Barack Obama had a tune…

Bill Clinton had a tune…

Tony had a tune… (sorry!)

And Maggie had loads… (not that she would have wanted them)

But as for Dave, there doesn’t seem to be anything on the horizon.

Okay, so there are a few obvious contenders, like this…

And Jarvis nails its pretty well, of course…

Sadly, there isn’t a video of Frank Zappa’s cover of The Clovers’ doo-wop classic ‘Cocksucker’s Ball’ so we’ll have to make do the original in honour of D-Cam’s days as a Bullingdon Boy… (definitely NSFW audio)

And I’ve always thought this one by the Beatles fits pretty well…

Although its possible that Beau Bo’s come closest so far to capturing the essence of the Tories…

Tell you what. Let’s throw this one open to the floor… can you think of a better theme tune for D-Cam than any of these?

“We need a message that actually it is not a very good idea to become a single mum at 14. [It is] against the law to get pregnant at 14. How many kids get prosecuted for having underage sex? Virtually none. Where are the consequences of breaking the law and having irresponsible underage sex? There aren’t any.”

So, The Guardian asked, should there be prosecutions?

“We need to be tougher. Without sounding horribly judgmental, it is not a good idea to be a mum at 14. You are too young, throwing away your childhood and prospects of developing a career.”

Without sounding horribly judgmental, anybody who thinks that there are no consequences to getting pregnant, and that a criminal record promotes a happy childhood and helps develop a healthy career, is a Platinum Imbecile.

Platinum Imbecility aside, there’s something to note about the bizarre universe Mr Loughton resides in: girls get pregnant by magic.

In the universe I inhabit, pregnancy outside of IVF clinics requires two people, male and female. Assuming that most teenage girls are having sex with teenage boys, the preoccupation with “teenage mothers” is thus striking. Why don’t we hear more about “teenage fathers”?

Sadly it’s not just idiotic Tories that insist on believing that Britain’s teenage girls are experiencing immaculate conceptions. Idiotic Labour MPs are possessed of this bizarre mysticism too. Check out this obnoxious nonsense from (alleged) Labour MP Tom Harris. Teenage mothers are the problem, he shrieks. But what about the boys who are getting them (if you’ll pardon my French) up the duff? Not a word about them.

Things become especially bizarre when we recall research that teenage motherhood can be an overwhelmingly positive experience. It’s just not the case that teenage motherhood necessarily results in packs of feral youths roaming the streets, gleefully breaking Britain. The problem is not with teenage motherhood, it’s with poor parenting. And that can happen whatever age the parents are. A sensible attitude means developing strategies to aid parents in difficult circumstances, not obsessing about the parents’ ages and stigmatising them accordingly.

But you know what? I have no problem with teenagers having sex – and even getting pregnant – per se. There, I said it. Scandalous. But in my opinion, Teenagers Having Sex is only a problem if, for example, a particular teenager is personally not ready for the “consequences” of sex. Say because they are pressured into it, and find the experience traumatic. Or because they end up with an unwanted pregnancy.

But these qualifications are crucial. Sex is not bad per se, even for teenagers. Sex is bad when it’s attached to undesirable things, whatever they happen to be. Perhaps the risks of “bad things” is higher for teenagers. Maybe. But even then, a sensible approach is to make judgements using evidence, and often on a case-by-case basis. What’s silly is to condemn all teenage sex just because it’s teenage sex. There is no reason teenagers can’t have sex with no negative consequences whatsoever. The sex act itself is not the problem. It’s the baggage which is or isn’t attached that’s important.

Which brings us to an interesting point. Our society exhibits a bizarre hysteria about teenage sex. Most especially, there is an overwhelming hysteria about teenage girls having sex. We live in a world of paradox. Advertising, music videos, film and TV push relentless images of sexual availability in young females. Teenage girls are relentlessly encouraged to look available and attractive. Yet actual sexual activity by teenage females is viciously scorned and stigmatised. Adolescent girls are to look and act as though they are sexually available – but should they ever actually be sexually active and available, they earn the labels of slut and slag. (Boys, of course, are players and studs – a significant attitudinal difference, I would suggest).

It’s the bizarre, confused, quasi-Victorian mania about female sex and sexuality that largely animates Loughton and Harris. The blunt horror of even thinking about teenage girls having sex so overwhelms them that they forget that girls do not have sex alone. Teen mothers are vilified by Harris, while Loughton demands they suffer criminal penalties. The question of whether teenage fathers bear responsibility, or are worthy of our extreme moral disdain, or even our attention, never makes it onto their radars. That their attitudes are the norm tells us something important about our society.

Nadine Dorries, who has repeatedly declined to disclose the location of the property, was paid the allowances on the basis that she needed two homes to work in both London and her Mid Bedfordshire seat.

Mrs Dorries is under investigation by John Lyon, the parliamentary commissioner for standards, who may recommend that she repay public funds received for unjustified claims.

MPs are entitled to claim back “second home” expenses that were “necessarily incurred in staying overnight away from their main home for the purpose of performing their parliamentary duties”.

Most designate a constituency house as their “main home” and bill taxpayers for a flat close to Westminster, where they can stay the night after working in Parliament.

Yet in a highly unusual arrangement, Mrs Dorries tells Commons officials that her “main home” is a one-bedroomed lodge-keeper’s cottage in a small Cotswold village, 90 miles away from Parliament and 55 miles from her constituency.

This allows her to claim “second home” allowances for her family house in her constituency, where neighbours have stated that she spent a significant amount of her time.

In all she has claimed £60,524 since 2006. She used the money to pay the house’s £18,000-a-year rent, as well as council tax and other domestic bills. She recently moved into a bigger farmhouse half a mile away.

—-

What a wonderful job we’re doing of keeping Nadine in the lifestyle to which she thinks she’s entitled.

The notes were taken at a recent seminar organised by the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship (SWSF), an offshoot of the Anthroposophical Society, which exists to promote the occult philosophies of the German mystic Rudolf Steiner, and also suggest that a newly registered educational charity with close ties to the Conservative Party may be actively engaged in the promotion of Conservative education policy in such a way as to breach the Charity Commission’s regulations on charity involvement in political activity.

The meeting, which took place last November, was described as a ‘pre-election seminar about possible developments in the state funding opportunity for Steiner Schools’ and included seminars with Sam Freedman, the head of Policy Exchange’s education unit and a current advisor to Shadow Education Minister, Michael Gove, and Rachel Wolf, the Founder/Director of the New Schools Network and former education advisor to the Conservative Party.

According to the notes we’ve obtained, which were taken at the meeting, Wolf told SWSF members, during a session billed as ‘If the Conservatives win the election…” that her organisation performed three functions;

a) to give guidance to certain schools looking to become state funded;

b) to communicate the benefits of the [Conservative Party] policy being discussed today;

c) to research the policy by looking at the experience of schools in the UK and abroad that are involved in similar state funding arrangements

Wolf’s organisation, was incorporated in July 2009 and granted charitable status shortly afterwards (October 2009) with the objective of promoting “the creation of maintained charitable schools (where there is a need) with a view to improving educational opportunities for young people and in particular those with necessitous circumstances”. However, item b) on the list can easily, and legitimately, be construed as suggesting that Wolf and/or her organisation could also be considered to working to an unstated and undisclosed non-charitable objective of furthering the policy aims of the Conservative Party, a practice that is not permitted under charity law.

It is also evident that the existing Steiner Schools network, which currently draws the vast majority of its pupils from white middle-class families, is something of a mismatch with NSN’s stated objective of setting up new schools for pupils with necessitous circumstances.

Despite their obvious enthusiasm for the possibility of using the existing Steiner network as a quick win for their education policy, the Tories are also extremely wary of the network’s links to the Anthroposophical Society and occult philosophies of its founder, Rudolf Steiner, and in particular of Steiner’s theory of racial evolution through reincarnation which suggested that human evolve upward through the races until their reach the apex of human evolution as a blond, blue-eyed Aryan.

