The Conservative party conference has been short and sweet, and delegates are winding their ways back to constituencies and Westminster. Here are five important lessons to take away from Birmingham:
1. The government will pursue a further cuts to the welfare budget, but there’s a fight ahead on how much money can be cut, with the Liberal Democrats rejecting the George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith’s plan for £10 billion of cuts. James examines how the relationship between Osborne and Vince Cable will be key to the negotiations over further cuts in his political column in tomorrow’s Spectator.
2. David Cameron is keen to keep both compassionate Conservatism and the Big Society alive as key brands for the Conservative party. His speech today took compassion as its big theme, telling delegates that ‘this party, our party, it has a great heart, but we don’t like wearing it on our sleeve’. He continued to pitch to the ‘strivers’, not just by making attacks on benefit dependency, but also by talking about the ‘aspiration nation’.
3.
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