Seriously? The new Conservative party? Has he actually called themselves that?

Such a title combined with the piece written by Wit and Wisdom earlier make the whole idea of electing Tories over Labour fairly redundant!

Also, where are the hints of plumping up the wages of low paid workers to encourage people back in to work. Is this too radical for Cameron?

It’s all about semantics, Dave – the NEW-tories are offering job opportunities, sadly it sounds like the opportunity to be shafted in the labour market.

It’s the sort of spin that would have made Alastair Campbell blush?

Good point about the structural aftermath of Thatcherism.

i still don’t get the jobs policy they were trumpeting on the news yesterday. you get people into ‘work’ (for which read, more or less unpaid, long-term ‘apprenticeships’ with no guarantee of a job at the other end) by forcing a large proportion of those currently on disability benefit onto the dole proper, and you create jobs for these same people by, er, dunno. at best it is totally half-arsed, cheap, points-scoring nastiness; it barely seems to have been thought through at all.

if claimants are forced into the labour market, it will be at the expense of existing badly paid workers, who will find their wages yet further undercut.

That may be true, though I don’t recall you making the same case wrt immigration!

To be fair to the Tories, thinking things through is not really the Tories strong point. They are used to attacking the weakest members of society for the pleasure of nasty element of their supporters. Look at the comments page at the Daily Hate.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1218133/Benefits-slashed-work-shy-Tories-declare-war-5m-worked-Labour.html#comments

These same people filled our seaside B&B with the mentally ill, forcing motor neuron sufferers to pick up rubbish, as unpaid ‘training’ will present no problems at all.

Remember the ‘caring, sharing’, progressive ‘Call me Dave’? 14 points clear in the opinion polls and Murdoch’s lakey shows his true colours.

Also he’s impying that people on IB or ESA are not currently ever tested to see if they still qualify. This is false, but people not well informed about the welfare system will doubtless believe it.

“Famously, he boasted of spending just three weeks on the task, from start to finish, despite having no previous knowledge of social policy. Some of us would be hard pushed to put up a garden shed on that timescale.”

Although I see where you’re coming from Dave, your sub-standard DIY skills aren’t in themselves a reason to criticise Freud.

I’m with tom – I’m not at all convinced that the numbers on Incapacity Benefit will really reduce all that much unless seriously dodgy changes are made to the testing process. people are tested pretty regularly even now.

How will they make the test stricter, exactly? they’ve not said. And is having jobcentres full of the mentally ill (presumably these are the people they’re gunning for, as attacking the physically disabled is a vote-loser for sure), who are unable to hold down any kind of long-term work, really going to solve the ‘problem’? Won’t that just make Britain far more ‘broken’ than it was already?

The irony here is that the surge in IB claims came in the 1980s, when the Tories deliberately reclassified many long-term unemployed people as disabled, simply in order to massage down politically sensitive joblessness figures.

Then what is wrong with re-reclassifying them as unemployed?

“Then what is wrong with re-reclassifying them as unemployed?”

The idea that in 30 years nothing has been done to ensure those on incapacity benefit are really needing to be.

Labour have had 12 years to help people with reduced physical and mental health during a 10 year boom period and have not been particularly successful. Perhaps it is time Labour explains how they would help those with reduced physial and mental health?

This all smacks uncomfortably of Peter Lilley’s Little List.

Frankly I think the most informative responce to this came from Purnell:

http://www.openleft.co.uk/2009/10/05/holes-in-conservative-welfare-plan/

James (The Tory) Purnell?

Purnell invited this Tory policy because of his own policy of demonising the poor ffs!

You created a new twist, in that conservatives and libertarians like the 19th century Democrats believed in individual freedom and the right of an individual to make waves, rock the boat, drop pebbles in placid waters and be a nail sticking up on the boardwalk to create new opportunities for people to work when the mercantilist-protectionist elite few who rule the many object, as cited in THE CHANGING FACE OF DEMOCRATS (Amazon.com) and http://www.claysamerica.com.

“Nobody who is historically literate will forget that it was the Tories that ruled Britain through most of the 1930s and all of the 1980s, the only two decades in which the dole queues topped three million.”

Compare:

“MacDonald’s Labour Party was not radical in economic thinking, and was wedded to the orthodoxy of Victorian classical economics with its emphasis on maintaining a balanced budget at any cost.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression_in_the_United_Kingdom

This GCSE history of the 1930s depression in Britain is certainly rough and ready but better than believing the depression years of the 1930s were just a Conservative conspiracy:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/history/mwh/britain/depressionrev1.shtml

In fact, compared with the American experience – where national GDP fell by a quarter – much of Britain fared fairly well during the 1930s after the trough of the slump in 1931 when Ramsay MacDonald was PM. If we look around, we can easily find roads and roads of semi-detached houses in towns and cities in the southern half of Britain built for sale in the 1930s as speculative development on the basis of the prevailing low interest rates, which is hardly a convincing sign of desperate straights and pervasive poverty.

The severity of the depression in the north and in south Wales was very different but it is wrong to suppose that was the general state of Britain in the 1930s or that Britain’s experience of the depression was uniquely bad in Europe.

In 1943, John Major was born in St Helier’s Hospital, Carshalton, which had opened in 1938 as a focal point in what was and still is the largest council estate in south London. Other large council housing estates were built at about the same time in other cities – such as the Braunstone estate in Leicester:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braunstone

From a speech in 1948 by Herbert Bowden MP (Lab):

“Economists who have, particularly during the years between the wars, made a study of the relative affluence of different cities in this country and of the Continent, have told us from time to time that Leicester stood throughout Europe as the second most prosperous city.”
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debate/?id=1948-10-26a.8.7

Which provides a rather different perspective.

