Conservative Party

Don’t Congratulate George Osborne For Stealing Labour’s Living Wage

Samuel Hooper13 Comments

George Osborne - Budget 2015 - Living Wage - Minimum Wage - Conservative Party

 

We are in danger of getting so carried away praising George Osborne’s tactical genius in commandeering Labour’s compulsory national living wage that we forget to notice his total betrayal of conservative principles.

On a purely tactical level, George Osborne’s Budget of 2015 – the Conservative Party’s first for nineteen years – was a masterstroke.

At the nadir of Ed Miliband’s dismal attempt at being Leader of the Opposition, the Labour Party attempted to wow voters with their feeble plan to increase the minimum wage to £8 per hour – by the year 2020. And yet despite having defeated Labour resoundingly in the 2015 general election, it seems that the Tories were only just getting started – they have now twisted the knife by neutralising Labour’s main line of attack against the budget with their secret weapon, a re-branded “national living wage” of £9 per hour by 2020. With Tories like this, who needs the Labour Party anyway?

A fair question. But given George Osborne’s shameless appropriation of a flagship Labour policy, here’s another equally valid question: why bother voting Conservative ever again, either?

The national minimum wage – state control over the wages and employment conditions of over one million people – is a thoroughly un-conservative idea. What’s more, George Osborne’s rush to embrace the living wage makes a mockery of conservative arguments against government-controlled pay – either the Chancellor is deliberately riding roughshod over conservative orthodoxy, or he genuinely believes that conservatives were wrong about the minimum wage all along.

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There Are Important Priorities Beyond Brexit And The British Bill Of Rights

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

David Cameron - EU Referendum - Brexit - Human Rights Act

 

Janet Daley has a good piece in the Telegraph today, castigating the Tories for the way in which David Cameron’s government is rapidly turning the serious question of Britain’s future in the European Union into a farcical “pantomime”.

Taking the government to task for letting down those people who ‘kept the faith’ and voted Conservative in May, Daley laments:

But what a dispiriting carry-on it must seem to most voters, especially the ones who were really happy that they had kept their nerve and voted Conservative.

But here’s the money quote:

But our EU membership did not create the non-contributory benefit system in which people who have never paid in receive indefinite support. Nor did it give rise to our unique universal, free at the point of use, rationed health care system. And it certainly was not responsible for the poor educational achievements of so many young British people that companies prefer to import labour rather than cope with the shortcomings of our school standards.

This hits at an important question. Why is it that we want Britain to leave the European Union in the first place? And why do we actually want to unshackle ourselves from an international “human rights” mechanism that has been hijacked and turned into little more than a guarantor of social democratic dogma?

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Where Are Our Priorities? Tory Defence Cuts Are Dangerous And Unnecessary

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Troops Westminster Parliament

 

Ministry of Defence ordered to find £1 billion of further cost savings from the defence budget while OFGEM gives £500 million to power companies to make electrical power lines look prettier

Government has no more fundamental duty than the protection of the realm from threats foreign and domestic. But while David Cameron’s Conservative majority government is quick to take action against domestic threats (eagerly spending money and passing laws which undermine our fundamental freedoms and civil liberties in the process), it is worryingly weak when it comes to keeping Britain well equipped to deal with foreign dangers.

In just the latest manifestation of Tory disdain for defence issues, no sooner had the Conservatives secured their surprising general election victory than George Osborne sent an edict to the MoD demanding that they find another £1 billion of cost savings from an already pared back and insufficient budget.

Isabel Hardman, writing in The Spectator, remarks:

Even though the prospect of Britain failing to meet that Nato target is upsetting Washington, and even though it is something that agitates Tory backbenchers, and even though one Labour leadership candidate (Liz Kendall) has said they would stick to 2 per cent, this is unlikely to cause as big a row in Westminster as perhaps it should.

For starters, the Opposition is still officially not endorsing the 2 per cent target. For another thing, one of the best-briefed proponents of the Tories keeping their commitments, Rory Stewart, is no longer chair of the Defence Select Committee and is now a minister. And for another thing, Tory MPs are trying their best currently to behave rather than pick fights. Even if they did, a rebellion organised by a backbencher would number a few dozen at the most and would unlikely to be joined by Labour unless Liz Kendall wins the party leadership. There will be criticism from the sidelines, but few are expecting any sort of real trouble that is troublesome for the government.

Of course, this is only if you measure trouble as being purely confined to the walls of the Palace of Westminster, rather than the sort of trouble the armed forces may be required to deal with but just with even further reduced capabilities, but there we go.

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Left Wing Hyperbole Watch

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

Left Wing Hyperbole Watch - George Osborne

 

This thoughtful poem was contributed by a reader today. It is presented here exactly as it was sent to me – I think it speaks for itself.

IDEOLOGY

She put a drawing in grandmas coffin,
Afterall shes only five years old,
How do you tell an infant,
How her grandma died so bold. ?

She fought the bedroom tax,
But Atos dealt deaths blow,
59 years old,
Its Tory ideology we know.

Fit for work despite her heart,
And arthritus in her bones,
4o years in that house,
A place she called her home.

When her grandaughter is older,
She will read and then she.ll know,
Why mummy cried and grandma died,
Its Tory ideology you know.

– Norman Dickson

 

More Left Wing Hate Watch examples here, here and here.

Farewell, Civil Liberties

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

Theresa May - David Cameron - Conservative Party - Civil Liberties- Free Speech

 

“For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens ‘as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone'” – David Cameron, 2015

Pick your poison.

What’s worse? A Labour government that ruins the economy and condemns millions of people to lives of hard subsistence, bleating all the while about how fair and progressive they are, or a Conservative government promising semi-competent handling of the economy but itching to trample away our precious few remaining civil liberties now that they are no longer restrained by coalition?

Britain voted for the latter on May 7 this year, and on balance this was probably the right choice in the short term. But with David Cameron back in Downing Street and Theresa May re-confirmed as Home Secretary, anyone remotely concerned about civil liberties and jealous of their existing freedoms will need to organise to stop them being steamrollered in a flurry of quick legislating while this Conservative majority government is still in its honeymoon phase.

The fact that David Cameron could utter such words as the head of government of a western country is absolutely appalling, and only reconfirms everything that this blog and many others have disliked about the current Conservative Party leadership for some time.

Gone is any sense of small-L liberalism, trusting the people to know and do what is best for themselves and their communities. And in its place comes a heavy-handed, hawkish paternalism, made all the more offensive by the patronising tone in which it seeks to assert control over our lawmaking.

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