Andy Beckett - arsehole of the week

"Why David Cameron is the new Dubya", yesterday's offering in CiF by left-wing journopuke Andy Beckett, hardly seemed worth spearing at first skimming, but on for some reason it popped up as unread in my Google Reader today and I took another look at it. I have highlighted the more egregious stupidities in the following:

Once in government, Cameron, like Bush, has exceeded the electorate's instructions [1]. The cautious, inclusive, compassionate conservative has turned into a divisive right-wing radical [2]. Both men have used national emergencies as political cover. For Bush, it was 9/11 that justified his huge, reckless neocon experiment. For Cameron, the emergency, more contrived [3], has been the double one of a hung parliament and a large national deficit – neither of them remotely unprecedented, but scary enough, in a Britain recently grown accustomed to political and economic stability [4], to make a shrinking of state spending [5] drastic enough to satisfy the zaniest of 80s Thatcherites look like common sense, for the time being, to an impressive 55% of voters.

1. Electorates cannot give "instructions" - they can only give mandates and hope for the best.
2. Does anyone think it remotely likely that a coalition government including the Labour-lite wing of the Liberal Democrats could pursue "a divisive right-wing radical" agenda?
3. How did Cameron "contrive" a hung parliament and one of the largest structural deficits in the world?
4. There is nothing "recent" about political stability in Britain; an ability to cope with quite drastic change without popular upheaval has long been a feature of the society; and apparent economic stability bought with borrowed money simply postpones, and exacerbates, the inevitable day of reckoning.
5. The principal reason why a majority of voters support a drastic shrinking of the state is because the alternative is a huge increase in taxation on those who actually produce wealth in order to subsidize those who do not; and the reason why few other than state employees are protesting the slimming of government is because under NuLabour the state had become bloated and arrogantly intrusive.