Thursday, October 08, 2009 

The shape of the Tories to come part 2.

The plan for the Tory conference has been both obvious and has worked: ensure that Osborne and Cameron get all the coverage and limelight and hope that the underlings stay in the shadows, or at best don't make any horrendous gaffes. This was clearly what was in action yesterday, hoping that only the faithful or interested would notice that both Michael Gove and Chris Grayling were making speeches on their specific areas and announcing either new or somewhat new policies. As it turned out, this was further helped when Grayling himself gaffed by describing the appointment of General Dannatt as an adviser as potentially a gimmick, not realising that it was err, his side, not Labour, that had done so.

It was Gove's proposals though which were clearly the more ghastly. Alix Mortimer thinks of him as a prep school teacher circa 1965 and it's clearly a description which fits. His proposals for what should be in and out of education when the Tories come in are so overblown it reads like a an old reactionary's wish-list. What's wrong with our school system, it seems, is that the kids aren't dressed archaically enough. Just as much of the rest of society decides that suit, blazer and tie aren't perhaps the most practical or comfortable of clothes, in comes Gove, who thinks that as adults are giving up on it, children should wear it instead. His other great wheeze, setting by ability, is just as old and hoary. Listening to Gove you'd think that state schools haven't so much as tried such a thing. I hate to break it to him, but at my bog-standard, at times failing comprehensive we had setting by ability, and all it did was further entrench those in the particular sets at that level of knowledge, not stretching them or helping them, just leaving them to get on with it, failing everyone. Adding to the sense of nostalgia, rote learning was the next thing to be mentioned. He also wants "the narrative of British history" taught, without mentioning whether or not history will be made compulsory post-14, and which in any case Alix Mortimer demolishes. Just when you think it couldn't get any worse, he also wants soldiers to be brought into instil discipline, which is just the thing that we need in general in schools: ex-military personnel with a high opinion of themselves thinking that all the children of today need is regimentalism and a shared bond which develops in the line of fire.

Chris Grayling didn't have much of a chance of living up to such a litany of pure bollocks. He did though have a go, further broadening the mind-bogglingly stupid policy of taxing strong lager and cider as well as "alcopops" because of their link to anti-social behaviour. There is a case for taxing the likes of Special Brew and the ultra-strong ciders which have never seen an apple for the simple reason that the only people who drink them are alcoholics and those looking to get drunk as quickly as possible, but the downsides are obvious: when an ordinary can of Wife-Beater isn't going to cost any more, you might as well just downgrade slightly, and it's what people will do. You have to challenge the behaviour, not the drink itself. I've also lost count of the number of times I've said it here, but it needs stating yet again: those meant to be targeted by this tax do not drink alcopops. The people who do are those might get drunk, but are not those who specifically go out looking for trouble; it can be best described as a tax on those who don't like the taste of other drinks. Despite all the mocking, Grayling also still believes in the "21st century clip round the ear", now examining "grounding" as an "instant punishment". We laughed when New Labour proposed taking yobs to ATMs; now the Tories, that party of the family, wants police officers to take over parenting. Finally, once again the Tories want to ban Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a group which although reprehensible and may have incited hatred in the past, most certainly does not incite violence. If we're going to ban every group alleged to do both, why focus on HuT and not the BNP or EDL, who are the number one current threat to community cohesion? Answer came there none.

All everyone was interested in though was the main event. There is one thing to be said for Cameron's speech, and that's at least that it was a speech rather than just a series of connected thoughts, as both Brown and Clegg's attempts were. It was also a good speech in another sense: that it at least partially showed what Cameron does believe and think, and quite how wrong his interpretation is of what has gone wrong, primarily with the economy:

And here is the big argument in British politics today, put plainly and simply. Labour say that to solve the country's problems, we need more government.

Don't they see? It is more government that got us into this mess.

Why is our economy broken? Not just because Labour wrongly thought they'd abolished boom and bust. But because government got too big, spent too much and doubled the national debt.


It is indeed putting it simply, and also not accurately. Labour may have massively increased the size and scope of the state, but to break this down to saying that Labour's only solution is more government is nonsense. If it was, it wouldn't have spent the last 12 years trying to insert the private sector into every public service or continued with the horrendously wasteful private finance initiative, to give but two examples. More gob-smacking though is that Cameron seems to be suggesting that the reason our economy's broken is because of the size of government and because it spent too much: this isn't just wrong, it's politically bankrupt. The reason the economy's broken is primarily because there was too little regulation of the financial sector, not too much. Even if we had saved for that "rainy day", we'd still be in the same recession even if the deficit could be dealt with quicker, and considering that the Tories would have hardly done anything different on the economy to Labour until very recently, this is hindsight of the lowest order. He continues:

Why is our society broken? Because government got too big, did too much and undermined responsibility.

This is even more nonsense. Even if you accept that big government has and does undermine responsibility, and even if you accept that society is broken, the real thing that broke it was the undermining and even open destruction of economic communities over 20 years ago. Labour has tried and mostly failed with its initiatives, but at least it has tried. All Cameron offers, and continues to offer in this speech, is the firm smack of responsibility and the recognition of marriage in the tax system, something just bound to cure problems at a stroke and not just provide the middle classes with a helpful cut. And so it goes on:

Why are our politics broken? Because government got too big, promised too much and pretended it had all the answers.

Cameron on the other hand doesn't pretend to have answers, as he doesn't offer any specific reform of politics in this speech except for the cutting of some ministerial salaries. All the talk of a new politics has completely evaporated, and who could possibly be surprised? Cameron doesn't need to change anything to win, and so the status quo is far more attractive.

Again, like Osborne on Tuesday, Cameron also offers precisely nothing on economic recovery. It's presumably just going to happen magically, while all we need to worry about is getting the deficit down. As Chris Dillow and an increasing numbers of others are now arguing, the preoccupation with the deficit is potentially dangerous when there are other threats and decisions to be taken. The Tories have focused on the deficit because this is one of their very few selling points, yet it's also a point on which they could be attacked if Labour was reasonably sure of itself, with even the potential to turn everything back around. While trying not to be triumphalist, what is clear is that the Tories themselves are now absolutely certain of their return to power. From his mention of Afghanistan at the very beginning to the condemnation of the EU at the end, this was also a speech written to touch every hot button on which the Sun newspaper has recently focused. Nothing is being left to chance. The irony of it all is that on the one thing that the Tories are significantly at odds with Labour on, they're wrong. The sad thing is that it seems it won't make any difference.

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10/08/2009 09:54:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, October 07, 2009 

Ready for the same old dishonesty.

