Britain becoming more liberal
The 26th British Social Attitudes Survey has just been published, and has some interesting findings.
They show strong support for liberal social values, a decline in support for redistribution and traditional left-wing economic intervention to help the worse off, and overwhelming opposition to spending cuts in health and education.
It has prompted a mixture of gloating about how Britain is shifting to the right and whining about evil librulses not “tolerating” homophobia from our friends in the conservative movement, so let’s have a look at what it really says:
On social attitudes, Britain is becoming more liberal, except for when it comes to drugs:
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Exclusive: Campaigners advising Cameron compares NHS to “Nazi” system
contribution by Zarathustra
Nurses for Reform have been featured on Liberal Conspiracy before. They’re a campaigning group with links to the libertarian Adam Smith Institute and ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation think-tanks.
Last month they met with David Cameron to discuss their ideas, which included wholesale privatisation of the NHS, the scrapping of national pay agreements for health workers and nurses being given brands like consumer products.
The idea of competing brands of nurses (None of yer manky Tesco nurses working in our hospital. We only use Sainsburys nurses) might sound daft, but this weekend Nurses For Reform crossed the line from silly to downright offensive.
Their leading spokesperspon has been strongly implying the NHS was created along Nazi principles.
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In praise of Alan Duncan
I have no idea yet whether Alan Duncan is an asset or a liability to the cause of penal reform, but he certainly appears to be an ally, and is the author of two cracking soundbites:
Ms Crook wrote: ‘Alan Duncan said that the slogan “prison works” was repulsively simplistic. Anyone in politics should work to improve society and there was no more useful target than offenders.’
[...]
Ms Crook added: ‘He said, “Lock ’em up is Key Stage 1 politics.”’ Key Stage 1 is the first part of the primary-school curriculum studied by children as young as five.
To which the Mail has helpfully editorialised:
Suggesting that an old-style tough Tory approach to crime is worthy of a five-year-old will infuriate the party’s grassroots activists.
Well, if they’re going to act like five-year-olds…
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Tory Whip labels Cadbury workers ‘whingers’
It’ll be interesting to see what Mike Smithson makes of this story over at Political Betting…
CADBURY workers fearing for their jobs have been branded “whingers” by a Midland MP…
Mr Wiggin – whose Leominster constituency in Herefordshire includes Cadbury’s Marlbrook plant – said:
“Who wants to hire a whingeing workforce when you can have a positive upbeat one?”
Wiggin, who’s currently sitting on a hefty majority of 13,167 over the second-placed Lib Dems, from the last general election, would ordinarily be considered to be a safe as houses but he does seem to have a knack of opening his mouth and putting his foot right in it, as the Telegraph noted during its coverage of the MPs expenses scandal:
Mr Wiggin, the MP for Leominster in Herefordshire, has been contacted by John Lyon, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, over his claims for £13,000 in council tax and household bills between 2004 and 2006.
Mr Lyon is acting on a complaint from one of Mr Wiggin’s constituents who believes that the MP – a contemporary of David Cameron at Eton – may have claimed thousands of pounds too much.
The MP has accused the constituent, Jim Miller, a self-employed writer, of being a “trouble-maker”. He asked whether Mr Miller was “on benefits” and said: “His time would be better spent finding a job than pursuing a vendetta.”
Could Wiggin now be a more attractive target for the Lib Dems than his majority at the last election suggests, especially as his CV prior to entering parliament includes stints as a Forex trader with UBS, an associate directorship with Kleinwort Benson and a management position in the Forex department of Commerzbank?
After all, he seems to be a right merchant banker from where I’m sitting?
Goldsmith also goes for shameless pandering
If you thought the Tories’ ‘broken society’ meme was bit dystopic, this will really have you reaching for the bottle. According to Zac Goldsmith, Conservative candidate for Richmond Park and everyone’s favourite uber-green non-dom, we are no longer living in a civilised country. Can’t wait to see that on his election posters.
In a post which implicitly supports euthanasia, Goldsmith contrasts the seemingly lenient sentence given to a convicted paedophile with a seemingly harsh sentence for a woman who ended the life of her beloved but brain damaged son.
The problem, you see, is those pesky “sanctimonious liberal commentators” who “will argue that the mark of a civilised society is its willingness to apply justice in the face of public opinion. For them, this mother is a law-breaker, just like Sweeney, and she should be punished as such”.
Now, if I was going to write about how two court cases reveal what an uncivilised country we are, I’d probably think twice before accusing anyone else of sanctimony.
