Posts Tagged "Conservative Party"
Lib Dems in blatant hypocrisy shocker!
Three months after David Cameron held a public meeting in Bath, Nick Clegg, better known as leader of the Shadow Conservative Party, has managed to find time in his busy, busy, schedule to do likewise.
When Cameron came to visit, the Lib Dems criticised the Tories over the amount of information participants were asked to give, claiming that the meeting would be rigged or filled with Tory apparatchiks. They smarmily added that their meetings are open and honest.
Now, even by their own criteria, the Lib Dems have failed. They are now under fire for asking that residents sign up online and receive an e-ticket.
“Nobody wants to come to my party.”
It could be suggested that the Lib Dems are getting scared. With a majority of 4,638 and a certain sentimental element to it, Bath could be in danger of falling to the Tories, despite being Lib Dem since 1992 when Tory Party Chairman Chris Patten helped win the General Election despite losing his seat.
In principle, I see nothing wrong with the fact that people are asked to register because it helps organisers get a good idea of the numbers. On top of that, they can prioritise local residents.
If only there was some easy and simple way of proving identity, without the awkwardness of a passport or the need to know how to drive. Some sort of card, for your identity, like all other nations have. That’d be a radical idea, though just the sort of thing the Lib Dems oppose.
When Cameron came, he was warned that residents would ask questions regarding the Bath Transportation Package, which directly contradicts Conservative policy on Green Belts. He avoided and refused to answer the question for fear of embarrassing his Tory Council.
This time, with Clegg, I have no doubt that seagulls will be top of the agenda.
Fixed Term Parliaments won’t necessarily fix Parliament
Panic-stricken MPs at the epicentre of the Expenses Scandal put out a range of “constitutional reforms” that would be able to fix parliament despite not having anything to do with the problem.
Fixed Term Parliaments have been shelved for a long time now; it was Labour Policy in 1992, but since they didn’t win nothing came of it. The Lib Dems have held on to it for a long time now, but since they’ll never win, nothing will ever come from it. The Tories aren’t really quite sure whether to be in a conservative mood or their “change” mood.
If the date of a General Election is fixed well in advance, we can certainly expect to see an increase of widgets like this:
Though at least they won’t be quite so arrogantly presumptuous as to second guess the Prime Minister, at least this one doesn’t say “countdown to victory” or suchlike.
I would expect the Conservatives to rather like the current system, since they have played it so well. In Opposition, they used the “Snap Election” card to its breaking point. Cameron asking Brown “Can we have an election? When can we have an election? I want an election! Muuuuuuuuuuum!” every week for about three months in Prime Ministers’ Questions came off well for him.
The real advantages to introducing a fixed term parliament in Britain seem negligible. On the part of the electorate, the advantage is little more than psychological as it takes power away from the Executive (and gives it to the Administrative); the flipside is that by taking this power away, the Prime Minister no longer has to take the make-or-break decision.
This puts a stop to the grandstanding and the bluffing over wanting an election and completely removes the debate away from “personal mandates” and other nonsense that people come up with because they don’t understand the difference between a Prime Minister and a President.
It also means the Prime Minister will no longer need to go to the Monarch and ask for her permission to hold a general election, thus removing the Monarchy even further from politics and eroding its case for existence in the 21st century.
With the “PM decides” model, the incumbent has the advantage of being able to call an election when it suits them; they also have the disadvantage of being in government, so logically they really are just trying to pick the least unfavourable date.
There have also been accusations in past elections of releasing a ‘favourable’ budget just before an election, with Fixed Term Parliaments the same practice will go on, it will just be a little bit more obvious.
With Fixed Terms, potentially a government can hold out on the people for three years and then come out all guns blazing in year four. Whether voters have short or long memories is a different debate but my inclination is definitely towards the goldfish end of the scale.
Cutting down the Commons will cripple Cameron’s government
While covering up unfortunate remarks made by his colleagues, David Cameron told us again that he wants to reduce the number of MPs.
The logic is, on the face of it, that fewer MPs will claim fewer expenses. It true in absolute figures, less so in proportion. Members of Parliament are quite unpopular at the moment so it follows that we should have fewer of them.
It is yet another example that Cameron is nowhere near being prepared for government; leaping on top of a simple solution with a short term benefit with no regard for the long term decision.
No wonder they called him “Mr 10%”. See this interview in the FT.
Osborne, You're Fired!
Fewer Labour seats mean less Opposition
The real reason behind this measure is really just to cut the number of seats the Labour party has and thus make it easier for the Tories to win a majority by moving the goalposts, as my Bath counterparts have explained.
It’s not a bad strategy. By reducing the number of MPs, those remaining will have to take on more constituency casework. This will be particularly the case in Inner City areas (which generally happen to be the Labour seats) where there tends to be more casework generated than for the MPs in rural constituencies.