Like Craig Murray, I had to wonder whether I was on the same planet yesterday as some of the hacks who were clearly incredibly close to falling in love with George Osborne and his "massive electoral gamble", as Nick Robinson put it. Robinson was so over the top in his clear adoration of Osborne on the 10 O'Clock News that the only thing he didn't do was film himself shooting off while listening to the speech as a result of his excitement. If the BBC turned over and fell for New Labour, then the same seems to be happening now that the Tories are on the way in. Even the Graun described Osborne's gambit as their biggest political gamble in a generation.

Osborne's explanation of just what his new and doubtless "tough and tender" interpretation of austerity will entail left as many questions as it did answers. To start with, this is a very funny sort of austerity: let's accept for a second that the cuts and wage freezes which Osborne announced yesterday result in the £7 billion saving which he claims they will. Undoubtedly, these cuts will cause suffering, and they fall mainly on the middle, which is usually anathema to his party. All the same, this is as Robert Chote described it, nothing more than a dent in the actual deficit. Over a parliament it should save £35 billion. This year alone we've already borrowed over £175 billion. This isn't even going to begin to cut the deficit by half by 2014, as Labour have promised, with the Tories, although not being specific, saying they will act faster.

This therefore fails Osborne's own honesty test. He might not have said that these are going to be the only cuts, and he hasn't specifically ruled out tax rises, but many will get the impression that this will be the Tories' main prospectus for bringing down the deficit. Instead, this will only be the very, very beginning, as the Tories themselves must know if they are serious about reducing the deficit, and considering that it now seems to be their only real economic policy, it seems safe to assume that they are. Nick Clegg might have regretted talking about "savage cuts", but it's the closest description to what can be expected will be the order of the day once the Tories do seize the reins of power.

For this was just as fantastical a speech and lacking in any real integrity as Gordon Brown's was last week. Does anyone seriously believe that Osborne's repeated dirge that "we're all in this together"? I didn't even watch the speech in full, but the number of times he repeated the ridiculous phrase left me wanting to cram it down his throat. Indeed, it's fantastically clear from the very policies promised that we're not all in this together. Magnanimously, Osborne decided that he couldn't possibly repeal the 50p tax band for those earning over £150,000 a year while we're in the current mess, he's had to put the inheritance tax threshold raise on the backburner, although it's still a commitment during their first term, and if the bankers continue to award themselves ludicrous bonuses, he will step in to tax them, but apart from that there was nothing here that would shift the burden of bringing down the deficit to those who got us into this mess from those at both the bottom and the middle. Anyone earning over £18,000 in the public sector will have a year's pay freeze. The full-time median wage is £25,123. What is interesting is what both the Tories and Labour are prioritising: the military will not have to undergo any such pay restraint, meaning that if you're trained to kill people rather than trained to save people you're currently the more highly valued. To go off on a tangent for a second, it's also instructive that no party has considered getting out of Afghanistan to save money, but then that sort of thinking would make too much sense.

Just to highlight further how we're not all in this together, it's hard not to detect something afoot in the demand that no one in the public sector should earn more than the prime minister. Fair enough, but why not extend it completely? After all, just who is exactly worth more than just under £200,000 a year? Clearly, no one should earn more than David Cameron will, and if anyone suggests this isn't about all making a contribution and rather about envy, which is of course a Labour trait, then the Bullingdon might be paying you a visit.

Not everything that Osborne proposed was instantly objectionable. I'm one of those lefties who believes that only those who need the state's help should get it: why on earth were those earning over £50,000 a year getting tax credits in the first place when those at the bottom could have been receiving more (indeed, tax credits have always seemed a poor alternative to a guaranteed citizen's basic income and taking the lowest paid out of tax altogether)? I'm not as certain on the abolition of the child trust funds for all but the poorest third, as anything that encourages saving is welcome, but it may well be one of those cuts which we have to accept in the circumstances.

Most offensive is just the sheer disingenuousness of most of the speech. Osborne complains at one point that all Labour did last week was announce yet more spending; Osborne's party would never be so crass in committing to spending increases and tax cuts at a time when the books are so in the red. All they're doing is reversing Gordon Brown's tax raid on pensions, which won't cost much, probably only 3 to 5 billion, wiping out all but 2 billion of the savings so far announced. That's to add to the pledge that those going into care homes will no longer have to sell their houses, changes to the tax system to "support marriage", the freeze in council tax for two years, the decision not to introduce the rise in national insurance contributions Labour has pencilled in, and also now the promise not to tax new businesses for their first ten employees.

The most amazing hole though is that not once does Osborne broach the one thing that is more important than the size of the deficit: the recovery. He attacks Gordon Brown for not mentioning borrowing, then takes for granted that the recovery is already on the way and that he doesn't need to anything to stimulate it further. Indeed, he again claims to be right in not supporting the VAT cut. He scaremongers that our creditworthiness is being brought into doubt while Chris Dillow points out that in fact the yields on index-linked gilts have fallen to record lows, the bond markets never so keen to lend to us. Osborne's soundbite that we need to return to being a saving society might be right in the long-term, but not when we're not even certain that growth has started again. Osborne isn't going to be chancellor until at least May, it's true, by which time if we're not back in growth we really will be worrying, but even then we're going to need investment as well as cuts and tax rises.

We have to make allowances for the fact that no politician is going to give us their budget for after they win the election the year before it even happens, but that Osborne will only "not rule out additional tax rises" is simply not credible. Either you're serious about bringing down the deficit or you're not. It's one thing to be in denial as Labour arguably are, but it's something else entirely to be as dishonest as the Conservatives have been this week. Everyone knows that they are going to be cuts, and there are going to be tax rises, even if they don't like the idea. The real "massive electoral gamble" would be to set out what they are likely to be now. Only then will we be able to decide later whether or not a party was elected on a false prospectus.

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10/07/2009 09:24:00 PM | | | links to this post

Tuesday, October 06, 2009 

The road to Purnell.

Over on the bustling Open Left blog, James Purnell has had a look at the Tories' welfare proposals and rather than arguing with the merits of their policies has instead decided to pick holes in them. If anything, Purnell is critical of the fact that they could be less tough on claimants:

The other big mistake the Tories are making is giving up on the Job Guarantee. In fact, this seems to me to be the bit no one has picked up on – looks to me like they are abolishing the Future Jobs Fund which is creating jobs with public and charitable organisations so we can offer everyone a job to every JSA claimant aged 18 to 24.

I think this would increase the number of claimants – training has limited value in helping people back to work. Instead, places like Denmark and the Netherlands guarantee people work but require them to take it up. That helps people such as the disabled who sometimes get overlooked in interviews. But it also forces people who are cheating the system to stop claiming. This is also the lesson from the US welfare programmes – what works is work. The Tories seem to be moving away from it (and indeed this seems to contradict the headline in the Sunday Times “Tories would force jobless to work”).

