Deborah Orr - soothscribe again

Under the drum-fire of lefty crap that usually fills it, I'm often tempted to delete the Guardian's CiF column from my RSS. Then something like Deborah Orr's article today comes along to remind me that there are still a few clear-eyed sceptics on the left. I believe she's the first person to win a bar to the Soothscribe award.

It seems to me that all we voters have to choose between is two brands of fantasy. Ed Miliband's fantasy is that Labour can now do all the stuff it was voted in to do in 1997, when it achieved an awesome mandate at the start of a long boom. David Cameron's fantasy, shared by his deputy, is that he can wipe out the deficit within five years, to the applause of a busy, purposeful and grateful nation. 

And, with reference to the Coalition government's decision to cancel - probably on the grounds that anything he did was assumed to be corrupt - Peter Mandelson's £80 million loan to Sheffield Forgemasters (which relates directly to yesterday's post on the prospects for nuclear energy in Britain): 

Britain's nuclear energy programme may not be exactly healthy (no government subsidy for nuclear development was the Old Generation's policy, under Old Generation energy secretary Ed Miliband). But Forgemasters has an eye to the foreign markets it believes will be buying the large castings that only one other company in the world presently supplies for nuclear power stations.

Deborah Orr is married to the novelist and acerb commentator Will Self. I imagine they breakfast apart, as their combined reactions to the day's news would probably achieve critical mass.