Politics

So what overarching theory do Cameron & Co. believe in now?  Is it Phillip Blond’s “Red Toryism”?  Are they still invigorated by “libertarian paternalism”?  Or have they struck on something else?  This week’s Bagehot column in the Economist gives us a useful overview of all the -isms the Tories have gone through recently, before landing on a conclusion that the policy wonks in CCHQ may not like: “The Tories should stop worrying about whether their view of the world works in theory, and concentrate more on generating ideas that will work in practice. They can live without an ideology; what they urgently require is balls.” Bagehot’s take is certainly attractive. 

Fantastic, thought-provoking stuff by Matthew Parris in the Times today, as he looks back on the past 12 years of Tory opposition and asks: “Just what did they achieve?”  His response is generally unfavourable: that, until more recently, the wilderness years have largely been wasted years.  And he highlights the Tories’ inability to take on Labour over their wasteful spending and burgeoning deficit: “But it was on the central domestic question of the era that the Tories’ nerve failed almost fatally. At first new Labour held to the tight spending plans that it inherited from John Major’s outgoing administration. Then the Government let go. The letting go was, in retrospect,

Gordon Brown, if you are about to pick up today’s New Statesman, I advise you to put it down, return to the sofa and start re-watching those Raith Rovers tapes. In it, Frank Field writes that Harriet Harman offers Labour a sense of direction that Gordon Brown’s government, which is simply drifting towards ‘the most horrendous defeat’, has lacked. Here are the most crucial, and the most gushing, bits: ‘You have to hand it to her. Harriet Harman has really shown how to use No 10 as a platform from which to direct policy. You may not agree with how she presented her programme, but, for the first time since

Aside from the irony that ministers think they can nail General Dannatt over his Civil List expenses, I can’t see how the government can benefit from smearing Sir Richard, assuming they placed the FOI request. (Although to be honest, I can’t see why anyone other than these defence ministers would seek to damage Dannatt.) Friends of General Dannatt say that he will “do his duty and carry out his responsibilities to the Army and the country whether he is in uniform or not”. And I imagine the man who won the Military Cross fighting the IRA will take this smear campaign in his stride and write an especially savage book

The day before A-level results are published, the Telegraph and the Independent report that traditional academic subjects, such as maths, physics and history are not being offered by a large minority of state schools. Here are the details:  ‘Around one in seven schools – 264 in total – did not enter any pupils for A-level geography in 2007 – the latest available information – and a similar proportion failed to enter students for physics. Figures also show that more than one in 10 comprehensives did not enter pupils for A-level chemistry, while six percent failed to enroll candidates for maths and seven per cent shunned biology. A further 145 schools