The ThunderDragon

One of the policies to come of the Conservative conference last week which I particuarly like is this one:

I want to put an end to the situation where welfare is an entitlement. Instead I want our welfare state to become a two-way contract.

Our job is to help people when they are down - their job is to do everything they can to get themselves and their families back on their feet again…

Everyone who could work will be expected to take up the offer of support. They will be expected to get out of the house and to do something every day. If they won’t, then they will automatically lose their benefits until they do.

We’ll introduce mandatory independent medical assessments for people claiming incapacity benefit to see who can and cannot work. Anyone claiming the benefit on a false premise will lose it immediately. We’ll equip those with the potential to return to work with specialist support to do so. But if they refuse that support, they will also lose their benefits…

If people refuse reasonable job offers they’ll lose their benefits and if they refuse an offer three times, then they’ll be excluded from the benefits system for three years.

And for those who don’t manage to find work and claim jobseekers allowance for more than two years, we’ll introduce a year-long community work programme to get them back into the work habit.

No one benefits from sitting at home on benefits doing nothing.

In a nutshell, it is giving putting the opportunity in to the hands of the people. They will get the opportunities, and they have a simple choice: take them or lose their benefits. Which is more than fair enough - taxpayers are not a charity.

This is similar to ideas I have previously proposed. If we make it too comfortable for people to sit at home on benefits, why would they bother going to out to get a job? We must ensure that it isn’t easy for people to do this. They should either be actively looking for a job or taking part in training - or both.

It is very simple, and absolutely no-one with even half a brain can object to this proposal.

Previously published at The People’s Republic of Birmingham.

The tagline of this years Conservative Conference is “Plan For Change”. Change, moving forward, a new start. That is what this conference was meant to show – the Conservative’s setting out their plan for their future government. However, events have rather overtaken them.

They have set out several policies and points of principle, such as:

• Freezing council tax;
• Giving schools budget freedom;
• Scrapping authoritarian child databases;
• Not releasing prisoners early just because;
• Pledging to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty; and, quite possibly most importantly
• Not matching Labour’s spending plans if the country can’t afford it.

But this has been totally overtaken by world events: the economic crisis caused by Gordon Brown and the Labour Party. And so the mantra of the Conservatives yesterday has been less “plan for change” and more “let’s work together”, by not “playing politics” with the economy.

This is an immeasuably responsible response in this economic climate. Any other response would have been extremely irresponsible. Yet it does rather undermine the “plan for change” motto, and rather allow the Conservatives to be associated with “more of the same”.

Unfortunately for the Conservatives, their conference has been overcome by the crisis, meaning that the plans for change that they have put forward have failed to dominate the headlines like they otherwise would have. However, they are out there, just not anywhere near as highly publicised in the media. What this will do is mean that the impression that the Conservatives are policy-lite will continue, and unfairly.

The Conservatives are planning for change, but able to work with other parties when necessary for the good of the country.

The big announcement in George Osborne’s speech today was that the next Conservative government is to freeze council tax for two years. Not as electrifying as last year’s inheritance tax proposal, and harder for a Labour government to steal.

Obsorne said:

The country may not be able to afford upfront tax cuts because borrowing is too high but families facing the squeeze cannot afford tax rises either.

So we’re going to go into partnership with local councils. If they find matching savings in their town hall, we will give them these savings from Whitehall.

The next Conservative Government will freeze your council tax for at least two years.

Every council tax bill of every family in every council that takes part will be frozen.

As a proposal, it’s not the most inspiring. But it is a good solid proposal. Even better, it puts control in the hands of local councils who can decide whether or not they will choose to take part. If they make the wrong choice, they will face the wrath of their electorate when they next get a chance to vote.

It is encouraging public services to save money through doubling that benefit, and ensuring that it passed directly on to the people.

Two indisputable reasons to vote Conservative:

• “A Conservative government could hold a referendum on the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty even if it has already been ratified, William Hague has said.”
  Unfortunately it’s still only a “could”, but it is promising.
  
• “A flagship database of every child living in England, which is due to be launched by the government next year, will be shutdown by a Conservative government.”
  Good to see their libertarian credentials.

Hopefully this conference will give us a great many more reasons.

The new Conservative website looks quite pretty. It is far prettier than the old version, certainly, and has more and better information on it. However, it is really quite “safe” in the end, and nothing is really very “eye grabbing” in aesthetic terms.

There is a nice number of sections on the site, such as policy, “where you live“, and the Conservative Wall.

Plus the Blue Blog. With the blog, however, I would have liked to see it looking that bit different to the rest of the site, to make it look a little more individual. It really needs to be plugged far more than it is and linked to from all pages. But how useful it is will depend on the frequency and quality of the posts made - which is something to be evaluated in the future. [One change that needs to be amde now is is a bit of spelling correction - "comments" has two only two letter m's - not three.]

The real test of the site, however, will depend on the content and how it kept updated. Content is king for a political website - it needs to b kept constantly up-to-date and be interactive. The Wall just isn’t all that interactive.

Overall, I’d give the site about 8/10.

Compared to the new Labourand Lib Demsites, however, there is no denying that it is the most impressive.

David Cameron is to borrow Barack Obama’s slogan “Plan for Change” for the Conservative conference.

This does show a grest deal of confidence on the Conservatives’ part, even though to be fair the Conservatives are in a better political posiiton than the Democrats, as they are leading by ten points even after their opponents conference bounce and before their own. Even though the differences in the political systems mean that even with a 10% lead, winning would be hard for the Tories.

