Conservative Party

Jubilant Trade Unions Are Wildly Misreading Jeremy Corbyn’s Mandate

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

TUC Conference - Young Socialists - General Strike

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Trade union activists may be delighted by Jeremy Corbyn’s triumph in the Labour leadership contest, but they should not mistake the scale of his victory for widespread demand for socialist and pro-union policies among the wider British public

Can you imagine a British general strike taking place in the year 2016, ninety years since the last, with workers from every industry downing tools (or leaving their public sector office desks, as it would be today) to bring the entire country grinding to a halt?

No, of course you can’t – no person with a single foothold in reality can take the prospect seriously, let alone countenance the circumstances whereby a general strike might now be justified. But Britain’s trade union leaders can – and now that Jeremy Corbyn has been installed as Labour leader, they fully intend to make it a reality.

The Daily Mail strikes a suitably alarmist tone:

It would be the first time that there had been a General Strike since 1926, when work was halted for nine days.

Unite, led by ‘Red Len’ McCluskey and one of Mr Corbyn’s biggest supporters, is calling for ‘a broad, militant and imaginative campaign’ against the Trade Union Reform Bill.

It even proposes breaking the law, saying the TUC should be open ‘to giving maximum possible political, financial and industrial support to those unions that find themselves outside the law’.

But on this occasion they are right to be alarmed. The Telegraph reports that Britain’s favourite union leader, Mark Serwotka, sees Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership victory as only the start:

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Why I Am A Conservative

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Cambridge University - Conservatives for Liberty - Why Im A Conservative

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First published at Conservatives for Liberty

I came from a single parent family and a working class background, got into Oxbridge, worked hard and made something of myself – no thanks to the modern Labour Party or the nurturing support of Big Government

I first realised I was a conservative the day after I heard George Galloway speak at the Cambridge Union Society in 2002. Galloway has a certain way with words when he turns on the charm, and perhaps like many other people that evening I left the debating chamber thinking that maybe there was something to this socialism business after all.

It was only after letting the ideas percolate in my head overnight, trying and failing to match the socialist rhetoric against my own life experience, that I realised that everything George Galloway said that evening was complete hogwash – and that conservatism remains our last, best and only hope for building the just and prosperous society.

If this is all starting to sound a bit Brideshead Revisited – privileged young man goes to Oxbridge, dons a tuxedo and gets in with the Young Conservative set – perhaps I had better start over. I came from a poor, single parent family in Essex. I grew up on benefits, not that it is tremendously relevant. The point is that everything I achieved since that time has been the result of a nurturing family environment and my own hard work. Despite coming of age at the peak of New Labour’s power and popularity, our supposedly benevolent welfare state was at best an irrelevance and at worst was an an outright hindrance to my progress.

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Stop Worshipping ‘Centrist’ Voters – They Are Responsible For Britain’s Woes

Samuel Hooper8 Comments

Swing Voters - Couch Potato - 2

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First published at the Conservatives for Liberty blog

What exactly constitutes the political centre, anyway? Is it even a real thing? And why are we so in thrall to something so vague and ill-defined?

The political centre ground: people talk about it all the time. It is meant to represent the silent majority, that great conclave of wise and sage-like citizens who – unlike us hotheated partisan folk with our strong beliefs and awkward ideals – remain serenely above the political fray, calmly and methodically weighing competing policies against each another before arriving at their pragmatic, irreproachable voting decision on polling day.

Every British political party leader since Thatcher left office has been in hot pursuit of the political centre ground, happily throwing established party orthodoxy and revolutionary thinking alike out the window, preferring to court the good opinion of people who took a good look at Labour’s managed decline of the 1970s and the Tory individualism of the 1980s, and, Goldilocks-like, decided that they prefer something half way between the two, thank you very much.

But who are these political centrists? Do they actually exist, or are they an artificially created demographic, an amorphous and shifting blob of people whom the pollsters have not yet found a better way to categorise?

It’s a relevant question, because you can be assured that British politics for the next five years – or at least, the narrative around politics constructed by the media – will be all about the political centre, and which party is doing the better job of wooing it approaching the 2020 general election.

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The EU “Renegotiation” Is An Attempt To Deceive You

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EU Renegotiation - Brexit - European Union

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By Ben Kelly, blogger and editor of The Sceptic Isle.

If you are one of those many people who consider themselves to be a “Eurosceptic” and lean heavily towards the “no” (for “Brexit”) vote yet still believe in the so-called re-negotiation – because “it’s worth a try”, you never know what we might get, we’re in a strong position to win back powers, et cetera – then please stop. Stop wasting time, and wake up.

If you are against our membership of the European Union on principle then the possibility of “winning” some minor cosmetic changes to our relationship should not give you cause for doubt. You need to focus on arguing for secession, now.

The renegotiation is a pretence conducted by avid europhiles with the sole intention of shutting down this debate and sealing the United Kingdom’s fate as a permanent part of the political union, destined for deeper integration. The evidence for this plain to see, and eurosceptic Conservative Party members and MPs should not allow the party leadership to get away with its insultingly transparent charade.

The image being portrayed is that of our government locked in a “renegotiation” with other EU members; with all the arguments, banging on the table and defiance that this entails. Please don’t fall for this, David Cameron is not a born again eurosceptic. None of that is happening, it is all nonsense, complete make believe; at best it is elaborate political theatre.

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The Tories Should Steal Jeremy Corbyn’s Plan For A National Education Service

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

Jeremy Corbyn - National Education Service - Education Policy

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A version of this article was first published on the Conservatives for Liberty blog.

A top-down reorganisation of Britain’s education system, giving the state full control over education at all levels and for all ages would be a terrible, frightening idea. But could conservatives pick up Jeremy Corbyn’s proposal for a National Education Service and give it a libertarian twist to inspire a genuine consumer-focused revolution in life-long learning?

Whether you hail Jeremy Corbyn as the left wing saviour of British politics or intend to hide behind the sofa on 12 September lest his election as Labour Leader ushers in a dark new era of Soviet communism, no one can deny that Corbyn’s candidacy has brought a certain level of partisan excitement back to drab, consensual British politics.

But as always happens when an outsider threatens to show up the bipartisan political elite and their soul-sapping sameness, the media has focused on whipping up hysteria about some of Corbyn’s off-the-cuff pronouncements, like his remark that we might potentially learn something from Karl Marx (as though we can only learn from historical figures who we 100% agree with) or twisting Corbyn’s words to suggest that he supports re-instating Clause Four and the historic Labour commitment to public ownership of industry.

You don’t have to be a fully paid-up Tory to realise that this headline-bating and click-chasing detracts from the serious discussion of any policy specifics which Corbyn has announced, and which might lead to the start of a real debate if only the media did their job properly. Take Jeremy Corbyn’s recent proposal for a National Education Service to rival the National Health Service.

While failing to provide many concrete details of what this “cradle to grave” education system might look like, Corbyn did offer this glimpse:

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