David Cameron

The Furore Over David Cameron’s Tax Affairs Reveals Britain At Its Worst

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

David Cameron Tax Protest - Panama Papers

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Responsibly lowering his tax liability through perfectly legal means is one of the few things that David Cameron has accomplished with any real competence. If only his stewardship of British sovereignty and democracy was half as accomplished, his premiership might not be such a letdown

No, I’m not going to write about David Cameron’s tax return, because despite the sound and fury emanating from the Paul Mason, “neo-liberalism” hating Left, it is a complete non-story.

That much is outlined well enough here, here, here and here.

This blog is more than happy to discuss tax reform – preferably of the fundamental and flattening kind – but not through the lens of our national envy and hatred of wealth and success. Because this tawdry intermission in our political conversation serves only to highlight all of the flawed parts of our national psyche – particularly the disdain bordering on hatred many people feel toward wealth and success – while fading out everything that makes us great.

Of course there are privileged people in this country with wealth and resources that the poorest among us can only dream about. But every moment we waste casting envious eyes at those with more than us, bemoaning our own lot in life and viewing ourselves as part of a vast Collective of the Oppressed and Hard Done By is a moment we are not accepting the agency and responsibility we have for our own lives and decisions.

Should we be outraged that the legal, private tax affairs of an elected politician somehow set a bad example? Okay – but only if we are really willing to go down a path that ultimately will lead to witch-hunts of anybody who fails to “voluntarily” donate 90% of their income to Our Blessed NHS (genuflect).

Bear in mind, many of those shouting the loudest themselves are guilty of the same (or worse) behaviour, cynically (and hypocritically) attempting to use this story to advance their political agenda. And in terms of Cameron’s mishandling of the media story, are we really going to focus on this one particular instance and not the many other clangers? I could write a blog post every day for a year about why David Cameron is a lousy conservative and a disappointing prime minister, and still not get around to talking about his family’s mundane tax affairs.

So if you want to read a furious polemic about the Evil Tories and their inherited wealth, look elsewhere – Owen Jones and Paul Mason will take good care of you. Likewise if you want to read a simpering, fawning defence of the prime minister.

Our country faces an existential choice in the coming EU referendum while the liberal, enlightenment values which we supposedly hold dear are under attack everywhere from GCHQ to social media to the university campus.

And so long as that remains the case, this blog will focus on the things that matter, not the shiny distractions which only serve to reveal our petty biases and jealousies.

 

Panama Papers - Mossack Fonseca - Tax Avoidance Evasion

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Top Image: Newsweek

Bottom Image: BBC

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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 23 – Manchester University Students’ Union To Debate Banning Conservatives

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Manchester University Students Union building

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Activists at the University of Manchester Students’ Union are to debate a motion which would essentially ban conservatism and enshrine one particular leftist worldview as the only acceptable political thought on campus

The students’ union at Manchester University never had a particularly strong commitment to democracy and free speech, preferring to act as one of those authoritarian talking shops where activists percolate in their own ideological certainties.

The university is rated Amber while the students’ union has consistently been rated Red in the Spiked free speech rankings, meaning that together they preside over a chilling and hostile climate for freedom of speech on campus.

But the current set of illiberal policies are nothing compared to a new student-initiated union debate which could see David Cameron – and theoretically, by extension any conservative politician or personality – banned from campus on the grounds that they may harm or manipulate weak and vulnerable students with their dangerous right-wing ideas.

The text of the motion, due to be debated this Thursday (14 April), reads:

Ban David Cameron from the Students’ Union building

David Cameron is a dangerous Tory whom has continually attacked the welfare state with the intent of destroying it since the Tory government assumed absolute power in a so called “democratic” vote.

David Cameron and his right-wing Tory government were elected by a minority of the electorate, and zero students voted Tory, therefore we must make a stand against this undemocratic regime by banning David Cameron and his Tory government from our democratic Students Union and our University Campus.

In addition, David Cameron has continually violated the Safe-Space policy by implementing changes to Junior Doctors NHS contracts. We must fight back against the Tory steamroller which is destroying the NHS and destroying the United Kingdom and also Europe. Also David Cameron has said that we should vote to stay in the EU, but he is a Tory and therefore he must have lied, therefore to prevent him being able to manipulate venerable [sic] students at the University we must ban him.

The motion is so childish in its demands and so illiterate in its expression that only a year ago one may have wondered whether it was a clumsy parody. But life on campus in British and American universities has now indeed become such a sick joke that the motion was almost certainly submitted in earnest – and could well be adopted by authoritarian student activists regardless of the motive behind it.