Fewer Labour MPs will therefore need to take on more casework, and if they’re busy in their constituency office all the time they won’t be able to be in Westminster preventing legislation. They won’t even be getting out and about in the community, scoring up those pesky Labour votes. This is where the phrase “chained to the desk” applies itself well.
It could be worth giving constituency casework to local Councillors, though they tend to like to maintain political independence and loyalty to their council group rather than the Constituency Party. Perhaps it could be an area of reform to give Local Government some teeth.
Fewer Cameroons, more Hannanas
When (if?) Cameron is asked to form a Government, and he enacts his proposal, not only will he have to say goodbye to a few of his chums (which I am sure he is ruthless enough to do) but he will also have to make new ones.
Consider the following quite from Yes Minister:
There are only 630 MPs and a party with just over 300 MPs forms a government and of these 300, 100 are too old and too silly to be ministers and 100 too young and too callow. Therefore there are about 100 MPs to fill 100 government posts.
There are about 646 MPs right now and there will be 650 (due to new constituencies) after 2010. So a party needs 325 for a majority. Cut that by 10% and we have 585 MPs, 292 of which can form a majority.
Now you see the significance of the YM quote, I hope.
The result is that it will completely cripple DC, depending on when/if he gets the legislation through. I sound as if it is a fait accompli though you can be sure Labour and Lib Dems won’t take kindly to it, and I doubt newly elected Tory MPs will be so quick to sacrifice themselves in the name of Conservative hegemony either.
DC will have fewer Tory MPs to choose from and so in terms of probability alone it means he will have to offer jobs to the very same Old Tories and Thatcherites he has been trying to get away from for years. You know what’s worse than a Cameron Government? A Cameron Government with Health Secretary Dan Hannan in it. He will be at the beck and call of not just his backbenchers, but his frontbenchers too.
So it will not only weaken his particular government, but any subsequent government’s prospect of longevity. Obviously, as more and more MPs go through the ministerial ranks, the harder it is to control parliament. As it was with Major it is with Brown. With fewer qualified MPs to start with, the half-life of a government decreases and the pendulum will swing faster between Labour and Conservative (not necessarily a bad thing, though).
Cameron has said that there isn’t enough talent to go around on the Labour benches, despite a 60ish majority, hence the appointment of Lord Mandelson as Dark Lord of the State.
But that’s another story…
Tory Jacob Rees-Mogg embarrasses Conservative Council (again)
Jacob Rees-Mogg, deputy Tory-buffoon-in Chief (they couldn’t trust him with the number 1 spot) has once again landed himself in hot water.
The Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for North-East Somerset had previously been caught out for plagiarising an article in the Sun and sending it to Somersetters. Once the discovery was made, however, he apologised immediately and explained it was in fact a staff member who was in the wrong.
Then a huge number of spelling mistakes and typing errors were found on his website. I would link to it, but it has in fact been taken down and amalgamated into a generic Tory Party site for being too much of an embarrassment.
This time, it seems he hasn’t learned any lessons.
This time, it seems a little more serious.
Private Eye, the satirical magazine, wrote a little article in its “Rotten Boroughs” section (click to see a scan in .jpg form), which was then picked up by local media.
The story is fairly straight forward. A ‘politically restricted’ Press Officer working for the B&NES council has been writing Conservative-issue press releases for JRM.
Two press releases issued by Margaret Brewer (JRM’s press agent in North-East Somerset) were emailed to several journalists as Word attachments – the ‘properties’ box revealed them to have been written by James Hinchcliffe on a B&NES computer during a working week day. The ‘properties’ box was also the source of Rees-Mogg’s downfall over the plagiarism scandal, so you have to admire his invincible ignorance.
Hinchcliffe was at the time the politically-restricted Tory group researcher on B&NES (as the Private Eye article explains) – this means banana skin-prone JRM has benefited from a Council officer, paid by the council tax payer to conduct Council work, misusing the time & resources provided to him for said Council work – making JRM the beneficiary of a misuse of council resources.
His own expenses scandal before even becoming an MP. Ra-Ra Jacob!
You can also click here (.jpg) to read the Western Daily Press article.
MPs with second jobs are second rate
It is assumed that being a British Member of Parliament is a full time job. One of the reforms being discussed is to regulate and discourage MPs from moonlighting and doing work on the side.
Constituency work, parliamentary business and party roles should add up to enough that an MP is delighted to find a weekend off in between the extra voluntary yet obligatory activities like leafleting and event-attending (less fun than you might think!).
With a salary of about £60,000 and an expenses account on top of that, money should not really be an issue; after all, people don’t go into politics for the money, do they? A significant amount of the Tory party, let alone the Shadow Cabinet, are already millionaires (Osborne!), so there can be no financial necessity like for that of a student who has to spend their weekends working in a café just to be able to survive.