Even if Purnell is right, the Tory proposal is much more preferable. Just what jobs exactly are these lucky people going to have to take up or lose their benefit? Ones you would imagine that are dead-end and which no one who had a choice would want. Training on the other hand is a different realm of possibilities, although the funding and planning required would be far larger than simply plonking someone into what could be a completely unsuitable job. The other lesson of course from US welfare programmes is that they simply give up on those who exhaust their entitlement to benefits, leaving the charity sector to pick up the pieces, which is only slightly more draconian than what is being proposed here.

The real point though is that the Labour and Conservatives plans are almost identical, and that although I was highly critical of the Tories' policies yesterday, Purnell may well have set me straight on which will be the most destructive. It's worth quoting the comments left by both myself and Lee Griffin:

Interesting fight going on isn't it. On the one hand you have a party demonising the poor and the out of work, threatening them with destitution and a life of crime if they don't follow the government's prescribed course of "work-fare". And now you also have the Tories giving their own perspective on the same thing!

Is this really about picking (what are minor) holes in Tory policy, or outpourings of jealous petulance at them coming so close to Purnell's own frankly despicable policies?

I notice that nowhere in this does Purnell address the feasibility or likelihood of moving 500,000 individuals from IB onto JSA when there's the simple fact that there's no jobs for those people and that even if there were employers are loth to touch those who have been sick for years with a ten-foot barge pole. The real point here is that there is next to no difference between both the Tories' and Labour's policies: both are intent on further impoverishing the most vulnerable in society, not because it will save money, as it almost certainly won't, but because the focus groups and tabloids demand it.

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10/06/2009 08:55:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, October 05, 2009 

The shape of the Tories to come.

You wouldn't normally consider Manchester to be natural Conservative territory - there is only one Tory MP in the entire Greater Manchester area - but perhaps the journey of the party faithful to the city is meant to be a statement of intent. You still get the feeling that there'd be much more at home in Bournemouth, which was this year's location for the Liberal Democrats, who also you'd presume would be happier in Brighton, where Labour last week held their wake, but for a party that is clearly gearing up for their return to their rightful place as the natural party of government, such details are hardly going to bother them too much. It clearly didn't concern Chris Grayling, who only a few weeks back declared that Moss Side was reminiscent of the Baltimore portrayed in the Wire, who responded to criticism of his view from a real member of the public by saying that he hadn't done anything of the sort, while directing him to read what he did say in his speech.

Still, such minor squabbles with those unlikely to vote for Cameron's new Tories are nothing more than a distraction from the main work of this week, which more than anything else is trying not to be appear too triumphalist. That can wait; you can be sure that there'll be no declarations from Cameron of everything being all right, nor that his underlings should return to their constituencies and prepare to reign. No, the main theme of this week instead had to preferably be something that the Conservatives are not renowned for, with the natural choice being "Getting Britain Working". Perhaps not that unknown for, for those old enough to remember the Saatchi classic which helped kick start the Thatcherite revolution, but as Dave Osler reminds us, few now can recall the irony of such a campaign when the following years lead to more than 3 million unemployed.

Fair enough, New Labour might yet have the dishonour of breaking that record, but looking at the Conservative proposals, especially on benefit reform, supposedly meant to be both "tough and tender" without becoming oxymoronic, you can't help but notice the contradictions. As always, while the Tories themselves are trying to dress up the proposed reforms in the warm, kind rhetoric of compassion and help, the exact same policy is instead sold to the Telegraph as cracking down on cheats, while in the Sun the ubiquitous skivers are about to routed. When it comes down to it, the differences between this radical proposed programme of welfare reform and the government's own recent changes are slighter than you might think. For instance, the Conservative proposal that everyone on incapacity benefit be reassessed is already being carried out; whether the Tories would do it all over again should they come to power is unclear, although doubtless they will attempt to do it faster.

The main change though is that the charities and private sector companies currently carrying out the medical checks and reassessments, should they after deciding that someone should be on jobseeker's allowance and not incapacity benefit manage by some kind of alchemy to get them into a job, they'll be paid the savings that the government would have made for at least a year. Hence not only will there be little to no savings straight off, but there's a huge great conflict of interest. Which company is going to actively reduce the scope for making a profit by deciding that someone on IB genuinely is sick when they can instead find any number of inconsistencies or conflicting evidence that suggests they in fact are capable of work?

Indeed, the more you think about it the more staggering it becomes. Based supposedly on government estimates, the Conservatives believe that anything up to 500,000 could be moved from IB onto JSA, although that figure seems ludicrously high to me. At a stroke that increases the number of unemployed by, err, half a million. This, in case it had escaped anyone's attention, is at a time when jobs are in rather short supply. Many of those moved from IB to JSA will not have been employed in years, some even potentially for 10 or more years; do the Conservatives seriously think that those in that position are going to find a job any time soon? The stigma against anyone with a record of sickness, whether mental or physical is always high; the TUC blog points out a survey which found 33% of employers would actively exclude someone with a long-record of sickness, while 45% thought that disabled workers would be less reliable. If anything, it quickly becomes clear what the real motivation behind this policy seems to be: the Tories' other welfare reform proposals involve losing the right to benefits if someone refuses to go on a return to work training programme, while those who refuse "reasonable" job offers could lose the right to claim for three years. Finally, those who fail to find a job within two years will find themselves having to work for their benefit; yes, the Tories are seriously proposing bringing back the workhouse. This isn't just wage slavery, this is dole slavery, working for a pittance well below the minimum wage. The obvious result will be those unlucky enough to find themselves in this position relying not on the state, but on charity handouts, something which has already become the norm in some American states.

Even more perplexing is the savings from this are likely to be negligible. At the same time, the promises of extra apprenticeships and training places, if they materialise, will further reduce the pot. This is before you consider the also tabled, supposedly funded, tax cut for new businesses with no tax needing to be paid for the first ten employees for two years which is to be introduced, meant to create up to 60,000 jobs. Even if it did, that would still leave a net increase of those on JSA of 440,000.

For a party so committed to tackling the deficit, or at least so they tell us, there's little yet announced on where the pain is going to fall, and especially on where tax is going to rise, as it almost certainly will. As the above illustrates, the priority still seems to be to find cuts where possible, whether it be on inheritance or council tax. The announced proposals on tackling NHS bureaucracy will doubtless as usual fail to meet up with reality, and although the proposed reforms on putting all major spending online are welcome, they're undermined by the dubious and short-sighted pledge to reduce the number of MPs to around 500, leaving an average constituency MP with 77,000 individuals to work with. Can one person honestly provide a decent service to such a number and over such an area? There's also some cowardice involved in this: what's the point of reducing the number of MPs without approaching the West Lothian question head on first? The sad fact of the matter seems to be that the Conservatives are going to win power not because they're a better alternative to Labour, but simply because it's time for a change. If Labour could only rouse itself from its stupor and actually attempt to communicate their policies, as well as adopting some better ones, they could still make a fight of this. Instead we seem doomed to a party entering government just because it's their time again.