This, after all, is the same students’ union which had an anti Safe Space petitioner dragged out of a student senate meeting by campus security for daring to criticise and speak over the Women’s Officer during a debate about abolishing the union’s Safe Space policy.

(Curiously, the motion to abolish the Safe Space policy was recorded as being rejected in the senate meeting minutes, although there were 38 votes for the motion, 3 against and 4 abstentions – I have contacted the students’ union for clarification on that rather surprising decision, and am awaiting their response).

University of Manchester Students Union

But consider the type of childish, underdeveloped mind which could seriously propose a motion to ban David Cameron from the students’ union (thus wrecking the prime minister’s plan to hang out there extensively in the near future).

The motion begins with the accusation that David Cameron is a “dangerous Tory”. Well, by that logic, so are the 11.3 million British citizens who cast their vote for the Conservative Party in the 2015 general election. Is this entire segment of the population also dangerous – or are they either evil and greedy people voting to enrich themselves at the expense of the poor, or “venerable” people conned into voting the wrong way?

Laughably, the motion describes the Conservative Party’s return to power as being the result of a “so-called ‘democratic’ vote”. Now one can criticise the UK’s electoral system legitimately and with good reason, but Manchester University Students’ Union was not exactly the scene of hunger strikes or self-immolations when the Labour Party won the 2005 general election with 9.5 million votes and 35% of the national vote, which strongly suggests that this is politically (not constitutionally) motivated.

The author of the motion then goes on to claim, ludicrously, that “zero students voted Tory”, which speaks volumes about this particular student’s limited social circle and cheerfully ignorant closed mind. As it happens, some students do vote Conservative – in fact, there has been a slight rise in 18 to 34 year olds voting Tory, particularly women. The fact that many of these right-leaning students keep their political views so quiet is because to talk about them openly would be to invite hostility, ridicule and social ostracisation from the sanctimonious Left.

Slipping the surly bonds of earth and touching the face of insanity, the pompous student motion continues:

In addition, David Cameron has continually violated the Safe-Space policy by implementing changes to Junior Doctors NHS contracts. We must fight back against the Tory steamroller which is destroying the NHS and destroying the United Kingdom and also Europe.

So now, taking a position in an industrial dispute which does not directly affect a single member of the students union is still a grave violation of the Union’s safe space policy. The author of the motion asks us to believe that government running the country and making decisions which anger the Left and the public sector actively makes students unsafe.

And the motion wraps up with the naive and childish statement that David Cameron “is a Tory and therefore he must have lied” about wanting Britain to stay in the European Union. In fact, David Cameron did lie inasmuch as he falsely presented the negligible and non-binding results of his abject capitulation as a bold renegotiation that would result in some kind of reformed EU.

But it was David Cameron’s own lack of character and patrician disregard for democracy which caused him to lie – not the fact that he is a Tory. One could just as easily seek to ban all Labour politicians and personalities from Manchester University by claiming that Tony Blair lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – and yet one can be certain that if Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn set foot on campus tomorrow, these students would drop whatever they were doing and follow him around like he was the Messiah.

University of Manchester - Occupied

One would hope that Manchester University Students’ Union will reject this babyish motion out of hand when it is earnestly debated at this Thursday’s Senate meeting, on the grounds that it makes everyone who touches it look stupid.

One would hope that there are enough liberty-loving students at Manchester to prevent the adoption of a measure designed to infantilise them and treat them as delicate snowflakes incapable of so much as being in the presence of people who disagree with them (though such sensible people tend to be repulsed by student politics and stay well away).

One would hope that the idea of passing a symbolic motion banning the democratically elected – not to mention remarkably dull and centrist – prime minister from setting foot on union property would be laughed out of the house by student leaders who realise that demonising over a third of the country for their perfectly legitimate political views makes honest political debate impossible, and (most dangerously) enshrines one particular left-wing ideology as the only “acceptable” political opinion.

One would like to think a good many warm and positive things about the generation of Stepford Students currently passing through our academic institutions, both here in Britain and in America. But every day we are given ten times as many reasons to despair as causes to hope.

And now we have the ludicrous spectacle of Manchester University students earnestly debating whether or not they need to protect themselves by placing a de facto restraining order on David Cameron and his Evil Tory brethren.

As Manchester goes, so goes every other major university in the country. Never has a group of students been so in need of a robust, small-L liberal education, yet so thoroughly unprepared to receive one at university.