Newflash…

Nick Robinson nearly came in his pants live on the BBC at the Tory shindig.

He does not even try to hide his bias..

I wonder how this press report relates to that newsflash:

“Top BBC presenters are setting up their own companies to reduce their tax bill in light of Labour’s new 50 per cent top rate. They are saving thousands of pounds by using the avoidance tactic – at the expense of the rest of the public.

“Insiders say the BBC has advised them to set up ‘service companies’ so that they can convince the tax man they are legitimately working as freelancers. . .

“Not all the BBC’s big names have done so: employees on the payroll include Huw Edwards, the 10 O’Clock News presenter; Evan Davis, of the Today programme, and Nick Robinson, the BBC’s political editor.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/6259112/BBC-presenters-set-up-companies-to-avoid-50-per-cent-tax-rate.html

Bob B illustrates the foolishness of relying on wikipedia as a source of information, with his statement that

“MacDonald’s Labour Party was not radical in economic thinking, and was wedded to the orthodoxy of Victorian classical economics with its emphasis on maintaining a balanced budget at any cost.”

McDonald and Snowdon as individuals subscribed to this classical orthodoxy, but it was not the consensus in the party as a whole, the majority were more influenced by the underconsumptionist theories of John Hobson. And the Labour Party were also the first ones to serious bring Keynesianism into mainstream politics, at the instigation of Oswald Mosley, supported by Ernie Bevin, and lefts like Nye Bevan and AJ Cook.

McDonald and Snowdon had to break with Labour and form a national government with the Tories to promote their pusuit of balanced budgets.

Tax cuts for business men, a tax cut for the richest 3%

While pensioners are to work longer for a state pension and ill people to be dragged off incapacity benefit to pay for it and the debt.

#20: “McDonald and Snowdon had to break with Labour and form a national government with the Tories to promote their pusuit of balanced budgets.”

And only 52 Labour MPs were returned to Parliament in the general election of October 1931 at which candidates supporting the National Government won a resounding majority.

“And the Labour Party were also the first ones to serious bring Keynesianism into mainstream politics”

That’s non-history.

Keynes was famously a co-author of a pamphlet for the Liberal Party in the general election of May 1929 with the title: Can Lloyd George Do It? in which Keynes advocated public works programmes to create jobs.

Keynes briefly visited Germany in January 1932 to lecture – a year before Hitler was offered the Chancellorship in Germany – see DE Moggridge: Maynard Keynes (1992) p.539. On his return, he wrote in the New Statesman: “Germany today is in the grips of the most powerful deflation any nation has experienced . . ”

There is evidence from Avraham Barkai: Nazi Economics (1990) that the Nazis lifted his policy ideas for public works programmes to alleviate unemployment in times of depression, contrary to the impeccably orthodox advice they were receiving at the time from Schacht, the banker and effectively their principal economic adviser and fixer.

Contrary to popular mythology, Roosevelt’s New Deal in America had nothing to do with Keynes’s ideas and Roosevelt declared that he firmly believed in balanced budgets. However, an attempt to balance the Federal budget in 1937 resulted in a sharp downturn of the American economy.

Funny I do not remeber many of you lot moaning when the labour party did the same thing, I’ve lost the use of my legs after an accident, yet I have been out picking up litter under a labour party training program, you lot on here thought it was a great idea, now the Tories are doing the same thing you attack it.

I know what the Tories are like, but not forgetting under the Tories my benefits would be standing at £130 now not the £86.90 they are.

Labour cut benefits to the bloody bone.

The fairy dust the Tories are using came from the Labour party stores .

Robert @ 24

Seriously? You have never read anyone on this site complain about Labour’s attacks on the disabled? You haven’t visited too many times then, I take it?

I’m not at all convinced that the numbers on Incapacity Benefit will really reduce all that much unless seriously dodgy changes are made to the testing process. people are tested pretty regularly even now.

Indeed. And yet somehow, without bothering to specify what changes they want to make to the IB system, they can say how many people they expect to move off IB as a result. How does that work then? Could it be that they’ve decided on a more-or-less arbitrary number that they think will make the books look better, and they’ll just figure out some mechanism for hitting it later?

Workhouse Purnell criticising the proposals! Probably thinks the Tories are being too soft.

The Mail reckons 500,000 IB claimants are just too lazy to compete with Eastern Europeans.

They only reached this conclusion, of course, after exhaustive research, and didn’t at all just pluck that figure out of thin air to support the Tories.

Seriously, you only have to look at these ideas for about five seconds to realise how ludicrous they are.

If you move 500,000 people from IB to JSA, all you’re doing is flooding Job Centres with the mentally and physically ill, who’ll be about as popular with employers as ex-convicts, especially since there’s already 5 fit and healthy unemployed for every 1 job vacancy.

As for the training schemes they’ll be putting former IB claimants through (after they’ve been laughed out of every job interview over a 12 month period), they’re hardly going to cure these people of their health problems, or re-write the huge gaps in their CV that say “I was sick and claiming IB.”

Of course, I’ve fallen into the trap of acting like none of this was already happening pretty much the same way under Nu-Labour.

Had to laugh at Toynbee in the Guardian suddenly getting outraged by it all – the Guardian’s political pundits had their noses so far up Purnell’s behind last year that I’m sure they could still pick out his foul Orc-like scent from across a crowded room.

The Mail is today persisting with the assertion that 20% (or 500,000) of those on IB are “thought able, but unwilling to work.”

Thought by whom, and on what evidence?

It’s truly reprehensible journalism.