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10/05/2009 08:19:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, October 01, 2008 

Our new overlords part two.

As I wrote on Monday, increasingly the Conservatives look to be returning to their status as the natural party of government, as they have so often been arrogantly described. This perception is only likely to be exacerbated (and yes, I do mean exacerbated) by Cameron's speech today.

There was no doubt that this was pitched almost squarely, not at the country, but at the Conservative core vote, or those who used to be the Conservative core vote. It has to be remembered that the Conservatives won the popular vote in England in 2005: one last heave, especially against an increasingly unpopular Labour government, would probably win them the next election in any event, even if leaving them without an absolute majority. With crises of any nature often inspiring a small rallying round the current leader, the Conservatives seem to have decided after the events of this week not to push any further into Labour territory, the jibe about "novices" being by no means thrown back at all at Brown by Cameron's performance.

Instead, Cameron seemed to want throw insults at almost everyone and everything other than Brown: read through it, and it all seems so sickeningly familiar; the unemployed, teachers, the NHS workers, although not directly addressed but implicated by the letter which has already been called into question, health and safety, human rights, all were tongue lashed at some point or another. Libertarians too, were maligned at one point, for thinking that "we all have the right to do whatever we want, regardless of the effect on others", which is the exact opposite of what most libertarians stand for. The only thing that didn't come in for a leathering was strangely the European Union. Cameron by way of levelling this out praised the armed forces in Afghanistan (he didn't mention Iraq) who are "are defending our freedom and our way of life as surely and as bravely as any soldiers in our nation's history", the Gurkhas, the family, responsibility, sound money, low taxes, enterprise, Helen Newlove, leadership, character and judgement. The only things he didn't mention, as wags have already identified, is motherhood and apple pie.

This wasn't an awful speech, far from it. It was instead as close to a vision of how Britain would look under Cameron as we have had so far, which is all the more depressing for how you can already imagine it. I've argued consistently that the new Conservatives are in essence the ultra-Blairites, who will do everything that they always dreamed they could of done, but that either the opposition of Gordon Brown or the parliamentary Labour party stopped them from doing. Remember Tony Blair and how he wished with reform that he'd gone further, that he'd further rubbed his own party's nose in it for the sake of it, told them there was no alternative and then wondered why by the end not just his own party but the entire country was sick of him and his pseudo-Thatcherism and you had David Cameron today, except with a party that absolutely lapped it up, because they believed every word of it.

Yes, there certainly have been changes in the Conservative party; there have had to be, such has been the impact of New Labour on Britain. There has been almost certainly a general shift towards the centre ground, which has meant that Cameron has had to embrace the environment, although that was hardly mentioned here, and that he toned down his section on the specious "broken society" by inserting a passage about Wandsworth prison and those that are there because they can't read or write or because they're addicted to drugs, although it's worth noting that Cameron's supposed guru Helen Newlove, who only believes society is broken because she was unfortunate enough to be married to someone who was brutally and meaninglessly killed, which might have broken her world but did not everyone else's, thinks excuses should stop being made for such people, but his world view is summed up a soundbite he's used before: he wants to transform society in the same way that Thatcher transformed the economy. Rather than blaming New Labour for all the woes of the economy, which he did to a larger extent than George Osborne did on Monday, he might want to wonder who exactly it was who started the bonfire of regulation that has led directly to the ructions of the past year, of the person who originally decimated the communities which he now wants to fix, who led us to depend on the City instead of our industry for our economic growth, for while New Labour encouraged all of these things, it's his idol that began them, and had the Conservatives been in power, would have encouraged and rallied them on just as much if not to an even greater extent.

Brown's speech last week was infinitely better than this: not because there was any more substance in it, but because it was believeable, it was honest, and because it flowed. He doesn't, like Cameron, think that it's about character rather than policies, and thank goodness for that. The difference was just one thing: confidence. Cameron overwhelmingly has it, as does his party, while Labour is left looking utterly bereft. It's their fault that they are in this mess, not just for leaving Blair in power for too long, but because they also believed there was no alternative, that the good times would keep rolling, and that the City rather than anything or anyone else had all the answers. We are now left with the real Conservative party to pick up the pieces, or rather, further dash them, and they simply have no one to blame but themselves.

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10/01/2008 11:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, September 29, 2008 

Our new overlords.

If the Liberal Democrats' conference was overshadowed by "Meltdown Monday" two weeks ago, the Conservatives hardly seem to be cursing their luck for suffering the same fate. Even with the polls suggesting that Labour's conference, or rather, Gordon Brown's well-received speech, has given the government a boost, the edict from on high was obvious: try not to look too triumphalist.

Accordingly, even if the swinging dicks in the party are on the inside brimming with confidence which only the most expensive private education followed by Oxbridge can provide you with, their faces and actions must be the opposite: stern, determined, serious. It's almost reminiscent of a faintly apocalyptic sect that are constantly reminded that they are living in the last days, and that The End could come at any time; when it does, they must be ready, lest the outsiders be put off by their exuberance at being saved whilst all around them are set to burn in economic hellfire.

The deeply depressing thing, apart from that fact that all the banks are going to collapse tomorrow leaving us in a Threads-like future eating rats to survive, is that the Conservatives truly do look like the government in waiting. A party flush with cash and the knowledge that they probably already have the next election in the bag is always likely to be able to put such a powerful show on, but that it's so apparently natural is what digs in and inspires anxiety. Not only are they appealling aesthetically, but also on policy they are finally starting to cobble together something approaching the beginnings of a manifesto. Their plan to set-up an Office for Budget Responsibility to monitor government spending is one of those simple ideas which is all the more effective for it. The announcement that they will not build a third runway at Heathrow and instead opt for a high-speed TGV line between St Pancras and Leeds was a master stroke - pissing off all the right people while further underlining their "green" credentials. It's hardly likely to win over the real greens, but those worried about about the contribution of flying to CO2 emissions will likely be impressed.