 

Safe Space Notice - 2

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Top Image: manchesterhistory.net

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Virtue Signalling Celebrities – Silly. Virtue Signalling Government – Dangerous

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

Benedict Cumberbatch - Virtue Signalling - Syria - Refugees

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When celebrities indulge in open virtue-signalling and Something Must Be Done-ery, it is irritating but ultimately harmless. But now political leaders and governments are doing the same thing, and it is deadly serious

Tony Parsons – who only last year bravely admitted to being “Tory Scum” – has a great new piece in GQ magazine, blasting the prevalence of virtue-signalling behaviour among the celebrity and political class.

After ridiculing certain actors and celebrities, whose Something Must Be Done-ery and hand-wringing at the existence of the Evil Tories is misguided but ultimately harmless, Parsons goes on to warn that it is much less funny when political leaders and entire governments are engaging in the same virtue signalling exercise.

His conclusion is worth quoting at length:

All this smug, self-satisfied, shockingly empty posturing would be merely laughable if it was confined to a few pompous luvvies who make clods of themselves every time they say a line that isn’t written by someone far smarter than them. But the desire to demonstrate moral purity now extends its cloying reach all the way to Downing Street, where even pink-faced Tory boys strain to prove their liberal credentials.

Many civilised nations such as Australia, Canada, France, Japan and Ireland have vastly reduced their foreign aid budgets after reaching the conclusion that shovelling billions to the developing world does nothing but encourage corruption, erode democracy and throw away taxpayers’ hard-earned money like a sailor on shore leave.

But in our own country the commitment to spend 0.7% of gross national income on foreign aid has been enshrined in law. The UK spent more than £12 billion on foreign aid last year, at a time when almost every other area of public spending was being slashed. Only the NHS and foreign aid were spared George Osborne’s cuts.

How can this be? How can a new private plane for a developing world despot be more important than the police, or the armed forces, or benefits for the disabled? How can it be rational, or even sane, for a country to care more about flood defences in Congo than it does about flood defences in Carlisle?

Because it doesn’t really matter if that £12bn a year in foreign aid itself is effective. It is not about feeding hungry mouths. Foreign aid is purely about demonstrating impeccable liberal goodness. Cameron’s Conservatives need to demonstrate that they are kind, decent and virtuous, need to show that they bought “Do They Know It’s Christmas” when they were at Eton and Westminster. Our foreign aid budget – millions of it shipped to nations where the British are despised – is meant to be conclusive evidence that the Tories care.

Virtue signalling begins and ends in the developing world. So Benedict Cumberbatch can’t give a thought to a small German town like Sumte (population 102) that finds its infrastructure collapsing under the burden of giving a home to 750 migrants. Sherlock can only prove his liberal goodness by fretting about Syrian refugees.

There is a debate to be had – and it is the debate of our age – about how we manage our moral obligation to our own people with our humanitarian impulse to help the world. But you will never hear that difficult subject broached among the virtue signallers who scream their pious certainties and wag their censorious fingers at the wicked Tories – which is bitterly ironic as David Cameron is the biggest virtue signaller of them all.

This blog dissents from the suggestion that the bulk of the foreign aid budget should not have been returned to taxpayers but merely reallocated to an unreformed NHS and welfare state, but the main thrust of Parsons’ argument – that we are essentially spending nearly one percent of our GDP not to do good but rather to look good – is devastatingly accurate.

And since those who disagree with the Conservative government are already determined not to see it as merely politically misguided but as a sociopathic millionaire’s club actively seeking to hurt the poor, there is little point in continuing to ringfence international aid spending as part of a PR exercise which has already failed.

Virtue signalling when practised by lame comedians and other assorted commentators angling for a cheap laugh is tiresome but essentially harmless. But when our elected government signals its virtue with taxpayer money and national policy, it can be the difference between life and death.

Which is why David Cameron and George Osborne should focus on sound policymaking and (just for a change) conservative principle, leaving the compassionate handwringing to the more-than-capable Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

 

 

Postscript: None of this is to say that this blog does not sometimes agree with the causes fleetingly taken up by celebrities, even Benedict Cumberbatch.

 

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Top Image: ITV

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If The Conservative Government Is Truly Evil, Where’s The Left Wing Revolution?

Samuel Hooper10 Comments

Jeremy Corbyn - Hipster - Middle Class Left Wing

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Virtue-signalling, vacuous middle class leftists are all talk and no action

According to many a Corbyn-cheering, well-heeled leftist, modern Britain resembles an unjust, “neoliberal” dystopia in which the Evil Tories and their Evil Banker friends leech off the real producers and heroes in our society (usually people who are net recipients of government spending, curiously recast as the being most virtuous of all).

