The perfect storm created by Labour and the trade unions over the controversial plans to dismantle the National Health Service, change the pensions system for public sector workers – work longer and pay more to get the same or less – and, as Ed Balls said, “crush” the economy, was a sight to behold.
The Shadow Chancellor, with the blessing of the man who should have given him that key portfolio last autumn, was in typically pugnacious form. He took the fight to the Tories and hammered them at every turn. And Ed Miliband, increasingly confident on what is traditional Labour territory, and increasingly effective in his forensic examination of the Government’s problems, or what they call policies, got the better of a peeved and irritable David Cameron at Prime Minister’s Questions.
How Mr Cameron loves a euphemism. The Big Society is a euphemism for savage cuts. And a no-fly zone is, as the US Defense Secretary Robert Gates pointed out, a euphemism for war. It would mean a military attack on the air defences of a sovereign country.
You might think, after the failures of the Blair administration’s adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the loss of public confidence in the political process as a result, that this government would tread a little more carefully. Not a bit of it. The hapless William Hague, arguably Britain’s worst Foreign Secretary since the dark days of the 1930s, when Lord Halifax sucked up to Adolf Hitler and encouraged the Führer’s designs on Austria, the Sudetenland and Poland, ordered a crack team into Libya by helicopter – they could have simply docked in port, like most people, and taken a taxi to their rendezvous with the rebels – who were captured by a motley collection of farmers and office clerks. No wonder this Government is well on its way to becoming the most unpopular in memory.
It is, perhaps, ironic that Japan, of all countries, should have invested so heavily in nuclear power. After the dropping in 1945 of two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan should have been more aware than most of the dangers of – and the devastation caused by – nuclear fision. Many people in Japan, and elsewhere, fear that the scientists are not being entirely straight about the problems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
We do not know yet if this will be a disaster on the scale of Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. But we do recognise the familiar pattern of denial over the leaks of radiation and we do know there are still farmers, in this country, who cannot sell their produce because of the nuclear fall out from Chernobyl 25 years ago. We also know that nuclear power is not, and can never be, entirely safe. Which should be food for thought for any government, in this country or abroad, looking to meet our energy needs in the 21st century.