When asked if he could foresee any particular problems with Steiner schools receiving state funding, Tory education advisor Sam Freedman gave this [verbatim] response:

“Not in terms of the way we want to legislate, but, I mean I’m sure this is something that you all know about anyway, there’s a big PR issue, and if a lot of Steiner schools open quite quickly in the state sector, I mean I’ve been, erm, I’ve had all sorts of people writing to me just because they found out that I was coming to this meeting. Attacking. Attacking the Steiner Schools… Anonymously. Through social networking. People find out who you are, find out your account number and bombard you with articles, negative articles… This was pointing out all the things they think are wrong with Steiner movement, link after link after link. And that’s just from me coming to this meeting, so you have to be aware, well I know you’ll all be aware anyway, but this will be on a much, much bigger scale.”

The discussion went on to two specific PR issues 1) Accounts from parents who are or have been unhappy with the Steiner schooling system and those that have had negative experiences associated with the schools, and 2) the writings of Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy, of which the latter was though to present the greatest difficulties. Freedman then suggested that it was important that the schools should “explain to people quite strongly that they are not teaching what he [Rudolf Steiner] said” before likening the situation to the fact that not all Christians believe every word of the Bible.

This may, however, prove to be easier said than done.

One observer at the meeting asked Freedman whether or not a Conservative government would consider intervening with Steiner teacher training to ensure that the racist aspects of Steiner’s writings would not be included, to which Freedman responded to this question by stating that if the issue becomes a big PR problem for Steiner schools, and the state is funding those schools, then it will become a big PR problem for the state. He then suggested that the schools should seek to nip any potential problems with their teacher training in the bud, because any pressure on ministers from negative PR was likely to be problematic for the school, at which point the SWSF were offered free media training, by Rachel Wolf, to help them deal with the ‘PR issues’.

It was not, however, until the meeting’s afternoon session, which neither Freedman nor Wolf attended, that the full scope of the SWSF’s ‘PR Issues’ were made clear.

During that session, which was led by Emma Craigie, the eldest daughter of William Rees-Mogg and sister of ToryPPCs Jacob and Annunziata Rees-Moog -  it was suggested that the Steiner Schools Fellowship should give a clear and categorical rebuttal of the racist aspects of Steiner’s work and that clear statements should be issued to the effect that the Fellowship does not  human beings evolve through the races or that blond hair bestows intelligence, etc…”. However, the meeting also noted that it would be difficult to rebut Steiner’s occult beliefs generally because ‘many people throughout the Steiner schools system, especially teachers, strongly support many aspects of that belief system” and it was felt that many of these teachers would refuse to play ball with the SWSF’s PR strategy.

The notes also indicate that the SWSF members who attended the meeting were left with the clear impression that any backing from a future Tory government would also include help with any negative press:

It was also stated that it would be important for the Steiner schools Fellowship to make sure that they have a clear PR message to convey to the politicians themselves. This would reassure the politicians that the negative criticisms aimed at the schools are not justified, and if there were a public outcry about the schools, the politicians would themselves be in a position to refute the claims. Indeed, there would be a government PR machine available to help refute the claims.

None of this addresses any of the major issues that providing state funding to Steiner schools would raise, particularly in regards to the teaching of science, where Steiner’s bizarre pseudoscientific outlook is heavily favoured over the teaching of the scientific method and well-established scientific ideas to the extent that, less than two years ago, Stockholm University chose to pull out of providing Steiner-Waldorf teacher training courses after concluding that the course’s science curriculum contained ‘too much myth and too little fact’.

Bringing Steiner schools fully into the state education system would fly squarely in the face of Shadow Education Minister Michael Gove’s public statements on the importance of returning state schools to a more ‘traditional’ form of education and, particularly, on the value he professes to place on the natural sciences. Here, he recently suggested that the curriculum should, in future, be shaped by, amongst others, the eminent astronomer Lord Rees and the doctor and scientist Lord Winston, neither of whom would be likely to countenance the incorporation of Steiner’s ideas in the curriculum.

It would also make a complete mockery of David Cameron’s publicly expressed aspiration of making teaching ‘brazenly elitist’ by restricting access to teaching to only the best candidates, i.e. those graduating from a university with a minimum of a 2:2.

At the present time, many of those teaching in Steiner schools lack any kind of degree level qualification, least of all a teaching qualification, and until it ceased any further recruitment in 2009, the only degree level course in Steiner education on offer in the UK, at the University of Plymouth, required only two E’s at A level for entry onto the course. While the university is now looking at the possibility of incorporating a Steiner option in its BA course in Education Studies it seems unlikely that this will improve matters at all.  Our own analysis of the reading list given to students attending the existing Steiner course, for example, showed the existing course to be overwhelmingly dominated by the works of Steiner and other members of the Anthroposophical movement.

Of the ‘science’ textbooks on that list, only Gray’s Anatomy could legitimately be consider to belong to the scientific mainstream.

Although the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship routinely reject any suggestion that Anthroposophy, Steiner’s occult belief system, is being taught in Steiner schools, the overwhelming focus on Anthroposophical texts in the training of Steiner teachers suggest that this is, at best, a wholly naïve view of the reality of Steiner education. Open discussion of Anthroposophy may well be frowned upon to the extent that there are well-documented cases of parents being asked to remove their child from Steiner school after asking teachers too many awkward questions, but this does not mean that pupils attending these schools are not being quietly exposed to Steiner’s occult beliefs, particularly in those schools that offer secondary as well as primary education.

What these schools practice is not ‘brainwashing’ in the conventional sense of the term.

Rather the educational environment that schools provide is designed foster a very particular outlook, one paves the way for the later inculcation of Steiner’s belief system in those students who show themselves to be receptive to Anthroposophical ideas once they become adults. This process may be one of slow acclimatisation rather than overt indoctrination and, therefore, appear to lack any of the threatening connotations usually associated with cult/occult activity but the outcome for those who do fully absorb the carefully wrought atmosphere of these schools is ultimately the same.

The real issue that Steiner schools need to address here is, consequently, not that of getting out the right kind of PR and engaging in media charm offensives but that of making a clear and unequivocal commitment to teaching children to understand the real world rather than the delusions of a long discredited German mystic and his latter-day acolytes.

—–

Credit is due here to the UK Anthroposophy blog for publishing the full notes of this meeting, a PDF copy of which I’ve also uploaded here for the convenience of our own readers.

As per the statement made by UK Anthroposophy, these notes were taken at a publicly advertised meeting under conditions in which there was, to the best of my knowledge, no formal or informal ‘code of confidentiality’ and raise issue in which there is, so far as I’m concern, a legitimate public interest.

Let’s leave aside the long list of differences (technical, fiscal, substantial, ethical, practical, etc) between the two types of “donations”. Let’s leave aside “solemn and binding” promises.

The best way to gauge weight and influence as carried by Lord Ashcroft vs the Unions is to check the relationship between donors and political parties.

Not a single senior Tory has publicly said a bad thing against the Belize-based tycoon. They said a lot of things, but nothing bad. And how could they, given that the Baron has pumped around £5m into Tory coffers?

Now look instead at how Labour is actively laying into Unite the Union in the middle of a delicate industrial dispute with British Airways.

There’s a trade union “proudly” handing around £3.6m a year to the Labour Party and publicly announcing that they made “tens of thousands of calls” to their members urging them to vote Labour at the forthcoming elections.

So what does the Labour Party do in return?

Public support would be too much, so forget that. How about neutrality and balance in the midst of the biggest industrial dispute of the year so far, that is the British Airways strike?

Fat chance. First, Transport Secretary Lord Adonis echoed BA boss as he called the strike “totally unjustified”. “I absolutely deplore the strike”, the unelected Baron told the BBC’s Andrew Marr, adding that “it poses a threat” to the future of BA.

But Adonis went further. Sounding like your average Daily Mail column, he warned that “passengers should not be held to ransom by [Unite]“.

