Tories

Following this excellent column at the Daily Beast, Bruce Bartlett, a veteran Republican whose credentials are established by his work for Jack Kemp, Ronald Reagan and Goerge HW Bush, emails Steve Benen to make a very useful point: I believe that political parties should do penance for their mistakes and just losing power is not enough. Part of that involves understanding why those mistakes were made and how to prevent them from happening again. Republicans, however, have done no penance. They just pretend that they did nothing wrong. But until they do penance they don’t deserve any credibility and should be ignored until they do. That’s what my attacks on

Harry Phibbs’ piece at Comment is Free today makes the perfectly sensible point that the Tories “localism” agenda – the closest thing Cameron has to a Big Idea – is more flexible, even nuanced than is sometimes appreciated. The Man in Whitehall Does Not Always Know Best. Elements of the localist agenda require local councils to have more power; others to devolve power – or choice – to the people themselves. As Phibbs says, more power also demands more “accountability”. But the Tories’ definition of “accountability” (itself a notion that can be taken too far) seems to mean only that You Can Find Out What the Cooncil is Spending. There’s

Conservative Home’s survey of 144 of the Tory candidates most likely to enter parliament after the next election is very interesting. It’s hardly a surprise that the Tories want British history to be taught in schools, nor that they’re in favour of school vouchers and strongly euroscpetic. Nor is it an enormous shock that 48% of them say they would have voted for Barack Obama in the US presidential election (that says more about the state and temper of the contemporary Republican party than it does about either Mr Obama or the Tories). But it’s a sign of how the times have changed that 62% of the Class of 2010

A characteristically interesting column from Rachel Sylvester in The Times today, in which she describes how the Tories are looking to how the Liberal Party in Canada managed to slash public spending a decade ago. As Sylvester describes it, our Canadian friends lopped 20% of their public spending bill and dismissed as many as a fifth of all state employees. In other words, cutting spending can be done, even if it’s never easy and always controversial. But unless you tackle welfare and the NHS then – absent a fundamental rethink of government needs and priorities – it’s unlikely that many of the other measures – charging for museum entry! –

Iain Dale, however, thinks Cameron passed with flying colours. I suppose it was merely a matter of time before the “Why Won’t Obama Come to the Aid of the Protestors?” meme spread to this side of the Atlantic and now, courtesy of the good* Mr Dale, it has. And apparently Gordon Brown and David Milliband havel also failed to help the Iranian regime by offering sufficiently forceful denunciations of their behaviour. That’s not what Iain wants, but it’s what would have happened if the President, Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary had followed his advice. Iain’s post is headlined “What Would Thatcher & Reagan Have Done About Iran?” which is itself

A reader asks, not without reason, what I think of the Scottish Tories attempts at a makeover since their wipeout in 1997 and whether, given that I’m generally, broadly speaking, in favour of the reformers when it comes to Project Cameron or Project GOP, I’m also happy with the Scottish Tories softer than softly-softly approach to decontaminating their “brand”. So, not too much to chew on there. The first thing to be wary of is our old friend the Pundit’s Fallacy. That is, the erroneous belief that a given political party’s electoral prospects would be transformed if only they were sensible enough to tailor their policies to fit my own

David Cameron’s speech to the Scottish Tory conferene was, I thought, workmanlike rather than inspired.The troops enjoyed it even if they were not necessarily enraptured by it. Interestingly he spent more time attacking the SNP than Labour, portraying the Conservatives as the only party that can truly efend the Union. Of course Labour will argue that a vote for the Tories will encourage the SNP given the nationalists’ palpable desire for a Tory government in Westminster. It is not impossible that both parties are right. Still, Cameron’s speech also betraed the fact that, ten years on from devoution, the Tories remain, perhaps unavoidably, in a defensive crouch in Scotland. “I

What is Britain’s role in the world? And what resources will be devoted to sustaining it? These questions, germane for more than 40 years anyway, have an extra urgency in this New Age of Austerity. Liam Fox is addressing the Scottish Tory conference as I write this. Fox reiterates the urgent need for a post-election Defence Review but says “There is one area however where the basic argument has not changed. There will be a replacement to the submarine-based nuclear deterrent under a future Conservative government.” Dr Fox acknowledges that it’s impossible to make fim predictions for defence spending, but given that he complains that “despite the two wars [Britain

An interesting exchange between Danny Finkelstein and Andrew Cooper, director of Populus in which Mr Cooper addresses public attitudes towards cuts in public spending: In principle, then, there seems to be an acceptance of the need for (inevitability of) some spending cuts.  But three quarters of voters think that some areas of spending should be protected from cuts – with the NHS and schools most prominently mentioned. Focus groups constantly find a deep-seated conviction that great amounts of public spending are wasted – but when pressed people don’t know what exactly these are (and they are, archetypally, other people’s areas of spending rather than one’s own). Aye, that seems about

Actually, Tuesdays are now the best day for the NYT’s op-ed page since in addition to Ross there’s David Brooks. His column today is a good one, making the point that the response to the swine flu outbreak offers a fresh example of the debate Brooks frames as: Do we build centralized global institutions that are strong enough to respond to transnational threats? Or do we rely on diverse and decentralized communities and nation-states? Gordon Brown is, you will be shocked to discover, in the former camp. Brooks, sensibly, puts himself in the latter. This is not, you’ll appreciate, merely a question of how best to deal with an infectios

I think James and Danny Finkelstein are correct. Political considerations trump the need to satisfy the Conservative party’s right-wing. And that means that, regrettably, George Osbourne is probably right not to promise to abolish the new 45% income tax band for the rich. At the very least this should be an aspiration not an immediate priority. But the problem is not so much the 45p band, but the number of people trapped by the existing 40p band. This has been one of gordon Brown’s most successful stealth taxes, drawing more and more middle class voters into his clutches every year. Even this years’ widening of the bands does little to