Jan
29
Order, Order…
The long awaited parliamentary style debate between the Labour Society and the University’s Conservative Association took place on the evening of the 9th December in a furore of banter and heckling which any MP would be proud of. Tensions between the parties had been running high since the Politics Society’s ‘Question Time’ debate where we saw the irrevocable difference of opinion between the two sides when concerning the global economic downturn.
The evening’s debate kicked off with a highly competent criticism of Labour’s economic policy by the NUCA’s President Will Bickford Smith, which highlighted upon the incumbent flaws in Labours ‘spend money like water’ policy. Will went on to make the extremely valid and relevant point, that ‘solving debt with more debt’ is - and will never be - a viable solution to the current financial crises. This attack forced Labour’s chair (Jamie McMahon) to hide behind a barricade of numbers and statistics which only served to show that there were regurgitating party literature. Moreover, their personal attack on Will’s use of rhetoric proved they hadn’t a single political argument left.
NUCA’s vice president, and economics student, Nick Allsopp gave a damning report on the cause of Britain’s recession; the fact that Gordon Brown, both as Chancellor and Prime Minister did not regulate the amounts of money lent by banks. Nick brushed aside McMahon’s statistics to reveal the true cost of the crisis on the British Taxpayer- £1 Trillion. Labour’s second in command Faruk Patel resorted to blaming Baroness Thatcher and previous Tory governments for the Crisis, an argument completely unfounded and steeped in the traditional Labour sentiment of passing the blame. When closing speaker Craig Cox raised this issue, he was told to ‘stop living in the past’- a comment which caused much uproar throughout the opposition.
All in all Labour’s performance at the debate could be summed up in three words: hypocrisy, bureaucracy, and incompetence.
By James Spencer