IEA wonk: Cam speech by a ‘fascist despot’
If you thought the left alone was used to throwing vitriol at David Cameron, you’d be wrong.
Yesterday’s speech by the PM was described as words that could have “been uttered by a fascist despot” by Dr Richard Wellings, deputy editorial director at the Institute for Economic Affairs.
No, really. He wrote:
David Cameron’s conference speech has arguably provided observers with important insights into the ideologies helping to drive coalition policy. Worryingly, there were strong elements of collectivism and egalitarianism in the Prime Minister’s address.
His discussion of “citizenship” was highly collectivist. He spoke of leading the change from “unchecked individualism to national unity and purpose”, a phrase which could easily have been uttered by a fascist despot, while the conference’s theme is “let’s work together in the national interest”. The question we should be interested in is “who checks individualism?” – the state or ourselves individually and as voluntary communities.
Nice to see the IAE taking lessons in political discourse from the US Tea Party movement.
He later fulminates:
However, recent policy decisions suggest that collectivist ideas are proving very influential within the Conservative-led coalition. There is a strong emphasis on redistribution, exemplified by the “fairness” agenda and by decisions to raise capital gains tax and to cut child benefit for higher-rate taxpayers, while raising child tax credit payments to workless households. Last week’s Equality Act imposed significant new costs on private businesses and was imbued with the kind of politically correct “cultural Marxism” that would have made it completely unacceptable to a genuinely conservative administration.
There’s cultural Marxism at the heart of Cameron! Did you hear that lefties – we can all rest easy now.
Read the whole blog post here.
There has been other criticism from the right too, over Cameron’s comments criticising laissez-faire.
Alex Singleton at the Daily Telegraph:
the speech shows an amazing retreat for the politician who just five years ago, in his leadership campaign, called for a “campaign for capitalism”. Then, he said that he wanted “To promote profit. To fight for free trade. To remind, indeed to educate, our citizens about the facts of economic life.” Now, we learnt today, he wants to subsidise middle-class teenagers to go on gap years abroad
David Blackburn at the Spectator:
He attempted to sell the Big Society (third time and no luckier). Then he said, with conviction, ‘I don’t believe in laissez faire.’
Those six words are pure Tory Reform Group, pure Iain Macleod, pure One Nation. He evoked that traditional form of Torysim with a firm description of how his government seeks to empower people as responsible groups not just free individuals.
No one matches the sheer wingnuttery at the IEA though.
Three reasons why the child benefits fiasco is a Tory master-stroke
The Tories right now are laughing all the way to the ballot box. Whether they intended it as such or not, this cut in child benefit for the richer is proving a political masterstroke.
That sounds an extraordinary thing to say, given the sustained attacks they are suffering over it, and the apologies that they are being forced to make.
But consider the following three points:
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Yvette Cooper tops shadow cabinet poll
Yvette Cooper has emerged as the most popular choice for the Labour party shadow cabinet among readers of left-wing blogs.
In a poll carried out jointly by Liberal Conspiracy, Labour List and Left Foot Forward, Ms Cooper was chosen by 93% of people casting their votes. Her husband Ed Balls came second.
Readers were asked to vote in the same way as members of the Parliamentary Labour Party: at least six women and up to 19 candidates in total from the list of 49 Labour MPs who put themselves forward.
Rather than choose who they expected to be in the shadow cabinet, readers were asked to vote for who they wanted to see elected.
All four of Ed Miliband’s cabinet level supporters made the cut: Hilary Benn, Sadiq Khan, John Denham and Peter Hain.
Here are the full results
Yvette Cooper 93%
Ed Balls 86%
Andy Burnham 79%
Hilary Benn 76%
Alan Johnson 72%
Sadiq Khan 65%
Douglas Alexander 64%
John Denham 60%
Ben Bradshaw 59%
Caroline Flint 58%
Tessa Jowell 56%
Diane Abbott 54%
Emily Thornberry 53%
Angela Eagle 53%
Peter Hain 49%
David Lammy 44%
Maria Eagle 42%
Liam Byrne 40%
Jim Murphy 40%
1,033 people voted in the poll.
Official voting for the shadow cabinet elections closes later today at 5pm, with results expected later in the evening.
Poll: charities don’t buy Big Society vision
A Charities Aid Foundation survey says only a minority of charities believe the big society is achievable, even with sufficient funding.
The Third Sector magazine reported this week that less than half of charities surveyed by the Charities Aid Foundation believe that Prime Minister David Cameron’s big society vision will work, even if given sufficient resources.
Forty-six per cent of the 266 CAF charity customers polled in August said they thought the big society ideas were achievable if they were provided with sufficient funds.