Yesterday Gordon Brown joined in. Again, he slammed the strike as “deplorable and unjustified”. Can you imagine David Cameron or George Osborne using those words against their biggest donor?

For 13 years, Britain’s unions have acted like a battered dog who keeps going back to its tormentor.

With few exceptions, like the Fire Brigade Union (which, to their honour, disaffiliated in 2004), the unions keep getting the shit kicked out of them by the Party but then always crawl back, cheque in hand, to Master Labour.

All the recent talk about whether or not British troops have been given the equipment they need reflects a fundamental problem in British politics: all of the main parties accept Britain’s intervention in Afghanistan, and, to a lesser extent, Iraq. William Hague’s speech gives every indication that a Tory government will continue, and risk expanding, Britain’s military presence abroad.

Hague, unsurprisingly, also repeats the meme about Britain’s credit rating being a worry, citing the ‘recent’ Fitch warning about the loss of the triple-A rating. I say ‘recent’ because Fitch has been carping about this since last year, so a new press release about it is hardly serious news. What makes this interesting is that Hague is all about the deficit reduction…and yet continuously talks up “Britain’s role” abroad.

With what equipment, in this Tory-led deficit-free utopia? Spitballs and paper aeroplanes?

Far better, surely, that Britain does step back from foreign engagements. Getting rid of the new naval carriers and the nuclear deterrent are the first steps, but cutting back the armed forces drastically should be a high priority all across the board, not just with the latest toys.

Contra the moralising about what equipment the troops did and didn’t get in Afghanistan or Iraq, it isn’t spending issues which have caused problems. Ask the Americans, who have spent nearly US $1 trillion, compared to the piffling billions of the United Kingdom. It is being there in the first place, when the government was warned of the consequences, creating conditions that exacerbated ‘terrorism’ until now it threatens nearby states.

It’s not the contradiction of a pushy but low-spending Britain that makes the clearest impression, however. It’s the interpretation of economic performance as merely a gateway to Britain being able to punch its weight in ‘world affairs’, rather than both economic performance and that weight in world affairs being tools to securing jobs, homes, healthcare and education at home.

In essence, this is high politics at its worst – talk of leaders and prestige, of power and the military rather than jobs and homes. Interestingly, Hague insinuates a future Tory government is prepared to invest in the military, to build new industries…but what about investment in higher education and research for the same purposes?

At the Times Higher Education debate back in February, Tory David Willetts was all about the euphemistic “rebalancing” of higher education, with more focus on students, and no reversals of Labour’s cuts to the teaching block grants, capital budgets or research. Hence Labour won the vote, at the end of the day, on which party had the best policy.

So we return to a bonfire of regulations and taxes, to encourage private investment to come to the UK, to shoulder the burden which the Tory state wants to shed. But of course there’s no talk of retreating public services, and when there is, it’ll be blamed not on Tory economic orthodoxy but on the failures of the Labour government. Which, in this hypothetical, future rhetorical encounter, will no doubt have been ‘in hock to the unions’.

But hey, don’t worry! Though people may want for their basic needs, our army will still be free to kill johnny foreigner when he doesn’t do as ordered.

Trevor McDonald Meets David Cameron attracted nearly 1.7 million viewers on ITV1 last night, Sunday 14 March – less than half the audience for Gordon Brown’s interview with Piers Morgan on the same network last month.

The Conservative leader opted to submit to a fly-on-the-wall documentary rather than an interview, with McDonald and the cameras following him at work and at home.

ITV1’s resulting 60-minute documentary attracted 1.689 million viewers and a 10.8% share from 10.15pm, according to unofficial overnights.

This compared with Morgan’s interview with Brown, seen by 4.2 million viewers, a 22.7% share, when it screened in the same Sunday-night slot on 14 February.

If that weren’t bad enough, the Guardian are also reporting that Cameron was well beaten in the ratings by both Match of the Day 2, on which the featured games were Man Utd v Fulham and Sunderland v Man City, and by a repeat of episode three of Great British Railway Journeys, which saw Michael Portillo travelling from Todmorden to York with a trip on the Embsey and Bolton Abbey Steam Railway thrown in for good measure.

What else can you say but…

…Mwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

Crewe and Nantwich is only one of almost 650 constituencies on the political map of the UK. But the by-election there in May 2008 holds important lessons for the upcoming General Election.

Following the death of Gwyneth Dunwoody, Labour were between the proverbial rock and hard place: whether they called a snap by-election, or played a longer game, the Government’s unpopularity put them at a disadvantage. Moreover, they needed to select a candidate, and quickly.

Both Tory and Lib Dem already had candidates in place. Edward Timpson was, apparently, not well regarded by Tory HQ, but the crucial and sensible decision was made by Eric Pickles, chosen to manage the campaign, to stand by him. The Lib Dems, seemingly in a moment of panic, ditched their man in favour of Elizabeth Shenton, who then had start over with local activists. This gave the Tories a head start.

Pickles then managed expectations well, the press were fed stories of a “rock solid working class seat”, which could be easily disproved by a trip out to Nantwich – solidly Tory – or to outlying villages, and those new housing developments full of potential swing voters. But during the campaign, most of the assembled hackery saw little more than the area between Crewe station and the town centre, and so bought into the Tories’ well crafted myth.

Surprisingly, the media did little analysis on past elections, which would have disproved the myth of the working class stronghold. The last time a majority Tory Government was returned – in 1992 – Dunwoody’s majority was under 2,700. There had been only one instance of a five figure majority, that in 1997: then, the Tories had been caught in a perfect storm, unpopular nationally and disliked locally after the rail sell-offs caused delays in new train orders and the Works had to lay off staff.

Labour selected Dunwoody’s daughter Tamsin to fight the seat. Was this a good or bad thing? My take is that it had no bearing on the outcome. I reckon she was the best candidate, but Timpson’s shortcomings – he’s not a natural talker and doesn’t do charisma – were managed by Pickles guiding and coaching him, making sure he got his talking points over. It would be different in a General Election campaign, where the luxury of a personal minder would be missing, but that would be to miss the point. The matter at hand was winning the by-election.

The Tories were allowed to make the running from the start, and their focus was incessantly negative, and personal towards the PM. They stuck to this tack and their discipline held firm. Labour’s attempts to show Tamsin Dunwoody in a positive light made little impact. Elsewhere, Elizabeth Shenton was having difficulty making herself heard, despite Vince Cable being ever present.

The saturation media coverage, and the dispatch of every well known politician to Crewe and Nantwich, also had little additional impact: on one Saturday in mid-campaign, Simon Hughes turned up to assist Ms Shenton, while earlier, Jack Straw had brought his soap box to Crewe town centre, and took questions from all comers, but they need not have bothered. The same could be said of the “love bombing” of often bewildered shoppers in Asda, who for a moment were considered important enough to have even “Dave” Cameron pack their shopping. The parties’ efforts cancelled each other out.

Was the “Tory Toff” line wrong? Maybe, given that Timpson, although part of the shoe repair dynasty, is not a man of ostentatious wealth. But Labour make Cameron visibly uncomfortable whenever he is the target of such attacks, so the idea that this contest going the way of the Tories would stop them is groundless.

One controversy was generated by a Labour campaign leaflet, which Pickles called out as “racist”. I saw the offending flyer – the contentious part was the policy of ID cards for foreign nationals – and sent it on its way. Was it racist? I think not. Clumsy maybe, and more likely a policy cut and paste job. But racist it had been called, and once more the Tory discipline held: all those from the party venturing an opinion on the matter toed the line. Pickles is supposedly known for his “anti racism”, but on this occasion it seemed more a case of “accusing the opposition of racism at a time likely to cause them maximum damage, and keeping up the attack in order to prevent them effectively rebutting the accusation”. Given his role in the upcoming General Election campaign, look for that one to be wheeled out again.

