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Friday 8 August 2008

The Tories - excellent and atrocious

Fraser has a great piece in this week's magazine on the Tories' education plans. Readers will know I have my problems with David Cameron, but if the Conservatives are serious about implementing Michael Gove's 'Swedish model' policy - and there's nothing to suggest they are not - then that alone is a good reason to vote Conservative next time round.

As Fraser writes:

The Prime Minister is known to take a dim view of all this. Choice, he argues, means the maintenance of surplus places which he equates with waste. Yet the irony is that his profligate spending has made the Tory voucher scheme possible: education spending is so high that funding per pupil is now sufficient to make it desirable to set up a school. And there are plenty of Blairite ministers who privately concede that Mr Cameron is right. ‘It’s exactly the right idea,’ a Cabinet member told me recently. ‘Our problem is that we have too many “top-down” people in the Labour party. They have won.’

What a contrast the education policy makes with the party's lamentable NHS policy. You'd have thought that a government which has thrown billions of pounds down the drain testing the idea that the answer to the NHS's problems is more money would have the upper hand when it comes to crazed NHS policies. But no. Give Labour the credit at least for introducing elements of competition. Give the Tories under Andrew Lansley no credit, because they deserve none. Their plan is to entrench producer capture in the NHS's very fabric, a policy which makes Labour look like the very model of modern public service stewardship.

And as if that wasn't enough, Andrew Lansley now comes out with his latest piece of worse-than-socialism. Fraser's take is spot on:

One wonders what David Cameron said to Andrew Lansley after his Times interview where he says 11% of GDP should be spent on health. A number of responses spring to mind:-

1) Please explain to me why you considered it helpful to come up with this 11% figure. Please. I’m interested.

2) Did anyone authorise this 11% figure? Or was it in the faxed instructions the BMA send you each morning in large type?”

3) How am I supposed to handle the rest of the Shadow Cabinet who all want spending on their departments? Davis wanted extra cash to say he’d pay the policemen, a pittance. George denied him – and he shut up. That’s called “discipline”, and it wins things called “elections”. Heard of them?

4) Have you learnt nothing from the Labour failures of seeing spending as a virtue in itself? Is this how you’ll govern the NHS? Or sorry, I forgot, you’ll make them independent – so they’ll govern themselves; your role confined to writing the cheques.

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