The same poll found that two-thirds of charities feared their finances would be hit in the coming year. Of those, 56% expected an increase in costs and 43% believed they would be hit by public sector cuts.
41% predicted a drop in voluntary donations, and 38% said they thought there would be an increase in demand for their services.
Most significantly, just over a fifth of those polled thought government plans for the big society would empower local communities and encourage more people to volunteer.
(via @donpaskini)
How Ed Miliband could respond to child benefits fiasco
This time next week, Ed Miliband will make his debut as Leader of the Opposition at Prime Minister’s Questions.
I wonder if the child benefits fiasco presents an opportunity.
Over the next week, Labour’s team could do a quick piece of policy work refining the government’s proposals to protect the people who are hit hardest by Osborne’s proposals and remove the anomalies where some families on £80,000 will get the benefits and others on £45,000 won’t.
continue reading… »
Telegraph eviscerates Cam on child benefits
Sorry I missed this earlier, but today’s Telegraph leader column is very scathing of David Cameron and George Osborne.
It states:
Clever politics? No, crass and out of touch
Telegraph View: the ham-fisted plan to withdraw child benefit appears to be about political positioning, pure and simple
And that’s just the introduction.
The third paragraph is the most spot on:
The measure, which will save about £1 billion a year, is self-evidently not an urgent element in the Government’s deficit reduction strategy, because it will not be introduced until 2013. So why has it been rushed out now? This appears to be about political positioning, pure and simple. With harsh measures against lower-paid workers imminent – we should learn the future shape of public sector pensions before the end of the week – it was deemed clever politics to take a pre-emptive tilt at higher-rate taxpayers. This is not a grown-up way to conduct welfare reform.
On a rare occasion I can agree with the Telegraph.
No escaping it – the polling looks bad for Ken Livingstone
Yesterday’s ComRes poll for London had bad news for Ken Livingstone’s chances of being elected Mayor of London again. The survey found that 44% of people would vote for Boris again, compared to 35% who would support Ken.
Closing that 9% gap is not an impossible but definitely a monumental task for Ken. The numbers are not artificially depressed by voters who don’t know the candidate well enough (as would have been the case for Oona King, who I didn’t vote for, incidentally), making this all the more harder. Ken is already well known with voters and shifting perceptions will be difficult.
I think all this illustrates a few points.
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Employers say cuts ‘arriving at wrong time’
The economy grew at a reasonable pace in the third quarter but businesses are increasingly alarmed about the prospects for another recession or much weaker growth, according to a closely watched survey of companies.
Growth between July and September looks likely to have been 0.4 to 0.5 per cent, according to polling company Markit, an estimate based on its surveys of purchasing managers in the service, manufacturing and construction sectors.
That is not far from the 0.6 per cent long-run average pace at which the UK has grown, but it is much slower than the 1.2 per cent growth in the second quarter. Markit warned that many companies are worried about spending cuts, with greater detail on the austerity measures due later this month in the government’s spending review.
“There are widespread worries that the economy is losing steam rapidly and that the recovery is at risk,” said Chris Williamson, chief economist at Markit. “Orders are not coming through at anything like their pace before and public sector contracts are being cut. Businesses believe these cuts are arriving at the wrong time.”
Cameron’s marriage tax break shows why child benefits cut was ideological
Yesterday was a day of flipping and flopping over what to do about the (surprisingly unanticipated) response to George Osborne’s decision to stop child benefit being universal.
The government has a lot of questions to answer about how it might handle proposals which will clearly have many unintended consequences – introducing the highest marginal tax rates yet seen, disincentivising marriage by introducing big couple penalties, and all sorts of other things the government are meant to against. (I list ten policy headaches over at Left Foot Forward).
And that’s aside from the politics of the move – where the “Angry Middle” of the Mail and Express make common causes with the high Tory Telegraph and Labour Mirror to demonstrate the Fabian case that progressive universalism will be defended much more robustly than narrowly targetted poverty strategies.
Instead, they have chosen to distract attention from the worst-designed policy they have come up with in government, by returning to an even stranger policy: the marriage tax break.
continue reading… »
The very un-conservative George Osborne
Yesterday George Osborne announced some big changes.
A cap system that will reduce income, housing and council tax benefit is going to affect a lot of people’s lives. You can read various good analyses here, here, here, here and here. Personally, I’m still reeling from the extent of Osborne’s assault on those receiving state support, disgusted at his fig-leaf excuses about preventing people seeing benefits as a “lifestyle choice”.
But one thing strikes me about these reforms: how cavalier and unconservative the Conservative Party is now being.
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