The Tories then completed their mission by keeping up the campaigning until polling day. Labour did not. On the last Saturday, I spoke with a Labour supporter who assured me that they would return to get out the vote, but later that same day, a conversation with the campaign HQ on Nantwich Road left me with the impression they had given up. So it was: the evening of polling day was a quiet one in what I call “Redbrick Crewe”, the area that returns Labour and Lib Dem councillors. Labour had already admitted defeat: the Tory majority therefore flattered Timpson.

What will happen at the General Election? Well, unless the Tories score a substantial swing, Timpson will be unseated. David Williams, his next Labour opponent, has the presence and the patter: he is a natural politician. Edward Timpson will have served his purpose.

Of course he is, in fact he doesn’t go anything like far enough in his accusations. Not only are the Tories wilfully misrepresenting the evidence provided by the police recorded crime statistics, but they are also pursuing a deliberate and wholly mendacious strategy of seeking to undermine public confidence in the British Crime Survey, a point that Johnson has, as yet, failed to put over forcefully enough.

As evidence, let’s refer back to an article by the Shadow Justice Minister, Dominic Grieve, which was published by the Telegraph in January 2009 under the title ‘Fiddling statistics is no way to restore public confidence”.  In the article, Grieve makes the following claims about the British Crime Survey.

The BCS is an obviously poor measure of violent crime. It does not count homicide offences, rape and multiple assaults. It also excludes some of the most vulnerable victims of violence, including: the homeless, elderly people in care homes, students in digs and – until this year – all children. In fact, we know that police recorded violent crime has nearly doubled since 1997.

Grieve’s suggestion that the BCS is an ‘obviously poor measure of violent crime’ because it does not count homicide offences is as risible as it is boneheaded. The clue here is in the name, British Crime Survey, which explains precisely why it doesn’t count homicide offences – you need to be alive in order to complete the survey form. In any case, homicides accounted for only 662 of the 2.1 million violent offences that the BCS estimated as having taken place in 2008/9, a mere 0.03 percent of the total number of offences.

The claim that the British Crime Survey does not count rape offences and, by extension, other sexual offences, is patently untrue. Although these offences are not covered by the main survey, a voluntary self-completion questionnaire has been used to estimate the prevalence of rape since 2003, with the evidence published annually in a supplementary volume (pdf) to the main “Crime in England and Wales” report. This volume also covers homicides (using police recorded crime statistics), firearms offences and other types of intimate violence.

Far from omitting rape, the British Crime Survey is the only regular source of evidence for the actual prevalence of both sexual offences and domestic violence, both of which we know to be massively under-reported in police recorded crime statistics. It is also the only regular source of evidence for the prevalence of repeat/multiple victimisation across a broad range of offences, from violent crimes to vandalism and criminal damage, contrary to Grieve’s assertion that multiple assaults are no included i the BCS figures.

As regards Grieve’s list of excluded and ‘most vulnerable’ victims, the background to these omissions and to the decision to include children in future surveys while continuing to exclude residents of communal establishments, i.e. hostels, nursing and care homes and university halls of residence was covered is some detail in a research report that was published well before Grieve’s article saw the light of day.

The report notes that communal establishments house only 2.1% of the resident population of England and Wales, a little over two-thirds of which are accounted for care/nursing homes and university halls of residence. It also covers the logistical difficulties and disproportionately high costs associated with surveying this segment of the population before noting that these far outweigh the potential benefits of extending the survey to these groups or, indeed, the risk of any biases associated with the omission. As populations go, the numbers residing in communal establishments are too small, relative to other potential sources of bias, such as measurement error and non-response rates, to have any significant impact on the validity of survey as a whole. If the prevalence of crime is these communal residences were double that of the private households it is estimated that this would add no more than a half a percentage point to current victimisation rates.

Finally, the reference to the near doubling of police recorded violent crime is one that we already know that to be untrue.

What Grieve did here was make the same error for which his successor as Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Grayling, was recently torn a new orifice by the UK Statistics Authority, leading to an attempt, this week, to partially rebut that criticism with a revised ‘study’ of the police recorded crime statistics that has been no less risible or mendacious than Grieve’s earlier attempt to discredit the BCS.

As was widely reported by even sympathetic media titles, including the Telegraph and the Daily Mail, Grayling refused to publish the data to back up his claim that crime had risen by 44% under Labour, and we know that this refusal stems from the fact that there is no new study, as confirmed by Shamik Das’s conversation with a spokeswoman for the House of Commons Library.

“I’m afraid I cannot send you the information you require, it was an individual request for information from a member. I can’t even tell you who that member is because it was a confidential request, though it’s pretty obvious who it was.

“In any case, it’s not a study at all, just some answers to a request from a member.”

Further digging suggests that what Grayling  actually obtained from the House of Commons Library was this report, published in October 2008, on changes in crime reporting practices, which makes for some very interesting reading, not least in terms of the clear reference to another recent (2008) example of deliberate Tory misrepresentation of a change in the police recording standards.

The report also provides a very interesting piece of information that does much to put the Tory’s longstanding interest in the accuracy of crime statistics into its proper perspective. In April 1998, a little under a year after Labour come to power, the Home Office introduced its first raft of major changes to the counting rules that the Police were expected to work to when recording the number of crimes reported to them.

Putting these new rules in place led to a 118% increase in the amount of violent crime recorded in the official police recorded crime statistics compared to the previous year, a year in which police recorded crime statistics were compiled to standards set out by the previous Tory government.

[Quick literary note - the title of this post is a deliberate play on a line in Tennessee William's 'Cat on Hot Tin Roof', hence the bout of unorthodox spelling]

UPDATE

It appears that the House of Commons Library has now published the actual briefing that Chris Grayling requested, which appears to be not too much more than a summary of the October 2008 report.

It does, however, state unequivocally that:

…police recorded crime is not viewed as a reliable indicator of trends as the number of offences recorded can be affected by various factors.

And, more importantly…

Because of the implementation of the NCRS the published recorded crime data should only be compared from 2002/03. Even when using this data it should be noted that the impact of the NCRS implementation was not confined only to 2002/03 and that increased levels of NCRS compliance across police forces in subsequent years will have affected crime recording.

To borrow a line from the Tory’s maths tsar, Lady Vordermort, it appears that the House of Commons Library has done a fine job of consolidating all of Grayling’s manifest incompetence and mendacity into a single, easily manageable, report.

Progressive conservatism, a project by Demos and led by Max Wind-Cowie, rolls with this contingent, and like the Red tory Philip Blond, is avowedly anti-Thatcherite with regards to an embrace of greed and yuppie idolatry.

At a time when industrial plants are closing down, there are massive job losses, such as the current events in Middlesbrough with the Corus steel factory, with little that Labour can do about it – even if Peter Mandelson, First Secretary of State,Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, had acted a little sooner – and by disavowing Thatcher (whose image is synonymous with factory closures) a new generation of Tories seek to throw off their nasty party image.

Despite what some on the right have called Cameron’s lefty language on community empowerment, there is nothing inherently different in the new emergence of co-operative theory and capitalism, in fact even the LRC document cited above on common ownership actively endorses competition among worker owned industries so as to increase ingenuity and innovation. Perhaps it is less that the right are moving to the left, and that the left are moving to a new capitalism.

Progressive conservatism most definitely seeks to save capitalism, but on the way hopes to replace what it sees as a crippling (and basically laziness promoting) benefits system with a recapitalisation programme – with the idea that if capitalism – in a slight modification of those famous words by Winston Churchill – is the worst form of economic system, except for all the others, should the poor be destined to poverty in the duration?

However, of course, problems arise from within the progressive conservative programme. Firstly, a charge that Wind-Cowie has on the way our benefits system is operated is that the state decides what money one deserves, and by this way decides what that individual or household should do with the money (in the form of housing benefit, for example). This won’t do for progressive conservatism. The poor, on their way to being recapitalised, should be given vouchers to ’save and to accrue assets’ (p.21). But this can only work if the state promotes an ideal for what people do with their income support. Now, I’m sure that Wind-Cowie isn’t against people who need a sum of money be provided for their living arrangement, what his main anxiety is that the state too much decides what income support is to go towards, but I’d say this is thoroughly a better tailored system than assets – cynically I’d say there is little difference in the two other than the fact that one has to hope their assets grow in order that that person be able to pay the gas that month.