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Cameron shamelessly exploits crime for political gain
The Press Association today reports:
Tory leader David Cameron will warn that Britain is in a “social recession” even deeper than its economic one as he steps up pre-election campaigning. And the Tory leader will point to the torture of two young boys as an extreme symptom of what he dubs Labour’s “moral failure” as he launches a raft of social policies.
“When parents are rewarded for splitting up, when professionals are told that it’s better to follow rules than do what they think is best, when single parents find they take home less for working more, when young people learn that it pays not to get a job, when the kind-hearted are discouraged from doing good in their community, is it any wonder our society is broken? We can’t go on like this.”
Mr Cameron will point to the brutal attack on the nine and 11-year-old boys in Edlington, South Yorkshire, by brothers aged 10 and 11 to reinforce his case.
It’s beggars belief that Cameron thinks it is right for a party leader to shamelessly exploit such a brutal crime so he can simply take cheap political swipes. Does he plan to strengthen legislation and provision for domestic violence? Nope, nothing about that in here.
Perhaps he is advocating that every single family in the country is placed under supervision so nothing like this could ever happen? It’s a possibility but the details of any policies are still vague.
Oh wait, the murder of Jamie Bulger took place under a Conservative government. Perhaps that was the start of this “social recession”? I suppose under a Tory government there will no violent crime ever. Right?
Should Labour / Libdems be targeting Osborne instead?
contribution by Vinay Nair
At this Saturday’s Fabian Society annual conference, Vinay Nair made a presentation to the assembled audience arguing that both Labour and the Libdems should be aiming more directly at George Osborne, and asking whether the electorate were happy with him as Chancellor.
Vinay narrowly lost out to being voted the best policy idea to defeat the right. He used a presentation to make his point and we publish them below the fold. continue reading… »
The brazen cheek of brazen elitism
For an Old Etonian to promise a ‘brazenly elitist’ approach to state education – as Tory leader David Cameron has done this week – is nothing if not brazenly cheeky.
It’s a nice catchphrase of course, chiming as it does with the popular perception that something is wrong with the system, and that sex-crazed pothead Sirs and Misses of the type parodied in that Channel 4 comedy-drama a few years back bear most of the blame.
To be sure, there is nothing wrong in principle with offering more money to attract people to a sector where vacancies are hard to fill. That, the economics textbooks tell us, is how labour markets are supposed to work.
But let us not even pretend that any government is going to provide state school teachers with the kind of starting salaries that Oxbridge graduates can pull down in the City or at a City-oriented law firm.
This is the Conservatives ‘class war’
At the weekend Peter Oborne treated us to a treatise on how the Conservatives have put together the most radical program for government since Oliver Cromwell, or words similar to that effect.
But in reality, as yesterday’s launch of the party’s education policies showed, somehow managing to be even worse than Labour at reforming our benighted education system.
After all, it really ought to be an open goal. Even after almost 13 years under New Labour, still barely 50% manage to get 5 “good GCSEs”, a record so appalling that it can’t be stressed often enough.
There have been improvements made, although considering the amount of money pumped in it would be incredible if there hadn’t been, and diplomas as introduced by Ed Balls, is one of the few reforms which has been a step in the right direction.
So when Cameron then immediately decides that the most important thing which will decide whether or not a child succeeds is not their background, the curricula, the type of school or the amount of funding it receives but the person who teaches them, he’s on the verge of talking nonsense on stilts.
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Cameron: Isn’t the most socialist education system in the OECD brilliant!
It’s always a sure sign that the Tory faithful are happy when Tory bloggers start posting long extracts from one of Cameron’s policy speeches.
We’re going to begin at source – at recruitment – and make sure we get the best people into the profession. At the moment, not enough of our brightest people consider going into teaching, especially those in the subjects we need – like maths, and in the schools that would benefit most from their knowledge – tough inner-city ones…
We can get round this problem – we just need to learn from abroad. Finland, Singapore and South Korea have the most highly qualified teachers, and also some of the best education systems in the world, because they have deliberately made teaching a high prestige profession.
They are brazenly elitist – making sure only the top graduates can apply. They have turned it into the career path if you’ve got a good degree…
So we will end the current system where people with third class degrees can get taxpayers’ money to enter postgraduate teacher training. With our plans, if you want to become a teacher – and get funding for it – you need a 2:2 or higher.
But can you be sure that any of these high-flying graduates you want to attract can actually teach?
It’s also interesting to see Dave picking on Finland as one of the three countries cited as having an excellent education system.
