Dance, Vince Cable, dance! The Business Secretary, whose hotly anticipated reality tv debut will be airing on Strictly Come Dancing’s spangly Christmas Day special, has made the supreme error of actually having and expressing an agenda. His ongoing humiliation in the press and the to-ing and fro-ing over his continued place in cabinet prove beyond question that the Liberal Democrats have no real influence in this Coalition government: they are there to smile and soft-shuffle and sprinkle a bit of liberal glitter over Tory policies. Cable’s declaration that he would oppose Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of BSkyB is unhelpfully aggressive towards a key sponsor and promoter of the Conservative Party, so his puppet-masters have seized the strings, ensuring that the Business Secretary dances to the right tune.
Mr Cable, along with millions of left-leaning citizens, may have been labouring under the impression that the Business Secretary, who won the public’s trust and confidence as a steady hand on the economic tiller during the election debates, is in the cabinet in order to guide policy. This has clearly been a gross misreading of the situation. Cable, more than any other Liberal Democrat, is not part of this cabinet of millionaires in order to wield power. He is there, in the words of Douglas Adams, in order to distract attention away from power – specifically, to lend legitimacy and a venerable, brow-furrowing, statesmanly air to the savage programme of spending cuts and welfare destruction being enacted by the Conservatives in cabinet who, lest we forget, did not actually win the general election in May.
Almost nobody has questioned whether or not Cable may have had a good reason for wanting to wage a private war against the Murdoch media monopoly. On the contrary, Conservative reasoning on this question was best expressed by Douglas Carswell MP, who wrote on his blog:
Murdoch’s “empire”….is the product of millions of free citizens willingly paying for products and services that Murdoch provides them. Politicians like Mr Cable and I are only able to do all the things we claim to be able to do because of the wealth creators like Murdoch. We should not forget it.
This is a government that protects the rich at all costs, praising business owners and media moguls as “wealth creators” while doing everything in its power to divert wealth towards them. This is a government which sees the rich as its core constituency — the people without whose mandate politicians could not “do the things they claim to be able to do”. It’s a strictly choreographed dance of corporate-sponsored statecraft, and any Lib Dem who falters over the rhythm will be jerked mercilessly back into step. On Christmas Day, we’ll all get to see Vince Cable dance to the music of cartoon politics — but if you look closely, you’ll see David Cameron pulling the strings.
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