Another problem is the problem of choice. The document states

“It is wrong that money that is designated for individuals’ use – because of need, illness or entitlement – is spent at the discretion of the state and not of the person.”

This is in a part of the document that seeks to revolutionise housing benefit for the better, saying that the government should not be subsidising landlords. A noble sounding, real progressive element, right? But this as a mode of choice falls well short. The option, when the state no longer subsidises housing benefit in the way we know now, is for the government to instead give the individual the choice – which is to subsidise the landlord! It would seem on reflection that the best that the progressive conservatives can do is not give straight to the landlord himself, but give you the choice of whether to pay him or not, which if you want to keep your house or flat, you will have to. No choice there then. Which is not directly the Tories’ fault – but it does nullify their claim to change.

The progressive conservatives will not change the system, they will only trivialise it. Futile attempts to promote the Singaporean system in the UK (p. 34 - though we know this is a false analogy), the illusion of choice in housing benefits, and the option of assets instead of a tailored benefits system – without the underlying patronisation that runs throughout, suggesting that benefits are for, and only promote, laziness – are all part of their master plan.

Andrew Lansley has recently written about the main Conservative health policies. He justifies his policy to privatise parts of the NHS using the following statement about productivity:

“we can not go on seeing productivity fall in our public services, just as it rises in the private sector”

But if we look at productivity in healthcare, the NHS is actually more efficient than the private sector.

In healthcare all work carried out must be at the highest quality, and a much higher proportion of resources must be invested in quality in healthcare than in manufacturing. When it comes to productivity, public services present a problem because the outputs cannot usually be expressed in monetary terms.

The ONS get around this issue by measuring the change in productivity rather than the the absolute measure of productivity:

“the change in health care productivity is estimated by dividing the index of health care outputs by the index of health care inputs, using volume measures”

During the ten year period, 1997 – 2007, the output of the NHS has increased 52.5% (ONS). This is quite an impressive improvement, an annual average growth of 4.3%. The key figure, of course, is by how much the inputs have increased to achieve this figure. Over the period 1997-2007 the inputs increased by 59.3% (an annual average of 4.8%). ONS interpret this as a ten year fall in productivity of 4.3% in total or an annual average fall of 0.4%. This is the figure that Lansley is using when he says that there has been a “productivity fall in our public services”.

If we take the ONS figures at face value, 0.4% year-on-year fall in productivity is really not much. However, I would dispute that there is a real fall at all. The fact is, in 1997 the NHS was seriously underfunded and undermanned and had had two decades of underfunding. Consequently there was a need for a lot of capital expenditure and an increase in clinical staff. Things had got so bad that increases in capital expenditure and manpower were needed simply to stand still. In short, for the decade after 1997 the country was paying the cost of underfunding and mismanagement of the previous Conservative administrations.

In the period 1998-2008 there was an increase in the numbers of doctors of 37% and a rise in the number of nurses of 21%. When you look at it this way the increase in output (52.5% for 1997-2007) showed that output increased at a higher rate than the manpower input. That means a real increase in productivity. So considering the huge capital investments over the last decade, a productivity fall (using a measure that includes capital investment) of a mere 4.3% is quite remarkable. And if you exclude capital investment the productivity would be a year-on-year increase.

So what about the private sector, where is Lansley getting the “rises [of productivity] in the private sector”?

There are no published figures for the productivity of private healthcare in the UK since this is considered to be “commercially sensitive”. Instead, we have to look at other measures. The Healthcare Commission said in 2006 that private healthcare did not outperform the NHS in terms of quality. Anna Walker, the commission’s chief executive, said standards in the independent sector were “pretty much the same” as in the NHS.

So if the private sector are not providing better outcomes, then perhaps they are providing the same care as the NHS, but at a lower cost? To investigate whether the private sector can cut costs in treatment, let’s have a look at a case study.

A case study: Cataracts

Cataract surgery is straightforward and hence it is a good candidate for the private sector to bring in innovative, cost effective solutions.

NHS hospitals are paid according to the Payment by Results
national tariff. In effect this is the average cost of each procedure averaged for NHS hospitals in England. When a patient has a cataract operation the hospital will be paid the national tariff for the procedure. (The payment may be slightly more since the Department of Health applies what is known as the Market Forces Factor to the payment. This factor varies between 1 and 1.35 and is used to adjust the payment to reflect the difference in the costs across the country.) The current national tariff for “phacoemulsification cataract extraction and lens implant”, replacing a cataract, is £741 per eye.

So what about the private sector? Well, the first point to be made is that the NHS will implant a basic lens. If you choose to use private healthcare then you will be given the option of different lenses (for example to reduce UV, and even varifocal lenses) and some of these specialist lenses can significantly increase the costs of the procedure.

Therefore, when comparing costs with the NHS you should only look at the lower end of the range because this will be more equivalent to the NHS treatment.

The following is not a scientific analysis, but it should be representative. I performed a Google search for “cataract + cost” and came up with the following:

Advance Vision Care £2190
Ashtead Hospital £1550
BUPA £1800 – £2900
Capio £1650 – £2604
Cataract Care £1945
Cataractsurgery.co.uk £1300 – £1600
Consultants Eye Surgeons Partnership £1950 – £ 2500
harleystreetdirectory.com £1550 – £2950
Nuffield £1950 – £2600
Spire Healthcare Hospitals £1800 – £2900

This table is a mixture of actual quotes from surgeons, quotes from hospitals and clinics and general quotes from the large healthcare insurance companies. As you can see, the lowest quote is £1300, but the average cost is closer to £1800 or about 2 and a half times the NHS national tariff. Clearly the private sector has a lot of catching up to do to get to the productivity of the NHS!

Another example is the Mercury Healthcare Independent Sector Treatment Centre:

“In 2006, every cataract operation at the Mercury Healthcare ISTC at St Mary’s Hospital, Portsmouth, cost £5,590 compared to the standard NHS price of £847. The public has so far paid £335,412 for 60 cataract operations at the private-sector centre, since it opened on December 19 2005. The same number would cost £50,820 at an NHS hospital. Mercury Healthcare has an £84m, five-year contract, with local NHS commissioners. The contract states that Mercury should carry out 1,650 cataract operations a year, but the company gets paid whether patients are referred or not. The government also pays out an extra 20% to compensate Mercury for setting up the £10m centre.”

Furthermore, the British Medical Association say about ISTCs: “Every eight cases diverted to an Independent Sector treatment centre costs the taxpayer the equivalent of almost ten cases dealt with by the NHS”.

It is quite clear from the figures given above that the private sector is considerably more expensive than the NHS. Andrew Lansley may be right that productivity is increasing in the private sector, but it will need to have some very impressive improvements for it to reach the productivity of the NHS.

This is an excerpt, you can read Richard’s full analysis here

He is presumably familiar with the way in which the parable of the Good Samaritan warns us away from racist stereotyping, and perhaps also of the anti-racist message in the episode of the moneychangers in the temple.

He is also, according to the FT, a key influence on the thinking of the Conservative party hierarchy, his blog supposedly reflective of Conservative grassroots opinion.

In this guise, Montgomerie is now proposing that each Tory leaflet before the election should strip the content down to three key messages. Here they are:

(1) something on the economy, emphasising how Brown has failed on controlling debt, cutting waste and regulating the banks;

(2) something on crime and immigration; and

(3) something on protecting the NHS and the most vulnerable.

(My emphasis)

So Montgomerie is suggesting that around a third of the Tories’ overall ‘message-time’ should be spent conflating the issues of crime and immigration.