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How the Tories u-turned on NHS plans
A few months ago I was hanging out at the back of a fringe event at the Tory conference, bored and exhausted and frankly wondering whether I could justify going home, when Mike Penning said something that suddenly made me start listening.
Penning, a shadow health minister, casually mentioned that a Tory government would take from the poor and give to the rich.
He didn’t put it in those terms, of course. But that, nonetheless, was the implication. The government, he said, had done all sorts of iffy things to the formula that distributes money around the NHS. They’d over-emphasised poverty. They’d under-emphasised age.
They’d done this for political reasons, to redirect cash to their own voters, and as a result a lot of sweet old ladies in nice, Tory constituencies were snuffing it with distressing speed.
The Tories would correct all that. They’d “de-politicise” that formula. No longer would those old ladies have to die.
So I looked into this. Yes, a press officer told me, this was actual policy.
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Cameron’s friends show how to destroy the BBC
Facing the outright fury of the Murdochs for daring to provide a free news website, as yet there wasn’t a set-out policy on how the BBC could be emasculated by the Tories.
Thankfully, Policy Exchange, the right-wing think-tank with notable links to the few within the Cameron set with an ideological bent has come up with a step-by-step guide on how destroy the BBC by a thousand cuts which doesn’t so much as mention Murdoch.
Not that Policy Exchange itself is completely free from Murdoch devotees or those who call him their boss. The trustees of the think-tank include Camilla Cavendish and Alice Thomson, both Times hacks, while Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph and who refused to pay the licence fee until Jonathan Ross left the corporation is the chairman of the board.
Also a trustee is Rachel Whetstone, whose partner is Steve Hilton, Cameron’s director of strategy. Whetstone was also a godparent to the late Ivan Cameron. The report itself is by Mark Oliver, who was director of strategy at the Beeb between 1989 and 1995, during John Birt’s much-loved tenure as director-general.
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Anti-fascist MEP threatens Tories with legal action on expulsion
Edward McMillan-Scott MEP may take legal action against the Conservative Party after an internal appeal panel upheld his expulsion from the party.
He says his treatment went beyond that of any Conservative MP involved in the Westminster expenses scandal, and that the five year ban contrasts with the two year expulsion of Den Dover, the former Tory MEP who was expelled for two years in 2008 when he refused to pay back “unduly” claimed expenses payments worth over £538,000.
This is not about me: it is about the values of the next British government … In the context of the Westminster expenses scandal, for which no Conservative was expelled, this will be seen by many as a serious case of double standards. The party seeks to prevent my candidacy in the next European election merely for taking a stand on matters of personal conscience. This raises very serious ethical, legal and political issues. [Telegraph]
The Tory NHS: Lies, Libels and Price-fixing
If you were to ask David Cameron to sum up the content of the Conservative Party’s draft health manifesto in three words then I dare say he’d reply, ‘decentralisation, accountability and transparency’.
Read the manifesto for yourself, and you’ll quickly find three much better words to describe it, ‘lies, libel and price-fixing‘.
Now, admittedly, you do expect that political parties will be somewhat economical with the truth in setting out their manifestos, but by any reasonable standards, the lie contained in this manifesto’s introduction is a whopper…
We understand the pressures the NHS faces. In recognition of its special place in our society, we are committed to protecting health spending in real terms – we will not make the sick pay for Labour’s Debt Crisis. But that doesn’t mean the NHS shouldn’t change. When you’re more likely to die of cancer in Britain than most other countries in Europe -
You are not more likely to die of cancer in Britain than in most other European countries as a peer reviewed study of estimated cancer incidence and mortality rates in 39 European countries, which was published in 2007 in ‘Annals of Oncology’, clearly demonstrates. continue reading… »
It’s not class war, Dave, it’s just character building…
Does it really matter that that David Cameron is an Eton-educated scion of the aristocracy whose entirely life history has been one of relative privilege and ease?
According to some people, especially Tories, such a characterisation of David Cameron is not only unfair but entirely unjustified and tantamount to engaging in crude class warfare. To refer critically to his privileged background, upbringing and education is to label him a toff and expose your own deep-seated class prejudice.
Personally, I think that’s a complete load of old rot.
Cameron’s privileged background does matter but not because he’s a toff; the flaws and limitations he’s starting to exhibit are by no means the sole preserve of the aristocracy and its offspring. Rather its because, like Tony Blair, who’s own road to high office followed a trajectory that was, in many important respects, similar to that which Cameron is now traversing; Cameron is showing worrying signs of being a dilettante, of being the just the kind of Oxbridge-educated ex-public schoolboy for whom the veneer imparted by his upbringing and education masks a deep-seated lack of intellectual rigour.