To this mindset, George Osborne is not simply wrong on the economics, he is engaging in a deliberate war of attrition against the poor, and Iain Duncan Smith’s abortive efforts to reform the welfare state were part of a Nazi-inspired eugenics programme to kill off the sick and disabled.

All of which begs the question – if David Cameron’s centrist, soul-sappingly unimaginative Conservative government really is evil incarnate, why do its many opponents content themselves with mere polite protest and ineffectual rants on social media?

If I believed for a moment that the state was engaged in a deliberate extermination of its weakest and most vulnerable citizens, I hope to think that I would have the moral clarity and fortitude to either take up arms against the government or to work for its downfall using every skill and talent at my disposal. And yet those who actually do believe that the Tories are “evil” can usually be found clad in skinny jeans and non-prescription hipster glasses, waging “resistance” via their (capitalism-produced) smartphones while sipping a hand-crafted flat white.

My Conservatives for Liberty colleague Martin Bailey sums up this moral hypocrisy perfectly in a piece entitled “The impotence of the middle-class Left”.

Bailey writes:

If I thought that the world was controlled by a secret ‘Neo-Liberal’ elite that oversaw government and mass media across the globe, I would do something about it. Take up arms, man a barricade, refuse to comply. If I genuinely believed that democracy was a sham and we were all willing drones to corporate bosses, I wouldn’t stand for it.

So what do they do? They sit in comfort and plenty streaming idle profanities across Twitter and Starbucks. They can’t even find an independent coffee shop in which to plan the revolution. Anonymous abuse of anyone on social media who dares to question their orthodoxy is about as rebellious as a wet fart in an empty train carriage. Che would be turning in his grave.

The EU referendum is a perfect example of stupefying left wing impotence, with thousands of social justice warriors happy to forget the glaring absence of democracy and willing to accept the biggest corporatist cartel in history, all for the fear that someone they know may or may not lose their job. I guess the revolution will have to wait, eh Comrade?

Read the whole piece, it is a highly entertaining takedown of the Left’s hypocrisy and wilful misunderstanding of capitalism.

And to my mind, there are only two explanations for the gulf between the Virtue Signalling Left’s angry talk and their lack of action commensurate with the inhuman Evil Tory threat that they constantly decry.

Option 1 – The left-wing outrage at the present Conservative (often in name only) government is completely fake, in which case the failure of its opponents to take concrete action makes perfect sense – after all, they are only invoking the memory of the Holocaust as a cynical political ploy to demonise their opponents and paint them as heartless and deliberately cruel.

Option 2 – Their outrage is genuine and they honestly believe that conservatives have blood on their hands, but they are also too cowardly to risk their own relatively privileged and comfortable lives by coming to the aid of the supposedly oppressed. In other words, the middle class Left are happy to parade their hatred of the Evil Tory Scum on social media and to friends, but would continue to let society’s most vulnerable people suffer and die before than risking their coveted London homes, worldly possessions and personal liberty by backing up their fighting words with real action.

Manipulative cynics or moral cowards. The only question remaining is which reflects worse on the virtue-signalling middle class Left?

 

Postscript: I happen to believe that most middle class leftists fall into Option 1. It’s trendy to moan about how beastly the Evil Tories are being, and posting a few IDS-as-Hitler memes on the internet is a good way to quickly signal to other bovine minded people that you are one of the “good guys”.

But that’s not to say that there are not also a number of credulous cowards out there – that is, people who genuinely believe the anti-Tory effluence which pours from their mouths and keyboards, but are too darn selfish to risk anything of theirs by physically attempting to stop the genocide that they believe is underway.

 

More Left Wing Hate Watch here.

 

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What Might A Post-Osborne Conservative Party Actually Look Like?

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Britain Election

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George Osborne has political enemies. But are they also ideological opponents?

What hope is there that the Conservative Party might realistically follow a different intellectual and ideological path after the Age of Cameron and Osborne?

While there have been precious few public signs of senior cabinet or backbench, leadership-calibre Conservative MPs willing to make a public stand for a smaller state and greater individual liberty, perhaps we should be encouraged by the fact that many Tory MPs apparently hold such a low opinion of George Osborne, the navigator largely responsible for the party’s current centrist course.

James Kirkup has been surveying attitudes to the Chancellor within the parliamentary party:

How much trouble is Mr Osborne in? Put it this way: Tory MPs who a few months ago were so wary of his power over their future that they flinched at the mention of his name are now speculating about whether he will keep his job.

By way of evidence, here are some things Conservatives have said to me about the Chancellor in recent days. Two of the quotes below come from serving members of the government. One is from someone who holds a senior office in the Tory hierarchy. One is a backbench MP who could easily have a prominent place in Cabinet in a year or two.

