Tories – you shouldn’t tell the electorate the truth

I’m sure I must be missing something here. Alastair Darling does what it’s fair to say the electorate are always saying they want and chokes up the honest appraisal that the economy’s a bit on the buggered side and going to get worse in the next twelve months and up pops the Tories with the whole “he’s let the cat out of the bag” routine.

Apart from my personal distaste for using simplistic phraseology in politics, what exactly are the Tories saying?

That he should have kept quiet about it. Careful, don’t tell the proles, they can’t be trusted with that kind of information now can they?

So are we now to believe that were there to be a Tory Government they’d simply not tell anyone. Keep it quiet like. Mums the word and all that.

Of course were Alastair Darling to take this approach, not say anything and as things do get worse, what’s the betting the same Tories would be jumping up and down saying “sir sir, he’s hiding something, he’s not telling us the truth about the economy”.

It’s a difficult one to call. Of course there’s the strong argument that if the Chancellor of the Exchequer pops up and says, “excuse me, but you know the economy, well, it’s a bit knackered at the mo and it’s probably going to get worse for a while” then it can hit confidence leading to detrimental effects.

However that said, if the combination of an international contraction on the availability of credit (I’m going to avoid the use of the phrase ‘credit crunch’ because it has come to mean bugger all anyway), combined with rapidly increasing energy prices is so fundamentally going to knock us for six then I doubt the words of the great eye-browed will make things any worse.

So for me, I like it, a politician being up front and honest which although I don’t subscribe to the hideously simplistic (and factually incorrect) “they’re all a bunch a lying cheating tossers” mantra that seems to pervade any discussion of politics these days, it is still refreshing to see.

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