For The Good Of The Country

It's still cold for the time of the year with night temperatures falling to ground frost levels in some secluded spots even in the south. British Airways - its management and aircrew - are hard at work - dust clouds permitting - on a journey to oblivion. It is almost a slow-motion replay of of the industrial bloody-mindedness of 70s Britain that ended with industrial wastelands across large areas of Britain and gave us Mrs Thatcher.

The new government is getting to work and I sense a general optimism among the general public that this coalition can be made to work. But there are forces willing them to fail. The Tory Party has a right wing element that like British Airways would rather self-destruct than compromise on anything. We know these people exist but the media seem deliberately to be seeking them out to plaster their minority views all over the front pages of the newspapers or broadcast them on radio and TV. The BBC has not performed well in this respect and I am almost inclined to believe the paranoids who think the BBC is filled with leftist propagandists working for the Labour Party.

On last night's Question Time, there were Lord Faulkner, Michael Heseltine and Simon Hughes putting forward sensible views on the formation of the Lib-Con coalition, when few other realistic options presented themselves. And, I believe that the two parties had a duty to pull together. But the coalition was attacked by members of the audience who, it seemed had been selected for their negative views on the coalition. But, if this were not bad enough, the otter two panelists were Melanie Philips who rants and raves all the time with her to-the-right-of-Genghis Kahn views and paranoid obsessions and Mehdo Hasan, the political editor of the New Statesman who also ranted and raved blaming everybody for failing to cobble together a deal between Lib-Dems and Labour. If the Lib-Dems had any guts, he said, they would have stayed out of this squalid deal and allowed the Tories to govern as a minority - which would ultimately have collapsed, caused a General Election and lead to the re-election of the Labour Party. I have to say that Michael Heseltine and Simon Hughes defended the coalition with vigour and a great deal of common sense. It seems that with so many Lib-Dem MPs actually part of the government, Simon Hughes is going round the TV and radio studios as a front line of defence. Considering that he is a fairly left wing Lib-Dem man, he has accepted the coalition with considerable alacrity and has a done a good job defending the government against many detractors. For years we have adversarial politics with parties shouting at each other providing little illumination and accepting that every few years we change over from one lot to the other - in every case in recent times elected by a minority vote. David Cameron has said that he wants to change that and I wish him well. It is a huge task, made more difficult by the fact that it has to be done alongside treating the worst financial disaster in modern times.

Today, William Hague was in Washington shaking hands and having a chat with Hillary Clinton and emphasizing the easy relationship between our two countries. Meanwhile, David Cameron was making friends with Alex Salmon in Edinburgh. This is going to be bit of a struggle because of the lack of Tory representation in Scotland but, again, there seemed to be some good will between the two men.

In the last few days there seems to have been an orgy of searching the archives to find examples were Lib-Dems and Tories called each other names. What is the point? As long as parties are fighting each other they will accuse each other of all kinds of things. That is what has been wrong. Now they should be pragmatic and pull together for the good of the country.

/