Deborah Thomas: Why We Need to Cut the Cable

Deborah Thomas was the prospective parliamentary candidate for Twickenham, where she challenged Vince Cable

Heavens to Betsy, Vince is an angry man, isn’t he? He wants to run over bankers, despises his coalition partners and seems to think anyone who owns a big house should be punished for it.

Obviously, as his former opponent, none of this surprises me, but having had the benefit of watching his performance with my professional (rather than political) hat on over the last year, I believe now is the time to let him snipe and whinge from the side-lines.

The reasons for this are essentially twofold, which I’ll explain below.

1. Vince Cable has not delivered

Short of being Chancellor of the Exchequer, Vince was given his dream job in the cabinet in May 2010 – Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills. He could use his so-called “visionary” knowledge of economics to get Britain’s economy back on track by boosting private sector enterprise and making Britain a world-class hub for higher-level skills. On both counts he has flunked.

Deborah Thomas: Let us say proudly, “Yes, we will be a do nothing party, if the only alternative is to make things worse”

Deborah Thomas is prospective parliamentary candidate for Twickenham, where she is challenging the Lib Dem Treasury spokesman, Vince Cable, and you can read her blog here. She argues that in tackling the economic crisis, Conservatives must challenge the apparent consensus that capitalism is broken and be bold enough to say that it is better to "do nothing" if the alternative is worse.

As the song goes, “Stop The World, I want to Get Off”.

I can’t help but feel that somehow we are living in a kind of political nightmare – a screen has been pulled separating out the political establishment from the rest of the world, the Westminster bubble unpoppable, and a dangerous reality vacuum being created that could lead to parties on the political fringes making headway, if only because voters are so frustrated looking in to the fishbowl.

In the recent economic crisis, I believe a dangerous consensus appears (and I choose that word carefully) to have been created: Bankers are bad. Capitalism is broken. Regulation has failed.

No searching questions, no detailed analysis and most importantly, no serious political rebuttal from the political right has been aired in the mainstream media against these new “truths”.

I have written before about my frustration with what a friend of mine calls “conformist liberalism”: the idea that there are paradigms - such as the certainty of climate change, the idiocy of George W Bush or the folly of war in Iraq - that should not be debated further, as they are given facts, with non-believers treated worse than early Christian heretics.

This disease has, in my opinion, infected parts of the Parliamentary Conservative party, where we have allowed politicians such as my opponent in Twickenham, Vince Cable, to be lauded, not because what he says is right, but because there is no coherent critique of the Government coming from the right to fill the vacuum.