For him, and presumably for his readership, it is perfectly reasonable to insinuate/imply/spell out that crime is a problem because there are immigrants, and immigrants are a problem because there is crime.

In its way, this is actually much more shocking than Rod Liddle’s outrageous claims, because however revolting they are there is always the sense that it’s the desire to outrage that drives the racist message, rather than the other way round.

But Mongomerie’s casual, perhaps even unthinking racism, with its apparent willingness to victimise a whole section of an already victimised population (let’s not get into who’s an immigrant) is simply disgusting.

And this man calls himself a Christian.

He says:

Borrowing is deferred taxation…
Taxpayers will have to help repay all that debt with interest in the years ahead. They know that means tax increases to do so. More borrowing can make people more negative about spending up to their current incomes.

A reasonable hypothesis – though he doesn’t provide any hard evidence that this is actually happening. But then he says:

Much of the money the government is borrowing will be lent by banks. This is money the banks will not then be able to lend to the private sector…No wonder money supply growth is weak, and no wonder the private sector finds it difficult to borrow enough at a sensible rate.

There are two problems with this claim. First, it flatly contradicts the empirical evidence. The Bank of England’s survey of credit conditions shows that the availability of bank credit to companies contracted sharply in 2007 – before the big surge in government borrowing – and improved last year, as government borrowing soared.

Secondly, it contradicts his first claim. If people are saving in anticipation of higher future taxes, then presumably they are depositing money with banks, which they can then lend on. And if they’re saving, then they don’t want to borrow.
You can believe in Ricardian crowding out. You can believe in financial crowding out. But you can’t believe in both, as one offsets the other.

Redwood then goes on to welcome the end of QE, on the grounds that “in the longer term it can trigger a more general inflation as too much money chases too few goods.”

But how is this consistent with his claim that fiscal policy is depressing demand? If fiscal policy is taking cash away from banks, he should advocate more QE as a means to putting the cash back into banks. And if people are saving in anticipation of higher future taxes, why will they spend any increase in their cash balances?

On top of all this, Redwood is missing the elephant in the room – that government borrowing is a response to private sector failure. Banks have reduced their lending because they suffered large losses. This caused the non-bank private sector to become forced savers, as some people couldn’t borrow. The mathematical counterpart to this is that government borrowing soared.
Redwood, though, can’t seem to see this. This might be because, being a politician, he can’t see that policy is sometimes endogenous, so politicians don’t have as much free choice as they pretend. Or it might be that he’s just incapable of seeing that the private sector can sometimes fail catastrophically.

Whatever the reason, his car-crash of an argument highlights how a desperation to attack one’s political opponents can lead to some terrible confusion.

While this might seem like good politicking it actually leaves the party vulnerable to ‘love-bombing’ from both sides.

But polling shows that the Libdem leadership are dangerously out of sync with the sentiment of Liberal Democrat voters.

The latest YouGov poll illustrated how the attitudes of Labour / Libdem voters tend to have more in common than Conservative / Libdems voters.

Liberal Democrat voters tend to prefer leading Labour politicians compared to Conservative ones.

For example, 52% of Liberal Democrat voters agree that Gordon Brown has a ’strong sense of right and wrong’ compared to just 37% who think the same of Cameron.

Negative feeling towards David Cameron persists in other results; only 11% think Cameron wants to do the ‘best for all groups in Britain’ compared to 44% who think the same of Brown and 32% think Brown ‘generally tells the truth’ compared to just 14% who think Cameron does.

Another illustration of Cameron’s failure at love-bombing comes in the findings that only 26% of Liberal Democrat voters feel they know where the Conservatives stand on important issues compared to 43% who feel the same way about Labour.

In other words, the Conservative message simply isn’t getting across to those who would vote Liberal Democrat and when they do hear it they don’t like it.

When it comes to policy questions a similar pattern repeats itself; for example, asked to choose when the government should make cuts in spending 49% of Liberal Democrat voters sided with 60% of Labour voters in arguing that cuts should be postponed until Britain’s economy was ’strongly growing’.

So much for Nick Clegg’s ’savage cuts’; Liberal Democrat voters prefer the approach of their shadow chancellor, Vince Cable who has made it quite clear that he will not support an emergency Conservative budget to cut the deficit immediately.

Despite some blips this is now the established Labour Party position also and no doubt this figures heavily in the 6% gap in support from Lib Dems (19 – 13%) for the economic team of Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling compared to that of Cameron and Osborne.

When Hain talks about a ‘anti-Tory’ majority in Britain he is thus not talking to himself.

What he is doing is talking to a body of voters who want to vote for Nick Clegg’s party but will be reluctant to do so at the cost of a Conservative government whose dangers they rightly recognise.

Political reality in both peoples perceptions and policy terms shows how much closer the Liberal Democrats are to Labour.

If Nick Clegg continues to ignore that reality then he will steer the Liberal Democrats onto a collision course with his own supporters.

——–
All graphs and figures taken from this Times/YouGov poll

Hosted by the New Political Economy network and Compass, debate was mainly focused on what can be expected from a Tory chancellor.

The audience and panel focused enthusiastically on how Labour can stop the Conservatives, and even what it can do differently if it wins. There was talk of a hung parliament with Vince Cable as Chancellor, even of a small Labour majority.

As members of the audience and panel became enthusiastic about a Labour resurgence, the understated but excellent Andrew Gamble had a small and important point to make: be careful what you wish for.

For over a year politicians have been solemnly intoning that “cuts will have to come” and that there are “hard times ahead”. But for many the fear-factor has worn off. So it could be that Tory promises of cutting harder, faster and deeper are turning people away. Many voters are now asking themselves: why do we need to cut at all?

But the truth is that cuts will have to come. Not as soon as the slash-and-burn Tories desire, but eventually.

Labour’s pledge to halve the deficit in 4 years is necessary. Protecting the tentative recovery in the short-to-medium term is essential – but eventually the debt has to be dealt with. And when the cuts come, it’s going to hurt.

For if Labour wins in 2010, the consequences could very well be worse than defeat. Labour would need a clear plan about how to tackle the deficit and stimulate economic growth – hardly an enviable task. The party would be under immense pressure from financial markets to outline and stick to such a plan.

Tough – even savage – cuts might be necessitated, and the impact would be felt by ordinary voters who returned Labour out of fear of the Tory axe.

Furthermore, Labour would find itself in a position of having to justify its actions to an increasingly angry electorate, now feeling real economic pain. It would somehow have to find new ideas to revitalise the party from within and without – despite the fact it already looks exhausted and drained of initiative after 13 long years in power.

In short, the danger is that a 2010 win for Labour would be the equivalent of a 1992 win for the Tories. It could spell 5 years of disaster – disaster which might put the party out of power for a generation, or possibly even destroy it.

As Jon Cruddas with appropriate under-emphasis put it: “with this one, the stakes are really high”.

But why the continued fall? Lack of clarity, narratives that have no real resonance (’Broken Britain’, ‘We can’t go on like this!!?!‘) and a complete lack of coherent policy are obvious points to make.

And to that I’d add another point: the Conservative party has been influenced far too much by the attack-dog politics of right-wing blogs, who are intent on winning the news cycle and simply trashing their opponents. Don’t get me wrong – that’s the job of right-wing blogs. But as I said earlier, their influence on the actual voting public is minuscule.

And so every time Cameron stands up and says: We can’t go on like this, a whole group of people seem to think – that’s true, I can’t go on hearing your crap. Every time Cameron says, We can’t have 4 more years of Gordon Brown, a group of voters seem to say – oh yes we can!.

Every time Guido Fawkes puts up another picture of the PM in the hope that he attracts more ridicule – the Labour Party’s poll ratings go up.

The big Tory mistake, it seems to me, is that they pay far too much attention to Conservative blogs and think the election can be won in the same manner. Trashing Brown, laughing at the Labour party and constantly calling for an election would win them the election. They thought they’d hit jackpot when the bullying row blew up.