However, if they pay the proper taxes, they should be able to spend their free time as they wish. A particularly energetic MP who can get through all the casework, visit the local university club and turn up to vote whenever required has the right to spend the time left over working elsewhere. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, but being a dull boy can be quite an advantage in Parliament (Again, Osborne!)
The main argument for keeping second jobs is that it gets politicians to connect with the public, and it gives them some knowledge of “a proper job” and how the world works beyond the Westminster bubble made up increasingly of young career politicians coming straight out of Oxbridge.
It’s a compelling point, were it not for the fact that most (though not all) MPs with second jobs are Tories with directorships and consultancies. Don’t expect your MP to knock on the door with a sponge offering to give your car a wash. This is not restricted to Parliament either; the Mayor of London is regularly under fire for the very expensive articles he writes for the Telegraph each week.
Technically, if being an MP is considered a full time job, then being a minister is a second job on top of it. In practice, a minister is required to spend less time doing backbencher activities like committees and Westminster Hall debates. In principle, if second jobs are prohibited, then it follows logically that when an MP is chosen to become a Minister he will have to step down and trigger a by-election.
This leads us to my next post about “unelected” ministers, and how the situation is a lot worse in French politics!
Attack and Retreat, Bait and Switch: Tory Policy on Europe
The Conservatives are always ready to implode over the continent. It’s a testament to David Cameron’s political skill/luck that he has specifically been able to avoid mention of Europe, keeping the focus of the debate on “I’m not Gordon Brown.” The Tory Party Political Broadcast was ‘scrapped’ (I’m not sure if they even made one because they could have unleashed it on an unsuspecting YouTube) so that DC could talk about expenses and pull the rug from under Brown.
With major Tory donors like Stuart Wheeler, who wrote a cheque for £100,000 to UKIP and said he will be voting for them, I can appreciate the tightrope DC is walking. However, though the general agreement is for ‘everybody to keep quiet until we’re in power’, they do actually have a policy on Europe.
The policy has been to leave the EPP-ED. David Cameron won the leadership election on this promise; it’s taken a few years, but been delivered.
Consider the following video, (it’s a bit cheesy, but makes a good point). The policies are pretty clear: “Support and Reform” or “Attack and Retreat”.
This is the great deception, as they are still running as part of the EPP-ED, but will leave after the election to form a new group. It’s voting for a candidate who is going to switch parties in the future. The manifesto agreed upon and voted for will be forgotten. (You may wish to point out something along the lines of “Manifesto? None of them keep their promises.” Consider yourself pre-empted.)
Let’s look at how the system works:
This graph shows what it says it does. It’s the political build-up of the European Parliament, where national parties group together based on ideology. MEPs are expected to act in the interests of their political nature rather than political party at home.
You’ll notice the two biggest groups are the EPP-ED and the PES. The Conservatives are currently found in the former with other Conservative and Christian Democrats and the Labour Party sits in the latter with fellow Social Democrats and Democratic Socialists. The Liberal Democrats are in the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats. Greens with the Greens and so on.
The EPP-ED is therefore the ‘mainstream’ group where all the serious centre-right parties sit. This will no longer include the British Conservative Party, who have decided to leave their natural European Party for being too pro-European. (They will say pro-Federalist to suggest the EU is going to become a superstate. I’ve just done an exam on why this is impossible and complete twaddle, so I’m not going to explain it. Trust me on this one.)
As a result of the gagging-order on Tories when it comes to Europe, we have very little idea on what lines this new group will take. It has been said that they are looking to seek relations with the Polish Law and Justice party as well as a Czech Party.
Its critics regard the party as homophobic owing to both the Kaczynski’s apparent opposition to gay rights. When Warsaw mayor, Lech, who is now Poland’s president, banned a succession of gay pride marches, while his brother said homosexuality would lead to the “downfall of civilisation”.
“If you think that David Cameron has an alliance with PiS, you could really say that Cameron has an alliance with Father Rydzyk,” said Olgierd Annusewicz, a Warsaw University political scientist. “Rydzyk is a guy who is against Jews, against homosexuals, against all liberal thinking, against privatisation.”
On Newsnight last night, William Hague, Shadow Foreign Secretary, brushed off these claims by putting it down to “differences in national political culture.”
The only result of this rag-tag mob of anti-gay, Climate Change denyng looneys getting together will be that Britain will be embarrassed and ignored by ‘Europe’ under a Conservative government. Don’t take it from me, take it from one of their MEPs, Caroline Jackson:
David Cameron’s decision on the EPP is pathetic and will sow the seeds of endless trouble. It will leave David Cameron and William Hague very isolated because it will leave bad blood with Christian Democrat parties throughout Europe. It is a stupid, stupid policy.
It’s wholly likely, in the event of a Conservative government, that the Tories will have to go back to the EPP-ED to get anything done. It will also be bad for national Foreign Policy as the Conservatives have alienated all the mainstream parties of Europe in one swift insult.
Thatcher summed up the Conservative attitude to Europe. “No, no, NO!”
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