Deborah Thomas is prospective parliamentary candidate for Twickenham, where she is challenging the Lib Dem Treasury spokesman, Vince Cable, and you can read her blog here. She argues that in tackling the economic crisis, Conservatives must challenge the apparent consensus that capitalism is broken and be bold enough to say that it is better to "do nothing" if the alternative is worse.
As the song goes, “Stop The World, I want to Get Off”.
I can’t help but feel that somehow we are living in a kind of political nightmare – a screen has been pulled separating out the political establishment from the rest of the world, the Westminster bubble unpoppable, and a dangerous reality vacuum being created that could lead to parties on the political fringes making headway, if only because voters are so frustrated looking in to the fishbowl.
In the recent economic crisis, I believe a dangerous consensus appears (and I choose that word carefully) to have been created: Bankers are bad. Capitalism is broken. Regulation has failed.
No searching questions, no detailed analysis and most importantly, no serious political rebuttal from the political right has been aired in the mainstream media against these new “truths”.
I have written before about my frustration with what a friend of mine calls “conformist liberalism”: the idea that there are paradigms - such as the certainty of climate change, the idiocy of George W Bush or the folly of war in Iraq - that should not be debated further, as they are given facts, with non-believers treated worse than early Christian heretics.
This disease has, in my opinion, infected parts of the Parliamentary Conservative party, where we have allowed politicians such as my opponent in Twickenham, Vince Cable, to be lauded, not because what he says is right, but because there is no coherent critique of the Government coming from the right to fill the vacuum.
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