To their credit at least, when faced with the prospect of Tim Montgomerie strongly urging them to push hard on immigration and crime, they told him to STFU and ignored the advice. But even then, coherence is a problem.

If the Tories wanted to win they strongly (now a remote possibility) they needed to have a positive and coherent vision of the future from the start. Changing to a positive message now, at Spring conference, is a waste of time. It’s too close to the election now. They also needed some substantial policies.

Instead, CCHQ assumed they could win by simply bashing the government like their online allies. Their newest poster betrays the same stupidity. It doesn’t seemed to have dawned on them yet that most voters don’t pay that much attention to, or care for, the Westminster bubble.

I mean, not even publications of the kind that get flogged outside Dalston Kingsland shopping centre of a Saturday routinely urge the comrades to break out the Kalashnikovs. That sort of juvenile ultraleftism is just embarrassing.

If you were just about to say Socialist Worker in response to my opening question, you may be surprised to learn that the correct answer is the Daily Telegraph this morning. No kid.

In fairness to economics editor Edmund Conway, I suspect the subs were getting a little carried away.

The piece at no point actively incites the bourgeoisie to stockpile automatic weaponry in anticipation of the need to gun down hordes of Jobseekers’ Allowance claimants on the rampage through the leafier parts of Richmond upon Thames.

But the article does offer an insight into what sections of the right are thinking right now.

Maybe that headline was more of a Freudian slip than a genuine gaffe? Conway buys into the double dip recession scenario. While the credit crunch and the banking collapse are more or less over, stage two will essentially be driven by a crisis of sovereign debt.

Whoever wins the next election, unprecedented spending cuts will be introduced, although the Tories have more relish for the task. Conway – who heard Tory economics spokesman George Osborne deliver the Mais lecture earlier this week – implicitly predicts that there will be resistance:

Osborne is terrified of imposing such deep and painful cuts. He privately despairs that he will end up as the most unpopular politician in modern history.

Probably not while Thatch is still alive. But I digress.

Which helps explain his plan, spelt out last night, to set up a three-man Office for Budget Responsibility to advise him on how far to cut spending. The hope is that the OBR will attract the opprobrium when state-sector workers are laid off or given pay cuts, when VAT is raised, when the retirement age is increased, and when public-sector pensions are finally tackled.

But the question that Osborne largely ducked was the issue of inequality. The gap between rich and poor is the widest since the 1930s, and is getting bigger, not smaller. After nervous acknowledgement of the current rioting in Greece, Conway reaches his conclusion:

Ed Balls’s plan to pitch this election as a class war is, I’m afraid, on the button. Class, money and privilege will be unavoidable issues during the next parliamentary term. Rather than ignoring them, the Tories must take action. Better to start thinking about free-market reforms that share the wealth more equitably than to leave it to the Left to suggest that taxes on the wealthy are the only solution.

Mmmm. Not sure about Conway’s attempt to paint the Tories as the unwilling victims of some kind of recidivist New Labour reversion to neo-Marxist type.

Oh, and the idea that the Tories have ever, at any point in their long existence, ignored class, money or privilege is risible. Sure, the have rhetorically downplayed the defence of privilege when that has suited their purposes.

Off hand, I can think of few free market mechanisms that tend to redistribute towards the poor, and most have quite the reverse effect. And of course, the left will be in opposition.

It can suggest whatever tax hikes it likes; it won’t be able to implement them. Yet it is noticeable that Conway’s concern is not to introduce egalitarian policies because they are desirable, or because they benefit the majority of the population.

His chief interest is to shield the ultra-rich from unwanted attentions of the Inland Revenue. Obviously, this column is Bleeding Heart Liberalism lite compared to the nasty Hayek porn purveyed by some of the Daily Telegraph’s other contributors, who would probably have few qualms about arming themselves for class war.

But the contradiction here is that no government – either Conservative or Labour – can mount the sort of full-frontal assault on state spending that all mainstream parties contemplate without making the current level of inequality look like the living embodiment of Acts 2:44.

This is a circle that Osborne cannot possibly square.

Its being organised by the Freedom Association, starring right wing Tory MEP Daniel Hannan.

As we will no doubt hear again and again, its a good moment for an anti-tax revolt.

After all, the 2010 British Social Attitudes survey shows public support for tax cuts and spending cuts has doubled since 1997, from 4% to 8%.

Public support for increasing taxation and public spending is now at its lowest level since the early 1980s. 39% support this, down from 62% in 1997. Only 8% support cuts.

The most popular view, held by 50%, is that spending and taxation levels should stay as they are.

It will be a long hard road to Libertopia, even if those who gather on Saturday may understimate that, but perhaps the Tory revolutionaries do realise that their real battle will be with their own leadership.

And perhaps the launch of the tea party should also prompt fiscal conservatives on the right to take on the fiscally ludicrous “oppose all tax rises” fundamentalism of the Taxpayers’ Alliance and their allies.

But there seems to be very little discussion on why they’ve dropped like lead balloons. It’s not like New Labour has announced any major new policies, found a coherent narrative, got the press on side or even escaped bad news. Cameron just ain’t getting a luck break. What gives? Here’s some thoughts.

1) Bad policies.
The rollout hasn’t gone too well has it? The education policy meant that Carol Voderman was excluded from their own ideas, the crime policy lead to Chris Grayling being publicly humiliated and the ‘broken society’ narrative got punctured by a few misplaced decimal points. All in all, Cameron was doing much better when he was vague. The public either don’t like their big ideas or don’t like the incompetent way they’ve been presented.

2) The wrong rhetoric.
Has the brand detoxification not gone far enough? Cameron was riding high when he was riding with huskies; as soon as he started churning out stats to push a ‘broken society’ – it was his campaign that started to fall apart.

In this regard I rather enjoy the fact that the Tory activists response to the fall in polls has been to talk even more about crime, immigration, heterosexual marriages and teenage pregnancies. Or, of course, cutting spending in all parts of the economy ’savagely’. That wasn’t Conservative rhetoric when they were doing well earlier so why would it help now? Tim Montgomerie is less politically astute than I thought. At least when I was endorsing the ‘class war’ strategy it was purely for strategic reasons.

3) Cameron himself.
Maybe it was the posters? All that airbrushing and the lampooning clearly didn’t increase his poll lead – maybe people are turned off by Tony Blair II and want a new approach? But given that the party is less popular than the man himself, this may not be a likely answer. Besides, Cameron’s lead was dropping before the posters and the parodies. But it may have actually hurt him further.

4) Tory support was shaky to begin with.
This seems to be a deep-rooted problem for the Tories. Their base is already starting to get angry at the incompetent delivery – let alone the fact that he’s keep silent on their pet policies like flogging ‘diversity officers’ and depriving single teenage mothers of all benefits. And yet not enough of Middle England is convinced for Cameron to realistically move right-wards. The base may be staying with him for now but there will be hell to pay once he’s elected.

But the deeper question is: why haven’t the Conservatives managed to build a deep and sustained electoral advantage despite all the press hate-mail directed at Labour? The government is tired, out of ideas and barely able to hold itself together. The Conservatives are uber-disciplined, controlling everything, have a fresh face and get better marks on personality than Labour politicians. And yet percentage of people committed to them is remarkably low. Why?

The Tories look too scared to even ask that question.

Workers judged to be lonely and to have a chaotic home life could be barred from working with vulnerable people, even though there is no evidence that they pose a risk, according to guidelines from the Government's new vetting agency…
If a teaching assistant was believed to be "unable to sustain emotionally intimate relationships" and also had a "chaotic, unstable lifestyle" they could be barred from ever working with children.
If a nurse was judged to suffer from "severe emotional loneliness" and believed to have "poor coping skills" their career could also be ended.

Second:

People who inform on benefit cheats could be given a share of the resulting savings to the state under proposals being examined by Labour’s manifesto team.