Take as a further example George Osborne, who ought to be on an absolute hiding to nothing. He's young, resembles a caricature of the smarmy, upper-class snob that spent his tender years smashing up restaurants when he wasn't shovelling white powder up his nostrils, with a face so punchable it's a marvel that he hasn't got a broken nose and a good number of teeth missing, knows next to nothing about economics, and has all the charm (to this writer at least) of a self-portrait of Kate Moss drawn in lipstick and Pete Doherty's blood. Instead his speech was pretty much as good as it could have been: for a party that has been absolutely anonymous on the economic fall-out of the past two weeks, he came across as ready to take over the reins should become available. The message about the cupboard being bare with there being no possibility of sharing the proceeds of growth, as they promised and as Vince Cable mocked them for, with a recession about to bite may have been stating the obvious but was still jarring. He declared that the party was over, and while you somehow doubt that is by any means the thinking within the Tory party, he undoubtedly meant it. While acknowledging the party's own role in deregulating the City while encouraging the housing bubble, he attacked the bankers "partly responsible" harder if anything than New Labour has ever dared to or would dare to.

There was of course chutzpah along with the clarity, Osborne hilariously claiming that they were "not bedazzled and don't fawn over big money", just as a Dispatches documentary showed that a donation of £50,000 to the party brought membership to the Leader's Club, where they could argue the toss over Champagne with Cameron, but the right tone had been struck. It will though be the promise of a two-year council tax freeze that gets the headlines, despite the cupboard from where it was presumably pulled being bare. This has all the makings of being just as much a con as the inheritance pledge was, with many being under the illusion that they will benefit when they most likely won't, as councils will have to decide to take part, before you even bother to actually look at the figures. None of this though will matter, just as the IHT pledge didn't last year, as the Conservatives are getting away with their promises barely being examined, as Labour's invariably weren't prior to 97.

This was further apparent when Andrew Lansley stepped up to the lectern, holding forth on the NHS just as Osborne had stated that the party was over. His big promise was a single room for any patient who wanted one, despite the unlikeliness of there being any extra cash to deliver such a bold pledge. When you consider that the NHS cannot even currently deliver single-sex wards, this was the sort of unachievable ideal that the Tories would have once criticised, and which Labour would have been crucified for as yet more wasted spending. He had previously promised to end the constant reforms under New Labour by introducing even more reforms, but this time ones which will democratise, empower and free the staff, as if Labour hadn't sold their constant rejiggings on exactly the same buzzwords. The contradictory, contrary thinking would have been mocked normally, but these are not normal times, and with the economy taking precedence over everything, Lansley and the party will probably be glad that few will take much notice.

There's likely to be more such flummery tomorrow, when the favourite Conservative subject, the "broken society", will be the main topic. Dominic Grieve, fresh from attacking multiculturalism as he enters one of the most multicultural cities in the country, will apparently offer changes in the law to help "have-a-go heroes" who are supposedly being prosecuted for daring to interfere when they see crimes occurring, often highlighted by the tabloids who hardly ever report the full real story, such as when they were outraged by the man and son who were arrested after they performed a citizen's arrest on a boy who had err, allegedly committed a crime the day before. He will also look to change health and safety laws supposedly stopping the police from doing their jobs, highlighting the case of Jordan Lyon, which err, involved community support officers, and as this blog has previously noted, was not the scandal which it was made out to be, as the boy had already disappeared from sight when they arrived and the police themselves were there within a few minutes of that.

The underlings though have been thoroughly overshadow by Osborne, just as they will be also by Cameron. While Osborne ineffectively threw back the "novice" tag at Gordon Brown, something not shown in many bulletins, his "stop go" soundbite will have a struck a chord with those tired of a government which has just one strength remaining, the experience of Brown in a crisis. This, lamentably, may be the end of even that.

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9/29/2008 11:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

Up the arse corner.

Mark Clarke is #2.

This blog tries not to dwell too often on tittle-tattle, but the story about one of the "Tatler 10", Mark Clarke, is improved dramatically by a comment from Sarah Gill herself on Recess Monkey:

Ok, now that i have gone on the record about Mark I would like to say that I am NOT doing this because I am “scorned”. Frankly the fact that I had a relationship with this man leaves me feeling soiled.
I have gone public because I think this man needs bringing down a peg or two. If I thought that speaking to the Tories would do the trick I would have done so but I fear they would just close ranks. (sorry Justine- didn’t want to implicate you-Mark told me you tried to get him deselected - beware- he is indiscreet about who and what he tells people. Glad you are now friends.)
Everything I have said is true and Mark knows it. He has many characteristics which in my opinion (as a Tory and a constituent) make him unfit to be an MP.(God help us if he ever gets the title “honourable gentleman” after his name….)Let’s face it, who would you believe, me who has nothing to lose or gain or a highly ambitious man. He has a lot riding on becoming an MP, afterall he gave up his six figure salary to persue a life of public service…. (meanwhile happy to enjoy the generosity of his cash poor girlfriend!)
One thing I never accused Mark of is lying but having seen his response to the article that can be added to his list of characteristics.
Oh, about the girl who he slept with to get back at his friend. We were having a discussion about the saying “revenge is a dish best served cold” (or Mark’s version- revenge is a dish served hot over many courses”). He told me that he shagged her up the arse and boasted “I was FIRST”.
Mark was SO right when he said that we weren’t right for eachother- I prefer my men decent and with integrity.

The Conservative conference theme is "Plan for Change". It would be immeasurably improved if it was "The Conservatives - Taking revenge by shagging your friends up the arse."

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9/29/2008 11:58:00 PM | | | links to this post

Saturday, October 06, 2007 

The honeymoon's over.

Well, that's that then. After two weeks of febrile, wildly over the top speculation that Brown was about to take the risk of calling an election, he, as the Guardian's leader today called for him to do, has put an end to it all. No trudging around in darkness as fireworks go off around and about for the activists of all parties, and only the blankness and dreary weather to look forward to for us sad, lonely political anoraks.

As Nosemonkey also points out, the hyperbole now swirling around is also surely out of all proportion. Is this really in any way a crisis? While Brown's advisers and pollsters can most certainly be accused of hyping up the prospect of an early poll, and he did himself no favours whatsoever by bringing the announcement on NHS reform to Thursday and the spending review and pre-budget report to early next week, this is hardly the beginning of Brown's downfall. The honeymoon is certainly over, and that is more than partly his own fault, but the chances of the Tories now managing to keep themselves focused without once again falling into infighting are slim.

It's true this is a mess of Labour's own making, and Cameron will naturally try to exploit it as much as he can. How quickly though things change: at the beginning of the week this was "mission impossible" or "make or break" week for the Conservatives, while for now at least they look the stronger and more focused. Their job, far from challenging Brown to call an election, as they fatuously urged this week, was to make certain that he couldn't risk doing so, and in that they've succeeded. It doesn't seem to have been Cameron's speech wot won it however, but Osborne's uncosted and discriminatory inheritance tax proposals, which were far more of a dog whistle than anything that Brown put forward. Promising to cut a hugely unpopular tax that very few actually currently pay was enough to get those in the marginals and soft, well-off Lib Dems in the south-east to change sides, at least for the opinion polls'.

