Entries from February 2009 ↓

Bob Piper – Without even a hint of irony David Cameron is going to announce today the Conservatives plan to give more power to local authorities… by instructing them to have directly elected Mayors.

UPDATE: The Birmingham Post says that Cameron will say there needs to be a referendum for local mayors. If that’s the case, what’s new? That’s the current policy of the government. Or am I missing something?

Google’s Chief Executive, Eric Schmidt, was appointed as David Cameron’s economic adviser last week. Yesterday, he was interviewed on Fox News on Sunday and backed the kind of approach being taken by the UK Government – running counter to the rather less hands-on position of David Cameron.

“Longer term, who would do this if it were not the federal government? How would we jump-start this? The markets would resolve. I mean, eventually, it would work itself out. The credit market would work
out. We would deal with the debt. But it would take a decade or two. And all of the lessons of global finance say that the government acts quickly, from our perspective, the quicker the better, and we’ll see.”

This is not the first time Mr Schmidt has advocated a different direction to the one being pursued by Mr Cameron:

“And the question is, in a situation where you have the – the largest global recession since the 1930s, and a lack of credit and so forth, what do you do? The business community’s view is, the government needs to act, and it needs to act quickly, to get people to get enough confidence.”

This suggest one of two possible positions. Mr Cameron is trying to gently steer his party to a more mainstream position. Though this would be welcome, it doesn’t seem likely. The only other conclusion I can make is that Eric Schmidt is pretty clueless about the UK Conservative Party. If only he’d googled “Bullingdon Club” before saying yes.

Awww, Tom, I don’t want to begin to think about it.