Am I missing something here? Vince Cable is a lauded financial genius who has lectured in economics, worked as an economics advisor, written books about economics, and is generally credited for having predicted the credit crisis in Britain. Pretty watertight experience and skills comprised there, you might think.
Equally, he is the lauded champion of students, signing the NUS Vote For Students pledge himself with alacrity and encouraging other MPs to sign it, promising to abolish tuition fees and repeatedly asserting that his party’s budget proposals were comprehensive, well thought out and realistic, he has now literally U-turned and declared that the party will not be voting for the cap after all.
So what went wrong? Could there have been a miscalculation? Or simply dishonesty? He is quoted as having said that he has changed his position because “We are not in an ideal world.”
Clearly.
Suzy
What he’s outlined today, effectively Vince’s Doctrine, seems to be “vote for us, we’ll promise whatever you want to hear, but after the election all bets are off.” By no means the first of cause, but I can’t recall anyone else being quite so blase about it before.
Next time ’round we shouldn’t bother with a manifesto, we can make it all up after the votes have been counted instead.