Cameron's mixed signals

Various things continue to keep me away from blogging (expect normal service to resume next month sometime) but I can't resist a very belated guffaw at David Davis's very hollow victory in his by-election/vanity crusade. All that being said, I was wandering around Politics Home and was more than a little amused to find on it's afternoon web update two stories about David Cameron; one claiming he was moving further away from Thatcherism and one (directly below it) claiming he was moving deeper into it's dark embrace.

Stumbling and Mumbling argues that Cameron's call for a 'US-chapter-11' style bankruptcy law is a "flat contradiction of standard neoliberal economics" and therefore a decisive break from Thatcherism. However, Paul Waugh in the Evening Standard argues the exact opposite; he seizes on comments Cameron made during a speech on 'morality' in Glasgow. Cameron said that;

"The Labour Party for a long time said only it could deal with deep poverty, because it understood about transferring money from rich to poor. I think we have reached the end of that road.

We have now got to look at what are the causes of the poverty we see in our country. The causes are family breakdown, worklessness, drugs, alcohol, failing schools and we need quite conservative solutions to deal with these problems."

Waugh says that many Conservative MP's will be "delighted" with Cameron's comments. I rather feel that the latter comments are more indicative of Cameron's true nature but he is smart enough to realise that you simply can't win elections by making those kind of statements your central message let alone your sole determinant of policy. However, despite his rhetoric about wanting to support 'hard-working' families there is no doubt that the central thrust of Cameron's Conservatives is still against poorer people and in favour or richer people (allot of noise about the 10p band but the flagship change is a reduction in inheritance tax). In other words, the Conservatives remain the party of vested interests. Our job has to be to get under the skin of the Tories and expose these contradictions.

Money, Money, Money!!!!!

‘Money, Money, Money, must be funny in a rich mans world’, so sang Madonna. One has to wonder if Gordon Brown is laughing; Labour has nowhere near enough of it and he is now regularly taunted by David Cameron for his parties increasing dependence on the trade unions to stay afloat.

In my view the rather corrosive role that money generally plays in politics are a symptom of popular public disengagement with politics. The financial problems of the parties are partially due to them failing to engage the population into political activity; engaging them to vote is hard enough work. This has to be largely down to the consensual atmosphere of party politics which often seems to be more about style than substance. It is a widely held belief that the reverse is true; however, common sense and the recent practical example of the American primaries settle the argument. People turn out to vote when there is something worth voting on and questions of style are largely not. Questions of fundamental importance are; and for there to be a proper debate there has to be two or more fundamentally opposed sides to vote on.

Political parties should not be rewarded, in the form of state-funding of parties, for this failure to connect. State funding is possibly one of the worst options on offer to solve the problem. In general, it should be a point of democratic principle that parties derive as much money as possible from the people they represent; they should not be provided with monies that will, in part, come from people whose views they are never likely to represent. Proportionality does not change that fact. State-funding further separates politics from the people and is democratically unacceptable.

Capping of individual donations is about the best way to ensure that parties are forced to re-connect and reengage with the people. Ultimately, however, it is that reengagement that is the answer in itself; its not something that can be forced. It involves the people themselves realising that democracy is what you make of it, you cannot expect it to lay dormant and unused and remain in good shape.

Class war and scepticism on Conservative Home

Euroscepticism is dead, that is at least according to Richard North on the EU Referendum blog. However, do not despair (or indeed break out the bubbly) say the posters on C0nservative Home. Sally Roberts says;

"Euroscepticism is not dead, its just waiting for the platform of government to re-emerge. Eventually the UK is going to have to decide whether to adopt the Euro or not."

Clearly the posters are waiting for David Cameron to perform the role of knight-in-shining armour. Donal Blaney puts it thus;

"'hush now our little skeptics, all in good time, all in good time."

Littletwo also sees the role of a Cameron government as actively promoting euroscepticism;

"Assuming that an incoming Cameron Government remains broadly Eurosceptical, they would do well to expose, pointedly, every EU law which they have to enact......Honesty is what the public craves from its politicians. The measure would be popular and public opinion would swing, inexorably, to more active Euroscepticism."

Meanwhile, while the Conservatives made much of Labour's 'class war' tactics in Crewe but are busy fighting the class war for their own 'side' - against so-called 'liberal elites'. Conservative Home gives prominence to an article by Melanie Phillips' entitled 'Overclass values created the underclass'. Replying to a Sunday Times article by India Knight Phillips said;

"It was the champagne socialist intelligentsia which destroyed the traditional family, demonised men, incentivised mass fatherlessness and declared never-married motherhood an inalienable human right, emptied education of content and cut off the escape routes out of disadvantage by withering the grammar schools, declared morality to be a dirty word, paralysed the police through political correctness, enslaved the poor through dependency on the state and then finally destroyed their brains by telling them to eat cannabis cake while themselves showing the way by snorting cocaine on the Square Mile or in recording studios, or getting legless on Crackdaddy cocktails at Boujis nightclub."

So, on-top of contempt for lesbians, 'villain' bad parents, 'scruffy' teachers we have the carefully concealed attempt for Europe and the hatred of 'political correctness'. people who 'destroyed traditional family values' and so on; not much new about Cameron's Conservatives is there??

Cameron - bad parents are 'villans'

It is the contention of this blog that little has changed about the Conservative Party and there has been a slew of evidence of that in recent weeks. David Cameron provided more evidence of that yesterday branding bad parents 'villains'. In remarks reported in the Daily Mail he compared Margaret Thatcher's confrontation with the trade unions to his commitment to put family at the centre of Conservative policy;

"The problems now are not so much the over-mighty trade unions so much as irresponsible parenting, family breakdown and anti-social behaviour."

"These are the great villains and problems today."

So, it's back-to-basics for the 'family values' Conservatives.

Cameron at odds with his own MP's

Tony Blair famously set himself against his own party numerous times and now David Cameron seems to be following in his footsteps. He voted against the majority of Conservative MPs who took part in the division yesterday on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. Altogether 37 Tories voted in favour with 49 voting against.

This is not the first time Cameron has been out on a limb either. According to Professor Philip Cowley, this is the fourth time he has been in a minority in his own party in Commons votes recently. The others were votes cast in favour of an 80-per-cent-elected House of Lords (where the Conservatives split 80/103 against); gay adoption (29/85 against); and the abolition of blasphemy (37/51 against).

All in all what this shows is the largely cosmetic nature of Cameron's re-branding of the Conservatives as a 'caring' party. As we have already seen today with the argument that lesbian couples should be denied IVF treatment unless they can provide a 'male role model' the Conservative Party remains as bigoted at heart as always.