Those same opinion polls in reality offer very little comfort for Cameron. He's squandered a huge lead over the last few months; while everyone knew full well there would be a bounce for Brown once he took over, the Conservatives both managed to underestimate just how long it would last and to lose their faith in Cameron at the exact second as the polls for the first time turned against him. Even if Brown had thrown all caution to the wind and decided to take the Tories' on at their own game by seeking his own mandate, as they taunted him to do, the very best result the most optimistic current polls for the Tories predict is a hung parliament. The Liberal Democrats would almost certainly have then gone into some sort of coalition with Labour, despite their previous pledges not to do so: the possibilities of power would certainly be too much for the overwhelming majority of the party to resist.

In fact, such a result would have been overwhelmingly welcome. The shenanigans of the last two weeks have only confirmed what many have long feared: that the arrival of Brown, rather than heralding a return to the left, as the Tories scaremongered about, would if anything result in an even further shift of the political "centre ground" to the right. Brown's courtship of Paul Dacre, the supposed political weather vane of the middle classes has meant that the difference between Labour and the Tories has narrowed yet further. A popular new parlour game could be to guess how many policies they have that aren't almost exactly the same: the only differences this blogger can discern is that the Tories will scrap ID cards only to waste it on even more prison cells, keep the detention without charge limit for "terrorist suspects" at 28 days, shaft the single mother and those on incapacity benefit ever so slightly harder, and rob the super-rich to give to the already well-off. It's hardly 1983 all over again, is it?

Which would have only exacerbated the likelihood of an even poorer turn-out than last time, which increased by a massive 2% on the record low of 2001. A hung parliament could have helped change that: the Liberal Democrats could have demanded proportional representation in exchange for going into a coalition, ending once and for all the insanity of having to appeal to those who care only about what politicians are going to do for them, rather than for everyone. Ming could also have rightly followed up his call for fixed-term parliaments, putting a stop to any repeat of this week's exasperating charade. We've been denied that for now, but if there's no change in the lack of choice whenever the next election is called, the calls for the above are only going to inexorably grow.

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10/06/2007 09:37:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, October 03, 2007 

"Well, that's it. That's what I believe."

Is it cos I is white?

If there's one thing you can't accuse David Cameron of, it's half measures. His speech wasn't just long; it was bladder pressurizingly lengthy. Delivered with only light notes, as both he and the Conservatives are crowing, it was in the region of 8,500 words of not very much. Prime example was that he just had to mention MySpace and Facebook, as every politician who wants to look vaguely "with-it" has to do, to help with a highly dubious point about having "to take what we're given" with politics, as if his entire speech wasn't an example of just that.

If anything, Cameron was taking his cue from Gordon Brown's similarly lengthy and rudderless speech last week. Both had no overall theme, a pedestrian stroll through their respective policies, without anything to draw it all together. Cameron's, if it's possible, is even more soporific; if I feel like dozing off speed reading through it, what was it like to actually sit there, in the probably stifling heat having to clap your hands together like a deranged seal every five minutes?

His real triumph, if you can call it that, was that his scattergun approach helps make it more difficult to object to the policies that were somewhat fleshed out. He rehashed the exact same things said by David Davis yesterday, for instance, but while his speech was aggravating and objectionable, Cameron has the quality to soften the blow. He still talked nonsense, obviously, like that you can't deport those responsible for gun and knife crime because of "Labour's Human Rights Act", or that Brown's speech was full of "dog whistles"; just ever so slightly rich from the man who wrote the dog whistling manifesto to end them all just 2 years ago.

Perhaps most significantly, he didn't mention inheritance tax once. The Tories' really big grab for middle class, middle England support, and he didn't cast minds back to it. Either this was because he felt he didn't need to, after the banner headlines, or that he wanted to be this person who is still all things to all men, rather than this tax-cutting, middle class subsidising traditional Tory pressing all the familiar buttons, just with a green tinge. Families were the biggest nod towards that front: 10 mentions, whether as the best welfare system or as the justification for ending the (non-existent) benefits bias towards single parents. Those who really don't need it are still going to get the equivalent of £20 a week simply for being married, a bribe of the sort that New Labour, for all its failed policies and quirks has never been as blatant to attempt.

Truly offensive and a hark back to the old nasty Tory party though was Cameron's promise that those on benefits who refuse a job "that they can do" will lose their money, while the ever wonderful private and voluntary sector will provide such brilliant jobs that no one ever will. We're talking about some of the most vulnerable, sick and depressed people in our society having their umbilical cord cut simply if they reject a job they don't feel up to or simply aren't suited for. So much for the broken society, but then those who might lose out are never going to vote Conservative anyway.

This wasn't an election winning speech, and Cameron never intended it to be so. It was a further attempt to mould him as this acceptable, friendly face of the Conservative party, an alternative to Gordon Brown, but without pretending to be anything like him, even if the vast majority of their policies are so similar that you couldn't get a cigarette paper between them. It was enough, and they'll now see what the wider response is. The real battle, if Brown is to risk an election as Cameron dared him to, is still yet to come.

Related posts:
Tygerland - More of the Same
Chicken Yogurt - Re-branding the herd
John Harris - Not Dave-ing, but drowning

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10/03/2007 09:36:00 PM | | | links to this post

Tuesday, October 02, 2007 

Cynical about real political choice? Moi?

There's nothing quite like the conference season to restore your cynicism in politics. Say what you like about the Liberal Democrats - irrelevant, idiotic, idiosyncratic - they at least have something approaching an actual debate, discussion and vote on new policies. Compare that to both the Labour and Conservative conferences, so far distinguished only by their congratulatory backslapping and err, almost indistinguishable policies, and you'd almost be forgiven for wanting to turn yellow and become a Minger.

First though, it would be remiss not to mention today's flabbergasting act of political cynicism from Gordon Brown. For once, the Tory accusations of spin, electioneering and downright opportunism were more than valid. As oleanginous, creepy and rabid as Liam Fox is, it was impossible to disagree with his righteous anger about Brown's token mention of Iraq in his speech last week, only to fly to Baghdad during the Tory conference and announce a further draw down of troops. Even if we hadn't then learned that this further withdrawal was in fact nothing of the sort, with some of the 1000 soldiers who would be back by Christmas either already here or not even in Iraq currently, the truly shocking thing about this latest foreign policy debacle was that Brown had the nerve to go to Iraq at all, without at the same time announcing that all the remaining troops would be brought home almost immediately. The lunacy of remaining at Basra airport, supposedly as a backup force in case the Iraqi army or police need as at some point, even when we're told that a full handover will be possible within a couple of months, and with, surprise surprise, Basra quieter since we left, is self-evident. Our last act in Iraq could conceivably have taken place before Christmas - the final operation, to bring to safety the Iraqi employees who worked for our armed forces whom we owe a debt of both protection and gratitude to - and that would have been that. Instead, in a blatant act of political manoeuvring prior to the now almost certain calling of an election, Brown proved that he can still be just as deceitful, if not more so, than his predecessor.