Third:

Shares in state-owned banks would be offered to voters at a discount as part of a Tory effort to encourage young people and those on modest incomes to invest, George Osborne has announced.
The shadow chancellor said his "people's bank bonus" would reward taxpayers for the £850 billion ploughed by the Government into propping up crisis-hit financial institutions.

The common theme here is that these stories show that the state is not a rational force for justice, but rather a means of bullying the vulnerable whilst handing cash over to its favourites.

Osborne’s claim that selling bank shares at a discount “would reward taxpayers” is simply an insult to the intelligence. The only reason anyone would buy bank shares – even at full price – would be if they offer a higher expected return than gilts.

But if this is the case, then the taxpayer loses money by selling bank shares and using the money to reduce public debt – because such debt reductions are, in effect, purchases of gilts.

The only way the taxpayer can gain by selling bank shares is if they are sold at an over-inflated price, such that subsequent returns on them are lower than the returns to gilts.
So, let’s be clear. What Osborne is proposing here is nothing other than a Russian-style privatisation* – the plundering of public assets for the benefit of friends of the government.

If that’s bad, though, Labour’s proposals are unspeakable. What they amount to is simply the harassment of lonely single parents, and those wrestling with mental health problems; who’ll be snitched upon under Murphy’s rules – the popular guy in the pub, the semi-gangster, or the “weirdo”?

This is using the state not only to undermine community and to build distrust, but to entrench injustice by making lives even worse for the worst-off.

Taken together – as they should be – these stories tell us how mainstream politicians envisage the state – as an instrument not of economic rationality nor of justice, but as a means for increasing inequality, by giving handouts to its friends whilst destroying the lives of the weakest.

* The analogy is appropriate. Russian privatizations involved giving assets to the poor, who promptly sold at knock-down prices to the rich – which is pretty much what Osborne’s proposing.

An article in yesterday’s Independent highlighted the failings in the Conservative school policy. Personally I think it was a rubbish idea to start with. Allowing parents, charities and trusts to run schools?

It sounds to me just like an idea to privatise the school system, an idea which allows any idiot with a ton of money to influence and indoctrinate youngsters with their own opinions.

Obviously that is still the case today, but in small isolated specialist schools which provide top quality education for the highest fee payers. Imagine if that was the only choice for your kids (minus the massive bill of course)?

The wonders of a central education system mean that every child has access to the same basic education and whilst it may vary regionally, what is taught is practically the same.

And anyway, how would people not trained in education be able to make the right choices about curriculum?

This whole process (if it went ahead, which I very much hope it doesn’t) would have to be closely followed by government inspectors and the cost involved in shutting down the public schools would be colossal.

For a Tory government promising to cut spending and reducing the deficit, how does the party justify this?

By the time these “gradual” changes have been put into place, the Conservatives will probably be voted out of office anyway, if they get in in the first place. There is widespread opposition when one local school is closed, could you imagine the uproar when these plans become publically known?

This is certainly a point to campaign about in the upcoming elections and certainly something I’ll be asking my local Tory candidate before I shut the door in his face next time.

The results of the system in Sweden haven’t been too rosy either. The head of Sweden’s school inspectors last week said that the system hadn’t significantly improved results in their country anyway, so why on earth do the Tories want to implement it here?

As someone still in education this worries me and will worry parents of young children, teachers and union representatives. Typical Tories of course, deny the whole thing.

————-
Sam Bumby is 16 years old with a big interest in politics. He has just started blogging and is on Twitter @sBumby

One of the posters is Frank Gallagher from Shameless, saying “I’ve never voted Labour before, but I can see the benefits”.

One nice thing about these posters is that some of them have an explanation beneath them to explain the joke to anyone who finds the humour a bit too subtle.

For the benefits one, their “fact” is “Labour’s over-complex welfare system means there has been more benefit fraud and less incentive to work”.

Really?

When Labour came to power, £1.7bn/year was lost in benefit fraud. In 2008, less than half that amount was lost in fraud, 0.6% of expenditure.

When Labour came to power, more than 700,000 workers paid 70% or more marginal tax rates, meaning there was little incentive to work. Indeed, some workers actually had marginal tax rates of more than 100%.

After the 2008 budget, 200,000 workers pay 70% or more marginal tax rates.

It’s bad enough that conservatives think their readers are too dim to get their jokes unless they explain them. It’s even worse that their explanation is actually wrong.

Of course nobody can credibly argue that David Cameron and his Notting Hill Set coterie personally harbour the type of crude homophobia that was dominant during the hey-day of Thatcherism.

But it remains a fact that the Tories are the party of Section 28 and Labour are the party of equalised age of consent, civil partnership, gay adoption rights and a prohibition on anti-gay discrimination in the provision of goods and services. And don’t forget that it was Labour that decriminalised homosexual acts between consenting adults in private in the first place.

In short, every single advance for gay rights in this country has occurred under a Labour government. Labour has set the agenda for decade after decade, often in the face of concerted opposition from the Tory right.

Conservative motivation for catching up is rooted as much in opportunism as conviction. It is easy to ‘champion’ something now there is nothing of substance left to achieve.

There is also the question of whether the gin and Jag belt golf club bigot tendency has truly been converted. Consider this revealing comment from rightwing columnist Simon Heffer in the Daily Telegraph this morning:

We hear of constituency activists’ anger that safe seats are given shortlists comprising ethnic minorities, women and homosexual men, as happened in a Surrey constituency last weekend.

What’s with the white het blokes only stricture, Simon? Don’t they have queers in the Home Counties or something? And last time I checked, women made up about half the population of Guildford and Leatherhead. They even have black people living there now, I gather.

Oh, and one last question for Mr Herbert. Given that Conservatives ‘champion’ gay equality, can we take it that your party will terminate its alliances with assorted east European homophobes in the European parliament? Sorry, speak up. Didn’t quite hear you.

This is the actual poster that The Spectator are using to promote an upcoming education conference called ‘The Schools Revolution’ at which the Tories Education spokesman, Michael Gove, is the headline act:

Does it remind you of anything? Like, say, this…?

Or perhaps this…?

Maybe this makes things a bit more explicit…?

Memo to the Spectator’s design department… not the best choice of colour scheme there guys, D’oh!

Take the “We Can’t Go On Like This” line, first seen accompanying David Cameron’s shiny airbrushed forehead. Rather than a reason to vote Conservative, it reads like the first stage of a relationship break-up. Almost as bad as “It’s not you, it’s me”, but somewhere above “If you liked it, then you shudda putta ring on it”.

Last week there were the tasteful “R.I.P OFF” gravestones, taking a mooted proposal, dishonestly elevating it into Labour policy, and turning the morally complex issue of end-of-life care into a macabre political football. But again, the message was hardly, ‘here’s a reason to vote Conservative’. It was more “OOOOHHHH be SCARED, evil Gordon is coming to steal YOUR MONEY when you’re DEAD!”

The most incredible thing about these and the latest campaign is that the Conservatives are practically admitting that they are a rubbish party, hence why people don’t normally vote for them.

I imagine CCHQ thought this would be a clever way to entice new voters. You know, decontaminating the Nasty Party brand by claiming that Ordinaries can vote Tory too. “Conservative Voters: not just climate-change-denying, EU-obsessed, Thatcherite troglodytes wearing tweed!”

Yet the negative framing of the slogan may inadvertently prompt people to remember why they didn’t vote Tory the last 3 times.

(spoofed poster by Left Outside)

Of course, there’s another good reason why all the Tory posters have been negative, focusing attention on Labour’s failings. Because for as long as the Tories do that, they don’t have to talk about their plans to slash spending and crater the economic recovery, give tax breaks to millionaires, implement incoherent plans to benefit wealthy families at the expense of the poor, their inability to use statistics, or any of the other concrete policy areas that get the party into so much trouble whenever they open their mouths.

Whether this approach will be enough to discourage voters from asking searching questions about Dave and Co for another three months is a big question. This election is Cameron’s to lose. And judging by the posters, his party knows it.