Cameron has begun his comeback against Brown after his conference speech, and espiecally his “not the time for a novice” line - which could be aimed at either Miliband and other rebels, Cameron or even, technically, Obama himself*:

Let’s look at the question of experience. Yes, this Prime Minister has got experience … he has got the experience of saying year after year ‘I have ended boom and bust’.

And yet now we face really difficult economic circumstances. Now, I don’t think that is the experience we need right now.

Buuuuurn.

So what the Conservatives need to do now is develop their policies so thst the people know exactly what they stand for and what they will do when in government.

Let’s plan for change.

* This actually sets up an interesting question: is Brown turning this into a copy of the American presidential battle - with himself as McCain and Cameron as Obama? Perhaps not the wisest decision.

Lord Ashcroft is exploiting a loophole in the political donations laws in order to fund the Conservative Party. He is sending his money from a tax haven in Central America through one of his British-registered companies.

This money is entirely legal for the Conservatives to accept.

However, it does appear to break the spirit of the law over political donations. Whilst no-one can blame Ashcroft or the Conservatives for doing this - especially not the Labour Party, with their own actually illegal donations - that doesn’t mean that it should be allowed to continue.

Loopholes of any sort shouldn’t be allowed to exist once they are discovered. The Electoral Commission should endeavour close this one off as soon as possible, and Ashcroft should cease chanelling money in this way immediately - and instead donate it personally.

… and Cameron’s to the Right.

Gordon Brown is now seen as being much farther away from the position of the average voter than Tony Blair was when he was Prime Minister…

The poll… shows that voters have sharply revised their view of Mr Brown over the past year, seeing him as much more left-wing than in early September 2007, at the end of his brief honeymoon as Prime Minister. This is the biggest change for any leader or party over the period.

However, Mr Brown is narrowly nearer both to the Centre and to the average voter than David Cameron, who is seen as shifting to the right…

The poll therefore shows that, despite the shift away from the average voter by Mr Brown and Labour, Mr Cameron and his party still have a long way to go to be where the average voter is. On a five-year comparison, the Tories have, however, moved 0.30 nearer the Centre, Labour 0.12 farther away. (The Times)

However, there is one huge issue over this poll: because it has been created entirely on a Left-Right one-dimensional sliding scale.

[Sidenote: Clegg is seen as only very slightly more towards the centre than Brown in this poll.]

This is a rubbish scale. Politics is so much more complicated than can ever be expressed in one dimension. Even the two dimensional scale leaves much to be desired, but it is as good as we can get. To start with, it includes “Libertarian” and “Authoritarian”, which can cross the Left-Right axis. So, if they want this sort of poll to be taken seriously, they need to plot it on the two-dimension scale.

As it is, this poll shows little about how the public actually view the parties.

As Conference season is very nearly upon us, it’s time to start a new mwm based on what you would say if you had a platform at any party conference. [Idea nicked from Mike Ion.]

So here goes:

Conference,

I believe that we, the Conservative Party, are once more ready to take office. Let’s be frank - for a while, we had lost it, as can sometimes happen. But now, we have developed and moved on. We have taken a look at ourselves, done our navel gazing, and then we have taken a look at modern Britain and seen how we can make it better. And we are now in the process of setting out our vision for the future, after the destruction befalling us from a decade and more of Labour mis-management.

When Labour took power in 1997, Britain was at the start of an economic upturn. Thst continued, despite the policies they pursued which has driven our economy to the edge of a precipice. Rather than spending that time developing and reforming our public services, they resorted to the tried-and-failed Labour tactic of tax-and-spend.

Last time they tried that, we had to go in and fix it. We had to reform the state and bring back economic security to the nation, because they broke it.

And it looks like we need to try and fix it all over again.

The truth is, as the Chancellor recently alluded to, is that we have been screwed by Labour. They promised much, took the money from our wage packets to pay for it, and then squandered it. Time and time again. Gordon Brown failed when he was at the Treasury and the economy survived despite him. But he took it right to the precipice, and as soon as the world economy slowed, the hollowness of his boasts about economic competence were revealed.

The country is clearly calling for us to step up our game and set out our stall with how we can fix it - and so far they seem to like what they are seeing. In every vote and in every poll, we are the clear winners. But now, the present is the time that we must lose sight of. We must not get cocky and see the next election as “ours”. Instead, we must respect that it is up to the people, the voters of this country, whether or not we are allowed to govern them for one Parliament.

Our country needs us. But it is up to us to go to them and tell them what it is we stand for - the freedom for them to spend their own money however they like, the freedom for them to do what they like in their own homes without government snooping or disapproval of them drinking more than than they say we should or smoking at all, and greater protection from criminals through putting real police on the street.

Our politics is about reform - change for the better, rather than for the sake of change. About cutting waste and providing more efficient and less polluting services. About making Britain cleaner, greener, and safer.

Thank you.

To write their own ‘pretend’ conference speech, I tag:

• Letters From A Tory
• Tony Sharp
• Nich Starling
• James Graham
• Sadie Smith
• Dave Cole
• Ordovicious
• And anyone else who wants to.

Completely and utterly deluded. Especially when polls are suggesting that after the next election, there may be a Conservative Commons majority of 260. That Brown thinks that Labour will win the next election really shows how separated he is from the real world.

I agree with Eric Pickles, who says:

The analysis is that it is now impossible for [Labour] to win the election, but it’s perfectly possible for [the Conservatives] to lose it… We can’t take a 20 per cent lead in the polls for granted.

Labour certainly appear finished, and it is unlikely that a change of leader will make any real difference at all. The Conservatives, however, certainly can’t take any poll lead for granted. We an’t be complacent. We need to keep on working to get a raft of policies and a united vision for what a Conservative government will do, and communicate that to the people between now and the next election.