The only mitigating factor was that today was just another day in the Conservative charade of pretending to be all things to all people, whether it was the presenting the alternative to authoritarian New Labour as being even more authoritarian, or promising to fix our "broken society" by shafting the ill and depressed into jobs they either don't want or can't cope with in order to redistribute to working couples. If you want a good giggle, you can read Ed Vaizey's hilarious CiF post about how the Tories are back on track due to their commitment to helping young people starting out in life; as WarwickLad in the comments puts it, by ensuring that the children of the well-off will have even less incentive to work or contribute to society, courtesy of their inheritance tax cut. Oh yeah, the Tories are back on track all right: a track leading straight to the buffers.

David Davis certainly wants to take them there. Reading through his speech, itself frequently broken up by self-indulgent video clips either involving individuals telling them how wonderful/right they are, or featuring those they've decided to champion for whichever fatuous reason, the only lasting impression you get is of, despite all Davis's protestations about how bad Labour have been over crime, immigration and terrorism over the last ten years, how little difference he's really offering. Davis wants less bureaucracy for the police; Smith last week offered them new computers for processing paperwork on the street and machines for taking fingerprints. Davis repeats a very recent news story about Devon police supposedly not being allowed to throw a life-belt to someone in the water without conducting a "risk assessment" first - in reality an on the spot evaluation by the officer of what might go wrong. The document Davis is referring to is in fact drawn up by the Devonshire police themselves, is a summation of their own policies on rescuing those in danger (it's not a requirement of the police to dive in to save someone - that's the job of the other, trained, emergency services, but naturally the vast majority would do anyway) and has nothing to do with the government, but anything will do to bash them; he also raises the story of the boy who drowned recently in Wigan when the community support officers didn't jump in to save him, except Davis refers to them as "uniformed officers" to obfuscate the point ever so slightly.

Next Davis refers to what happened to Nicholas Tyers, the fish and chip shop owner from Bridlington who performed a citizen's arrest on what Davis calls a "yob" and was himself arrested and charged with kidnap, only for the judge to throw the case out. What Davis doesn't mention is that the yob in question was 12 years old, and that the crime they performed a citizen's arrest on him for had happened the day before. All this is leading up to another inevitable - the rush to zero tolerance, which, amazingly enough, was what Jacqui Smith talked of last week. Davis lauds the completely incomparable example of New York once again to what could be achieved across the country, lifting his argument almost directly out of the pages of the Sun.

How will the Tories provide the extra prison places needed if zero tolerance were to be enshrined? By abolishing ID cards. The Tories' one decent, non-authoritarian policy on civil liberties apart from their opposition to longer detention without charge for "terrorist suspects", and they're going to spend the money saved from not introducing them on more cells, further entrenching the crisis in overcrowding which can simply not be built out of. It's a vicious circle - ever more people in prison leads to less effective rehabilitation and in turn more re-offending, but Davis has signed up to the fallacious Sun mantra that while the "bad people" are locked up they can't commit more crime. Who cares about what happens when they're released? The Tories are also still continuing with their head in the sand approach to the early release scheme, which they claim will lead to 25,000 inmates being let out around two weeks' early this year, even though the total has so far only hit just less than 6,500, and the prison population hasn't even dropped. If they hadn't been released slightly early the entire system would have snarled up, but seeing as they're not in power they can carp about instantly abolishing it.

So it continues. Davis' next wheeze is drug treatment programmes, which apparently work best when they are "abstinence" based. Perhaps we ought to get Davis addicted to crack or heroin and then see how he likes going cold turkey. On immigration the Tories will make sure it drops by putting a limit on economic migrants from outside the EU, which will of course be far removed from Labour's own impositon of a points system regulating who can come here to work, but to soften the blow Davis talks up the Gurkha who had to fight to live here, the Chinese cockle pickers, here illegally, and whom as a result the Tories woulld continue to promise to deport, but seeing as they're dead they can't point that out. The obligatory mention is next made to the evil that Smith also spoke of, human trafficking, talking of 10,000 women brought here and put to work as sex slaves; too bad that as in the US, the figures don't seem to stack up - Operation Pentameter, last year's operation find and free victims of sex trafficking, succeeded in freeing 88 victims. Human trafficking is a reality, but the numbers involved seem to be far below that politicians talk of. A police border force is announced again as well - a policy that Gordon Brown shamelessly nicked.

Oh, and Hizb-ut-Tahrir will be banned. So much for tolerance and respect, and a "hard-nosed defence of freedom". Radical Muslim organisations potentially far more dangerous forced underground than when they're out in the open don't apply.

Thing is, this isn't really entirely David Davis's or the Tories' fault. They've been hemmed in by New Labour, who've either stole the majority of their policies or been shoved so far to the right on home affairs by the constant screeching of the Sun that they've nowhere else to go. Davis seems in general to be something approaching an old style Tory libertarian, as his stance on extended detention and other matters has shown, that one gets the feeling that if he wasn't shadow home secretary the policy would be different. His, and his party's policies on that and ID cards are far more virtuous than Labour's disgraceful continuing attacks on civil liberties. It's just impossible to support the party's policies as a whole as because of how far right they've got to go to somehow outbid Labour. The above is proof of that failure, and how it's leaving the electorate in general with so little real choice.

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10/02/2007 10:19:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, October 01, 2007 

The charge to the right.

For those of us who hoped, however desperately or naively that Gordon Brown really would bring a change, however small to the Labour party, last week was the evidence that showed if anything, Brown is prepared to push the political centre ground even further towards the right. However much we may loathe his motives for doing so, it was an astute political move, if nothing else. The success of last week, or at least the success as the press and the Labour party itself saw it, was to put the Conservatives into a hole: where do they go when Brown is so shamelessly stealing not just their territory, but even some of their policies?

If yesterday and today are any indication, it's the response that comes naturally: go even further right. Of all the people who you could choose to talk on foreign affairs, only the rabidly right-wing would decide on a figure as divisive or discredited as John Bolton, one of the architects not just of the Iraq war, but also of the whole neo-conservative movement. You wouldn't have known that from listening to him though, as he's now apparently embarrassed about his previous dalliances with the Project for the New American Century, to which he was a signatory to at least a couple of letters, even if he didn't sign its statement of principles. No, rather than a neo-con, he's a Goldwater conservative, and he doesn't share the "Wilsonian" views of the benefits of democracy that some of his fellow neo-cons do.

