When a government is past its Sell-By date ...
A good test of when a governments has been in office for far too long, is whether they are unable to take criticism.
In particular, those who have become so accustomed to holding office that they see it as a privilege and not a right interpret any suggestion that they might have made a mistake not as criticism of themselves but as a disloyal attack on the country.
E.g. if the pound drops 25% and the Shadow Chancellor makes some comments about why this may be happening and how to avoid making it worse, and the government accuses him of "Talking Down the Pound."
You can't run a democracy on the basis that any attempt to criticise the government is immediately damned as disloyal and against the rules: that way lies the politics of Robert Mugabe.
In particular, those who have become so accustomed to holding office that they see it as a privilege and not a right interpret any suggestion that they might have made a mistake not as criticism of themselves but as a disloyal attack on the country.
E.g. if the pound drops 25% and the Shadow Chancellor makes some comments about why this may be happening and how to avoid making it worse, and the government accuses him of "Talking Down the Pound."
You can't run a democracy on the basis that any attempt to criticise the government is immediately damned as disloyal and against the rules: that way lies the politics of Robert Mugabe.
Comments
On more than one occasion when someone has raised a legitimate point of concern at a Copeland Council meeting about something which has gone wrong, the Leader of Copeland Borough Council has reacted as if any criticism should attach to the person asking the question, or possibly the Whitehaven News, rather than anyone else.
E.g. if there is a bad headline for Copeland Council in the local paper, that annoys the leader of the council, but her first reaction is too often to "blame the messenger" as if the fact that negative comments were made, rather than the actual issue, is the problem.