The Sunday Times reports that David Cameron – the newly elected leader of the Tories (well… ‘new’ – last year) – has to provide some clarity. People, by now, know what the Tories, under his leadership, are against but both politicians and voters, are now urging Cameron to make clear what it is he favors (and don’t even get me started about Pelosi’s empty “100 hours plan“. Never saw such a ridiculous thing in my life. As I commented: “Does she want to raise taxes to pay for improving education or health care? What does she plan on doing against the ridiculous deficit? “Pay as you go”. Pff. The question is, how the heck does she plan on ‘going’?” and “she should be embarrassed” and “what plan?? Am I the only one noticing that she said just about… wait.. let me think… nothing? Of course she said some good things, but those things are mostly ‘normal’ or should at least be considered as such. If I were American, my questions to her and the Democrats would be: “well, that sounds mighty fine, now please tell me what you are planning on doing after those first 100 hours? Do you plan on doing something to improve health care? Education? (Alternative) energy? What about the environment?
How does she plan on encouraging entrepreneurship? How does she plan on handling Iraq? How does she plan on dealing with terrorism? How does she…. This was more a TV add than anything even closely resembling a plan.
I am trying to read something lasting, something serious and something very telling into it… but I can’t. It’s empty. Throw some nice phrases into there and hoppakeey, you’ve got yourself a ‘plan'”).
“The leadership has done a good job of saying what the Conservatives are not now for,” said Lord Blackwell, former head of the Downing Street policy unit, now chairman of the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS). “But it is time for the other side of the coin — the principles the party is for and the policies that flow from them.”
And this might prove to cause trouble:
For Cameron this is a potential nightmare. The Conservative party is no longer riven with ideological division in the public way it once was, but the “mods” and “rockers” are still there, tooled up and ready to rumble. Indeed some suspect that the peace exists precisely because Cameron has steered clear of making tough ideological pronouncements.
Amassed to the right of him there are those who have never forgiven the party for dumping Margaret Thatcher — a group that one moderniser calls “the head-banging Europhobic tax-cutters”. They want to see a flash of the old, a firm commitment to reducing taxes and an end to the “namby-pamby” politics of equal rights and work-life balance.
On the other side are the “über-Cameroons”, metropolitan-based modernisers who want their leader to go further in burying his party’s unpopular past and set out a more principled compassionate agenda. They value social workers above tax cuts and cheered Cameron’s recent apology to Nelson Mandela on behalf of the party for having once branded him a terrorist.
More:
Much more troublesome is Blackwell and the growing gang on the right who will demand that Cameron demonstrate some genuine substance in Bournemouth. Blackwell will fire the opening salvo today with the publication of the CPS’s own manifesto for change. The centrepiece is a call for tax cuts, including scrapping inheritance tax, capital gains tax and increasing the level at which people begin to pay the basic rate of income tax.
“Tax cuts are an economic necessity,” he said. “It is all part of declaring what the party stands for — limiting the size of the state, encouraging enterprise and supporting families.”
More groups will publish their own ideas about tax cuts: the Tacherites (No Turning Back Group) will publish a pamphlet calling for severe tax cuts. Importantly, this pamphlet has the support of 54 Tory MP’s.
The Tax Reform Commission – headed by Lord Forsyth – will publish a report which will, like the groups mentioned above, call for tax cuts as well -> up to £19.5 billion.
These groups, of course, are all quite far to the right. To the left other groups are pushing Cameron to take a quite different approach. They want Cameron to ‘address’ problems like “depression, diabetes, Aids, those coping with terminal illness, and the 60,000 children in care.”
These Tories are doing something highly important: they are pushing their own leader to make his exact plans clear: even when that pressure might hurt the Tories as a whole. In short, they favor honesty and openness over mere criticism that does not really offer an alternative.
As I see it, GB desperately needs a right of center PM / government. Some of England’s biggest (future) problems are the economy and integration. Well, perhaps I should say the lack of integration. England and France are the two European countries with the largest integration problems. Especially England, though, harbors quite some extremists who are able to influence lots of individual, young, Muslims.
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