It matters because life, for David Cameron, has been, for the most part, far too easy and far too short on genuine adversity and the kinds of difficult personal experiences that, once upon a time, would have been universally referred to as ‘character building’. continue reading… »
Belief We Can Change Into
With politics, as with relationships, there are certain times when you wish they’d just lie to you a little harder.
This week, for instance, with the election months away and the Tory campaign bursting onto billboards across the country in all its terrible definitely-unairbrushed glory, it’d be nice if someone in government was making some sort of noise to persuade the people of Britain that they really do have a choice in their political leadership.
Amidst all the filibustering, the clumsy cloak-and-dagger backstairs plotting over a last-minute replacement for Gordon Brown, if it’s too much to ask that we actually be granted a degree of democratic self-determination, then it’d be nice if they were to at least pretend they have anything other than contempt for ordinary voters.
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Zac Goldsmith: Dense About Science
It looks like being a long, drawn-out general election campaign and that mean plenty of opportunities for politicians to demonstrate their scientific illiteracy and statistical ineptitude.
This is a field in which, as might readily be expected, the Tories have already taken an early lead courtesy of Cameron’s Greenwash Guru and ex-Non-Dom, Zac Goldsmith, who’s clearly failed to take to heart the first rule of writing fact-check articles; make absolutely sure your own facts are correct before you publish:
Every few months, an organisation called Sense About Science (SAS) issues a pamphlet that makes fun of celebrities getting their science wrong. It is full of what it regards to be false assertions by celebrities about the benefits of homeopathy and so on, and ends with an offer by the organisation to act as a fact-checking service.
Actually, Sense About Science’s Science for Celebrities series is an annual publication but that’s the least of Zac’s problems when compared to the abject intellectual dishonesty and general ineptitude of the rest of his commentary. continue reading… »
Cameron speech: pure (fridge magnet) poetry
Ever seen those fridge magnet poetry sets? I refer, of course, to the tasteful novelty items widely available in kitsch gift shops nationwide, where they typically sit alongside the double entendre coasters designed to appeal to camp sensibilities and endless racks of ‘world’s greatest dad’ mugs.
Well, I’ve just worked out who actually buys them. I defy you to look at David Cameron’s Conservative general election campaign launch speech yesterday and then tell me that his speechwriter does not own a SMEG adorned with hundreds of the damn things.
Oh, and for the benefit of working class readers with incorrigibly dirty minds, SMEG in this context refers to a range of posh retro style domestic appliances that are currently de rigueur in W11. OK?
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Taking apart Conservative party policies
contribution by reader ‘Donut Hinge Party’
Some time this month everyone’s expecting David Cameron to release his manifesto. The conventional narrative, “the Tories have no policies other than the inheritance tax one,” frankly isn’t true.
A quick skip over to conservatives.com will show a vast swathe of information about policy. Admittedly, much of it is woolly thinking about encouraging this and fostering that, but there are a few hard commitments, too.
I thought it might be interesting to fisk it and see how much actually makes its way to the final manifesto.
Now, I’m no partisan, so let me say here and there; not ALL of the policies are a load of rubbish. Although most of their ‘new’ policies are already in action: ensured support of those on Incapacity Benefit, minimum tariffs for crimes, councils publishing expenses online, flexible working hours for parents.
I like their energy ideas; get farmers to use their fallow land for wind turbines and biofuels. However, these are vastly outweighed by some of the ill conceived policies writ large.
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The Tories seek out wisdom of the crowds
Shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt says he’s going to “develop an online platform that enables us to tap into the wisdom of crowds to resolve difficult policy challenges”. Marina Hyde thinks the Tories may have solved the problem of their lack of policies. But with what significance?
The wisdom of crowds phenomenon observes that if you get a lot of people together and ask them to guess something – the weight of a pig at a county fair, say – then the more people you have guessing, the more likely they are to collectively get it right if you average out all the individual answers.
For every ridiculously far-out over-estimate, someone else under-estimates by the same margin. Eventually, the over- and under-valuations even each other out. The more people guessing, the closer the collective guess gets to a remarkable degree of accuracy.
The problem with applying such theorems to the realm of politics is that they only have purchase if the crowd or jury is being asked to discover something objectively certain. But politics is essentially conflict and struggle between clashing world-views. Large groups of people cannot discover the “correct” political policies, because the notion of “correct” politics is a chimera.
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