1. “No chance. None. Zero. Never going to happen. Dead. Deader than dead.”

2. “He has been found out. He doesn’t believe in anything and no one likes him. It was useful for people to support him when he was on the way up, but no one will stick with him on the way down.”

3. “The thing about George is that a lot of people think he’s a bit arrogant and rude, but that’s because they don’t really know him.

“Well I’ve worked with him pretty closely for several years now and so I know that the truth is that in person he’s actually much worse than that.”

Kirkup goes on to chart a path back out of the wilderness for Osborne, which is of far less interest to this blog, which ardently hopes that the Chancellor and his “New Labour Continued” strategy perish in the desert.

But there is no point looking forward to the departure of Cameron and Osborne unless there is a reasonable prospect of them being replaced by other, better alternatives – future leaders whose conservatism does not retreat at the first sight of negative headlines, and who know when the pain of public opposition is worth the gains (i.e. not in pursuit of a paltry £4bn of savings from Personal Independence Payments for disabled welfare claimants).

Back in November of last year, this blog pointed out that winning power only to implement Tony Blair’s unrealised fourth term of office was a waste of a Conservative administration, and that those who campaigned and voted Tory deserved better:

The fact that David Cameron and George Osborne are watching the slow implosion of the Labour Party and conjuring up plans to woo Ed Miliband voters – rather than capitalise on this once-in-a-century opportunity to execute a real conservative agenda unopposed – reveals their worrying lack of confidence in core conservative principles and values. If the Prime Minister and Chancellor really believed in reducing the tax burden, reforming welfare, building up our armed forces, shrinking the state, promoting localism and devolving decision-making to the lowest level possible (with the individual as the default option), they could do so. They could be building a new, conservative Britain right here, right now. Virtually unopposed.

But Cameron and Osborne are doing no such thing. They simper and equivocate, and talk about fixing the roof and paying down the debt while doing no such thing, and still they attract endless negative headlines for inflicting an austerity which exists primarily in the minds of permanently outraged Guardian readers.

If Britain is not a transformed country in 2020 – with a smaller state, more dynamic private sector and greater presence on the world stage – there will be absolutely nobody to blame other than the party holding the keys to government. The party with the word “conservative” in their name. The Tories will have been in power for ten years and have nearly nothing to show for it, save some weak protestations about having fixed Labour’s prior mismanagement of the economy.

That’s not the kind of party I want to be associated with. That’s not the party I campaigned to elect in 2010, back when it seemed possible that a new Conservative administration might aspire to being something more than a moderate improvement on Gordon Brown.

In other words, in order to make an exciting potential future leadership candidate, the Conservative MPs rolling their eyes as the Chancellor of the Exchequer self destructs (or uses up another of his nine political lives) must not simply dislike George Osborne – and there is increasing evidence that his support is a mile wide but an inch deep – but actually have an entirely different vision for the party.

That rules out all of the most obvious successors (Theresa May, Nicky Morgan, Philip Hammond, Michael Fallon, Jeremy Hunt) as well as those one-time Bright Young Things who have recently proven their unreliability by failing to come out in support of Brexit (Sajid Javid, Stephen Crabb, Matt Hancock, Rob Halfon).

Unfortunately, that mostly leaves a pool of potential candidates who are probably too new to Parliament to mount a credible leadership bid by 2020, or citizen politician types who have already publicly disavowed any future leadership ambitions. This blog took a warm liking to Chris Philp (if only he can be cured of his europhilia), David Nuttall (with some specific policy reservations) and James Cleverly when these MPs recently addressed a Conservatives for Liberty lobby event, and also Lucy Allan – though the latter’s social media exploits and alleged behaviour towards her staff raise some worrying temperamental questions.

Kwasi Kwarteng is also a sound conservative, advocating a return to a contributory welfare state as well as being an excellent author. Dominic Raab is very bright, and strong on individual liberty and meritocracy.

None are what you might consider to be household names at present. In some cases, that may have the potential to change by 2020, depending on what happens and whether any of these candidates are promoted into the cabinet as the Conservative Party approaches the end of David Cameron’s term.

But the green shoots of a British Conservative revival do exist. They are small and fragile at present, and no matter who is leading Labour in 2020, Cameron’s successor will have to contend with Tory Fatigue after ten years back in government, making the urge to tack to the centre even harder to resist than it is already.

Which is all the more reason why this blog believes it is now imperative to identify, support and champion those future leadership prospects who fit the profile of an heir to Thatcher rather than another disappointing, Cameron-style Ted Heath tribute act.

 

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