Watching one or two political roundups of the year 2015, the event that kept coming up was the Tory win in the General Election. Hardly surprising. With that victory went wipe out for the LibDems, success in Westminster for the Scottish Nationalist Party and the demise of Ed Milliband and Labour.
It was reiterated that "no one", but no one, foresaw the Tory majority. Not only that, the mystery remains as to how it happened. Factors cited included the unelectability of Ed to leading the country or the electorate being fearful of a coalition of Labour and the SNP.
George Osborne - ruthless unstoppable strategist
(Image by Daily Telegraph London England) Details DMCA
These may have been enough to account for the lack of success by Labour but no one put their finger on the reason why the Tories succeeded in gaining a fairly workable majority.
Your humble correspondent at the Newsletter did, regular readers will recall, predict the Tory victory in Newsletter No 145 of the 4th of April , five weeks before the election took place when I wrote
"The most likely outcome is a Conservative Party with either a majority or near majority"
Nick Robinson, BBC politician correspondent, clearly missed out by not reading this newsletter, reporting the day after the election that -
"No pollsters, no pundits, no political leaders saw it coming. Even David Cameron, himself did not see it coming. This was a day no one expected. No one could take it in."
Having had seven months to reflect on the result, none of the highly paid pundits have been able to figure it out. They are still thrashing around. Much like the causes of the First World War (which I explained in Newsletter No 137 Sunday 09 November 2014 ), it is an historical event without explanation. It represents an inevitable lacuna in our historical knowledge.
Well, the true mystery is in how people, who spend their lives
observing and analysing political events, can miss the factor that
guaranteed a Conservative majority.
In addition this was not something that arose by chance - that was
caused by Harold Macmillan's "events, dear boy, events". It resulted
from a deliberately engineered policy to divide the nation and leave a
significant percentage of voters fearful of change. These voters saw
how Tory policies had benefited them and sought protection for their
gains by voting for the Conservatives.
The Tory strategy for dismissing their coalition partners and continuing in government alone began almost soon as they gained power in 2010. George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister) was probably the brains behind it, as David Cameron has shown himself to be rather inept at times. But once Osborne spelt it out to Cameron, it must have appealed immediately to all his Tory instincts. The path was set.
The policy was obscured to a degree by the constant preoccupation of all parties and commentators on the cuts being made to government services and spending.
But to the beneficiaries it was obvious what was happening.
The government in 2010 was faced with a truly dreadful situation -- a declining economy, a large government deficit and a lot of unemployment. Orthodox economics was no help in addressing these problems for its solutions for such eventualities are always the same -- we need to liberalise the market, cut government expenditure and just wait and see with fingers crossed.
But governments and central banks have long since discarded orthodox economics as being of any help in achieving their aims. They haven't told the economists themselves, or the universities that teach economics, and so these fools just continue spouting the same misguided rubbish.
Their theories are completely unable to account for the events visibly before them, but this failure has been evident in various different ways for 200 years. It has never persuaded them re-evaluate their theories before. It is certainly not going to do so now.
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