Austerity

The Tories Are Fighting The 2015 General Election On Labour’s Turf

Samuel Hooper5 Comments

2015 General Election Tory Conservative Campaign Public Services Austerity

 

Defend our precious public services! All hands to battle stations in defence of our vital public services! Did you know that the 2015 general election is all about our public services?

The endless platitudes about the vital importance of “public services” to all our lives are starting to sound a lot like the ludicrous list of new government-approved slogans and phrases for the North Korean people to shout in praise of their Dear Leader.

Following George Osborne’s 2015 Budget, yet another let-down for small government conservatives and believers in fiscal responsibility, this blog took the Conservative Party to task for failing to extol the virtues of a smaller state and greater personal liberty during the election campaign. And today’s latest motivational email from the Conservative Party only serves to hammer home the extent to which David Cameron’s Conservative Party are on the ideological back foot.

From the latest Conservative Party fundraising email:

Together we can deliver.

A Britain that lives within its means.

Reducing the deficit so we can keep investing in vital public services.

Newsflash, CCHQ: life is not all about public services.

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With The 2015 Budget, It’s Finally Time For Labour To Put Up Or Shut Up

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

George Osborne Ed Balls Budget 2015

 

David Cameron’s Conservative Party may only be pretending to care about small government, strutting around in the borrowed robes of fiscal responsibility. But in their feeble reaction to George Osborne’s 2015 budget, the Labour Party – much like the proverbial emperor – have been caught wearing no ideological clothes, and possessing no real principles at all.

We have now experienced nearly five years of coalition government, a Conservative and Liberal Democrat joint venture, and throughout that time the Labour Party has squealed and bitterly protested every single action taken by the government to restore Britain to any kind of good fiscal balance.

One might therefore reasonably expect the Labour Party to be ready with a compelling, explainable and measurable alternative raft of policies to fix Britain as the 2015 general election rapidly approaches. But not only does it seem that Ed Miliband’s Labour Party have no alternative vision for Britain beyond carping about Tory meanness, neither are they willing to commit to reversing any of the coalition government’s spending plans, including those announced in yesterday’s Budget.

The Telegraph reports that Ed Balls will not commit to undoing a single Tory spending measure should Ed Miliband win the keys to 10 Downing Street on 7 May:

Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, admitted that Labour would not reverse George Osborne’s Budget measures, including the flagship measures on savings and Help to Buy.

Speaking in response to yesterday’s Budget, he said “nothing had changed” because the Chancellor had produced an “quite empty” Budget, meaning Labour “wouldn’t need to reverse any of it” if the party was successful at the general election.

“There’s nothing … I need to reverse. What I will reverse are deeper spending cuts in the next three years than the last five.”

Pushed as to whether he would retain Mr Osborne’s widely welcomed plans to spare millions of savers tax and to provide new “Help to Buy Isas” – savings accounts for first time buyers which would be topped up with government cash – Mr Balls told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he would, adding: “I think the Help to Buy Isa is an interesting idea. We’re not going to abolish it.”

This leaves two rather burning questions: why would anyone in their right mind vote for Labour now that Ed Balls has admitted that he would copy all of George Osborne’s ideas? And isn’t it about time the Labour Party apologised to Conservative and right-wing voters for having said such horrible things about the Evil Tories when they secretly agreed with David Cameron and George Osborne the whole time?

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No, Greece Is Not The Word

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Greece Syriza Alexis Tsipras

 

Syriza’s emphatic victory in the Greek general election last week has seen many British left wing politicians and commentators embark on a series of gruesome little personal victory laps, as though the outcome of a vote in that small Mediterranean country represents some kind of teaching moment for the sixth largest economy in the world.

These delusions have generally taken one of two forms: either the hubristic belief that Syriza’s electoral success somehow lays bare the inherent shortcomings of capitalism in general, or that the installation of Alexis Tsipras as Greece’s new prime minister represents some long-awaited turning point in the fortunes of the European political left. Both of these exercises in wishful thinking are just plain wrong.

The leftists just about have a point, so long as one is content to think very simplistically and superficially about an urgent, festering problem. This line of argument basically says “Austerity is bad, and now that a strongly anti-austerity party has achieved electoral success elsewhere in Europe, all of our arguments in favour of increasing government spending levels forever have been vindicated”.

There is no shortage of this pound shop pseudo-intellectual grandstanding on display at the moment, from many of the usual suspects in the Labour Party and their sympathisers in the media. The Times of London reports:

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Our Deadly Obsession With The NHS

Samuel Hooper20 Comments

NHS Lapel Pin National Religion Healthcare Hagiography SPS

 

What did you do this Christmas? Gorge on turkey with family, friends and loved ones? Engage in passive-aggressive political debates about Nigel Farage and UKIP with distant relatives? Test to the limit the human body’s ability to break down alcohol? Well, in between doing some or all of those things, a huge number of Britons also found the time to take to social media and publicly declare their love for one particular public service. The object of their affections is, of course, the National Health Service, about which only positive things can be said and to whom we must all be seen to pay sufficient homage.

For the past month, your blogger’s Twitter feed has been inundated with schmaltzy love letters to the NHS, shared and retweeted countless times by people in the grip of a dangerous herd mentality and the gnawing fear that failure to participate in the semi-compulsory Christmas love-in will lead others to believe that they are secretly in favour of cancer, or that they really Hate the Nurses.

Fortunately for these people, but less so for the rest of us, there are countless ways in which they can publicly display their unthinking fidelity to one very specific model of universal healthcare provision dreamed up in 1948.

They can post pseudo-inspirational images on our Twitter and Facebook timelines, like this one:

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Conservatives Should Not Apologise For Wanting To Shrink The State

Samuel Hooper10 Comments

George Osborne Ed Balls Austerity Big Government debate

 

“Tories pull into four point lead over Labour” proclaims the headline in today’s Telegraph, citing an Ipsos MORI poll that put the Conservatives on 33 per cent to Labour’s 29. But not so fast: “Labour opens up five point poll lead over Tories” reads a contradictory headline in the Guardian, talking up an ICM poll that put Labour on 33 per cent with the Tories languishing at 28.

Both polls come packaged together with their predictable narratives – Labour have opened a lead because their Road To Wigan Pier attack on the Conservatives is beginning to resonate with voters, according to their supporters, while the Conservatives are gaining ground because of Ed Miliband’s disarray on immigration and the beginning of the inevitable UKIP implosion, according to theirs. But looking past the partisan spin, neither poll makes encouraging reading for Labour or the Tories. In fact, the inability of either of Britain’s two dominant political parties to command the support of more than one third of the electorate is very damning indeed.

The reasons for the Labour Party’s malaise are fairly self evident – residual mistrust and dislike following thirteen recent years in government, a growing alienation between the party elite and their traditional core voters, total incoherence on the topic of immigration and the UKIP threat, and the abysmal personal ratings of their ex-leader in waiting, Ed Miliband. This blog has covered all of these symptoms of Labour decline at one point or another. But far more interesting are the reasons why the Tories are failing to generate any real approval or excitement, even among their supposedly natural voting blocs. These reasons are simple but stark: the Conservative Party has made a hash of delivering against the promises on which it was (kind of) elected, and has spent far too much time apologising for and excusing its policies along the way.

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