Our unpopular prime Minister

Once again popular euphoria has been replaces by popular discontent. Were the pattern not familiar it would seem strange.

In 1997 I welcomed a change of government, and was glad that the Labour party that took power seemed to have shed the some of the innumerate stupidity and thuggish envy that had characterised that party in the past. However I still had reservations, especially about the self righteous moralising of the new leaders, who seemed to get on disturbingly well with Rupert Murdock, and received from various business men sums of money orders of magnitude greater than the puny donations in brown envelopes with which Mr. Al Fayed had persuaded Conservative back-benchers to ask question in the Commons.

I considered Brown discredited by his first budget with it's removal of tax concessions from pension funds.

Even in the light of those considerations, our electorate returned Labour to power with a huge majority in 2001, and again, though with a smaller majority, in 2005, after they had taken us into an unnecessary war on the basis of false intelligence.

Since then, little has changed that may reasonably be attributed to any change on the part of the Government, yet there has been a great change in popular sentiment. The state of the economy does indeed give cause for concern, but insofar as government policies have contributed to those problems, those policies date back to the days of Labour popularity.

The swing in popular sentiment seems to consist partly of people who supported the policies, objecting to their consequences, and partly of people greatly exaggerating the power of the government to control the economy. My first reaction was to feel depressed that I live among such stupid people, but I console myself with the thought that the stupidity of collective decisions may be much greater than that of most of the participating individuals.

During the last three decades the share of the vote won by each of the major parties has varied between about 28% (Labour in 1983) and the mid forties, a variation of about 17%, or about one sixth of those voting, so the ranks of those voting against the results of their own policies may be relatively small. In a way that is just as depressing as my first conclusion, if not more so. Collective folly is particularly irritating because it is hard to anyone in particular to blame, and I like having someone to blame !!!