Wednesday 27 January 2016

Cameron's Dead Cat Manoeuvre

Not a good week so far for David Cameron and his Government and today he heaped even more brickbats to fall down on his head by dismissing refugees living in desperate conditions in French camps as a 'bunch of migrants'.
Not for the first time that the Prime Minister has used inflammatory language so you would have thought he would have learned by now but maybe he has which is exactly why he made such a comment.
While we are concentrating on that we are not discussing the uncomfortable things such as the Conservative Party flagship policy of the Bedroom Tax being declared 'discriminatory and unlawful' by the Court of Appeal or the the Google tax deal which saw the search engine pay a tenth of the amount tax it owed and the Chancellor describing it as a good thing.
Nor are we looking at how the Transparency International condemned the UK as 'extraordinarily inept' at tackling corruption and 'cosying up' unconditionally to states with appalling human rights records like Saudi Arabia and China.
The bunch of migrants speech also covers up the UN report that we have been implicit in Saudi Arabia targeting and killing civilians in Yemen and also selling spying equipment to repressive states such as Egypt.
Nor are we hearing much about how the government tried to redefine child poverty by changing how it is measured by measuring worklessness and children's performance at school rather than household income.
To use an Australian expression, Cameron is using the dead cat manoeuvre which involves throwing a defunct moggy into the room and everyone will shout about the dead cat you lobbed into the room but not about the issues that would otherwise cause him so much grief.
Sadly, it works every time.

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