That's probably for the best, as he had either just or was about to call for the overthrow of the democratically elected president of Iran, wistful of the time when the "the US once had the capability to engineer the clandestine overthrow of governments". Nothing really new there, as after all, Donald Rumsfeld himself had previously mused on the overthrow of the Shah, who he considered to be a fine man, except for the torture, repression and all the rest, whom the CIA had maneuvered into place after Mossadegh was deposed. According to Bolton, Iran's nuclear program has gone beyond the point of no return, and "limited strikes", while not an "attractive" option, are better than the alternative. The UN, he said, to applause, is "fundamentally irrelevant", unlike for instance, a former UN ambassador with a mustache similar to a former Russian dictator's.

Away from the calls for even more bloodshed and dropping of bombs in the Middle East, this week, again according to the media, was make or break for the Conservatives, the Scum for one suggesting that David Cameron's task was close to "mission impossible". Labour's bounce, especially when the Conservatives had yet to have their own shindig was always going to be possibly overstated, and no betting man would have put down his money before at least seeing how they performed.

While we'll have to wait until Wednesday for Cameron's own attempt to galvanize both his own troops and potentially the public behind him, if Brown does call an election, he'll find it difficult to top today's naked attempt to blind the public with tax cuts that the vast majority will never actually pay. If the message of Brown's speech was at times puritanical, nationalistic or even jingoistic, then George Osborne's theme was aspiration, that most bourgeois of desires, that the vast majority of us grow out of once we realise that it's only available to the better off. Osborne's promise today to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £1 million was, however indirectly, an indication that the Conservatives have no real intention of trying to change that.

Before he came to it though, it was time for a whistle stop tour of all Gordon Brown's failures. He holds, according to a former civil servant, a "very cynical view of mankind", which according to Osborne is the "antithesis of our age". Forgive me for defending Gordon Brown, but I think he might just have something there: the current state of the world hardly suggests otherwise. Give me cynicism over "sunshine winning the day". Next he was responsible for Northern Rock, somewhat more plausibly, but wasn't this ever so slightly rich coming from the party responsible for the disaster on Black Wednesday, and only weeks after John Redwood, shortly to be praised by Osborne, suggested that all the red tape regulating mortgages be abolished, just as the disaster of the sub-prime lending in America took out a bank that had thought that the age of easily available liquidity would last forever?

That part of Redwood's report was strangely not mentioned, although his other recommendations, Thatcherite to the core and in direction contradiction to those in the quality of life review from Zac Goldsmith and John Gummer, were praised to high heaven. Osborne doesn't just believe in low taxes, he wants them every day of the year, not just December the 25th, in a vacuous soundbite to end all vacuous soundbites. Before the inevitable announcements though, it was back still to whacking Gordon Brown over the head; he doesn't just not get it, he also doesn't understand the new economy, whereas Osborne believes in the collective wisdom of free people, which is apparently how Google, Facebook and MySpace work. It seems that Tila Tequila is a Conservative too, as the people have chosen her as their representative from MySpace.

Finally, drearily, Osborne got to the meat, and you really wish he hadn't, so thin and so laughable was his argument. Rather than it being the huge rise in house prices, or the lack of housing stock, vastly depleted by err, the Tories' selling off of the council houses being chiefly responsible for young families finding it hard to get on the property ladder, it's in actual fact all down to Brown's stealth taxes, and the whopping £1,600 that those buying for the first time have to pay in stamp duty. Well, fear no more, because the Tories are going to abolish stamp duty for all first time buyers' on houses sold under £250,000. Their dream of making a tax cut look better than it actually is your dream too, or something. Aspiration, aspiration, aspiration!

That though was nothing compared to the next fiction to be served up. John Redwood's report had proposed abolishing inheritance tax, and it was widely briefed that there was going to be an announcement this week that it was going to become firm policy, and Osborne certainly wasn't going to disappoint. He was cannier than Redwood though: abolishing IHT completely could easily be portrayed as giving the ultra-rich a free tax cut, giving Labour more than enough to target. Instead, Osborne's ploy was to readdress IHT and make it only target the super-rich, as it was initially meant to. The applause as he announced that the threshold would be raised to £1 million was deafening: you almost expected him to take a couple of bows, so delighted were the Tory faithful at such wonderful news. You could almost see the pound signs reflecting in their eyes, the vast majority safe in the knowledge that they could pass down all the privilege they'd either earned or inherited themselves with no worries that the evil taxman would be taking it from them.

Too bad that the sums on how it was to be paid for simply don't add up: just how many non-domiciled Britons are going to sign up for the status when it costs £25,000 a year? Answer: not many. And wasn't there an inherent contradiction in the policy? Hadn't Osborne just moments ago said how the very rich, those it is still going to hit, already avoid inheritance tax? Where do the aspirational fit into all this? Aren't those who inherit their parents' former abode with no payments to make less likely to achieve for themselves when they have a cash cow courtesy of the luck of being born, or even due to the luck of whom their parents were born to? In reality, inheritance tax has become a bogeyman for middle England which is all too easy to take out and win major kudos for doing. Never mind that even the Tories agree that it currently only affects 6% of estates, and that Labour is already going to raise the threshold to £350,000, it's still enough to scare the journos on the Mail and Express with their well-off parents, the most likely factor behind the clamour for its abolition and resulting inching into the consciousness of the nation at large. There has always been a case for raising the threshold even further, to £500,000, or £750,000, respectively double or treble the average price of a house in south-east England, so it really does still hit the rich, but £1 million is the equivalent of abolishing it while not doing so. Paul Linford thinks Gordon might go one better and abolish it completely, but we shall see.

At the same time then as declaring themselves the party of aspiration, the Tories intend to still further rob from the ultra-rich to give to the reasonably well-off, entrenching their position while further damaging the already limited ladder of social mobility. In fact, they're not even satisfied with that: in order to destroy the iniquity of single mothers being better off alone through the tax system than if they're living with a partner, they intend to get the long-term sick on incapacity benefit on their bikes through the private sector to pay for it, and that's without even considering the blatant bribe of £2,000 a year to married couples, those weak links that are hard done by as a result of our hideous welfare state helping the unwell and out of work which thinks nothing of those that tie our society together, as Iain Duncan Smith so effortlessly identified.

It'd almost make you want to vote Labour, until you remember that new Labour in the age of change under Brown is the soft Conservative option. I used to think that those who complained about politicians being all the same weren't paying enough attention: turns out they were right.

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10/01/2007 07:55:00 PM | | | links to this post

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