The Tories have to move way out to the right in order to be more right wing than Labour. And the Lib Dems don’t stand a chance clinging on to the policies which made Labour unelectable for so many years during the 1980s and 1990s. But either of these parties could capitalize on the huge sense of disillusionment among the British elecorate if they offered a new way (much like New Labour in 97). That way would have to be an end to “top-down”, “we-know-best” politics and the beginning of a more open era of Government — the very thing New Labour promised but failed to deliver.
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