New World.

Politics I've been watching BBC News almost solidly for days. These are historic moments and when I'm reading the book or watching the documentaries about all of this in future years I want to be able to remember what it was like to experience these dramatic political changes as well as the hindsight. With very little information to go on, just whispers in the ears of political correspondents, the coverage has largely consisted of a stream of politicians old and new offering their opinion on which form the coalition should take like a very slow, broadcast piece of qualitative market research, punctuated with statements from participants that say very little.

The overall impression is that as I suggested pictorially yesterday, after years of obscurity, of being laughed at and satirised in parliament and ignored in the media, the Liberal Democrats are now in the position of deciding if a figure like Alan Johnson or Ben Bradshaw keeps their job, with both speaking in a conciliatory manner about people and policies they publicly despised a week ago. A key example was Michael Gove on Newsnight last night revealing that the 10k tax break is one such sweetner being agreed to, with Kirsty Walk rounding on him and asking how the Tories would find the £17 billion to pay for it!

"Scrap Trident?" she asked.

This is a new world.

No comments: