ThunderDragon Blog

This is precisely the sort of tax cut that the Conservatives should be proposing. Removing tax on savings for basic rate tax payers will encourage people to save more, and reward those who do so.

David Cameron is definitively right when he says that

We need to make a really big change: from an economy built on debt to an economy built on saving. From a country and government that has lived beyond its means to one that lives within its means.

Because we do. This recession has been caused by over-spending andpeople who live way beyond what they can possibly afford to in the real world. Life on the never-never was always going to collapse at some point when it all caught up with you. This is one way of helping it not happen again.

Also, this £4.1 billion is also effectively funded. Yes, it may be by the ever-so-vague “efficiency savings”, but there is a real proposal there - that only planned spending increases on health, education, defence and international development would go ahead under a Conservative government, with all other departments having their increase in spending reduced from about 4% above inflation to just 1%. Which, handily, amounts to about £5 billion.

This isn’t a tax cut that would, or could, get us out of this recession. It undoubtedly is tinkering aound the edges - after all, £4 billion or so is peanuts on a national basis, however much is sounds in itself. But it is the sort of thing that helps those who help themselves, and is restricted to the lower-paid workers so cannot be attacked as a “tax break for the rich” as the ‘rich’ can’t benefit from it.

The Independent on Sunday had a piece on political advertising, and asked advertising agencies to develop posters that could be used by the main parties in an election.

The Conservatives got by far the best posters, with both of the ones developed for Labour being really rather weak. One depicted Cameron as Margaret Thatcher, which I can’t see really working - anyone who can be easily influenced by the Thatcher image would already be a staunch Labour or Tory voter, and the other “X-factor” poster just doesn’t really work. It is definitely far easier for the Conservatives to market themselves at the moment than for Labour, since they’ve caused the problems we face and suffer from. [And the posters developed for the use of the Lib Dems could far more easily used as Conservative posters.]

The best poster of the lot is definitely the one below:

This ties in well with the Conservative’s “tax bombshell” campaign, and is a simple but striking design. Though I wouldn’t have the white box at the bottom, which kinda distracts from the message.

Labour are going to struggle to develop any kind of simple-but-effective campaign that will actually sway people when it comes to the next election. The Consevatives have almost the opposite problem - how to keep any advertising campaign focused enough. And as for the Lib Dems, they’ll need to find some way to attack Labour that doesn’t send votes to the Conservatives. And that will be hard.

Members of the Shadow Cabinet will continue to be part-time. Why? Because they don’t want to lose the money and perks the outside jobs will bring them.

A month ago when this idea was first mooted in the press, I said:

Rather than banning them, making them subject to approval would be a better course of action - based on the amount of time they take, the potential for a conflict of interest to arise with regards to a Shadow Cabinet member’s portfolio, as well as more personal contexts. Alongside an understanding that by six months before a general election is expected, all outside appointments are dropped.

After all, if they want to be in the Shadow Cabinet and the likelihood of the Cabinet, then they need to be prepared to put the effort in.

And I think that should definitely be the case.

Frankly, any member of the Shadow Cabinet who refuses to reduce the number of their external roles and appointments to a manageable level should be sacked from the Shadow Cabinet rather than be given the opportunity to resign. Even if that figure is William Hague.

They are in the front line of politics; the people who should be pretty much expecting to be Cabinet ministers after the next general election. They should be developing policy and arguments, they should be opposing [when appropriate] government proposals in their area and offering well though out alternative suggestions - not lining their pockets.

Perhaps the reason why the Conservatives are not as far ahead in the polls as they were is because when an emergency strikes and the quick decisive development of policy across all government areas is required half of the Shadow Cabinet is busy elsewhere. And this has allowed the Conservatives to be characterised by Labour as the “do nothing” party.

In many ways, it comes down to Cameron’s strength as a leader. If he cannot encourage his own front bench to give up some of their income and dedicate more time to the cause, how can he run the party? How can he expect volunteer activists like myself who receive no money from politics at all to give up our time and money campaigning and donating?

When we interviewed for a new PPC for Watford, one question I asked the applicants was how much time they could dedicate to the job, unpaid as it is - and I expected it to be pretty much their top priority. If we expect such dedication from our candidates, how can we expect any less from our Shadow Cabinet?

David Cameron needs to put his foot down and say that any Shadow Cabinet member who cannot or will not dedicate themselves properly to their job as a front bencher should consider themselves fired.

Bob Quick, Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner in charge of specialist operations and counter-terrorism, accused the Conservative Party of creating a nespaper story that he claims put his family at risk. And now he has had to retract the allegations and apologise unreservedly after David Cameron completely rejected the claims and stated categorically that the Conservative party had had nothing to do with it.

But what now? Quick has apologised; surely that should be the end of it? Well… no.

Considering Quick’s position and specific role in the police force, as head of counter-terrorism, he needs a finely tuned political antennae, which he has proven beyond all doubt that he does not possess. He should have known that he had to either kept his mouth shut or be able and prepared to name names . He did entirely the wrong thing, and lashed out; not exactly a trait we want in the head capital’s counter-terorism unit.

But not only that, his outburst to one single newspaper story is rather over the top - even if it had been arranged by the Conservative Party. If he can’t handle that, how is he going to react to a full-blown terrorism attack?

Quick should be moved sideways in to another job, one where he will not be invovled in political investigations, because he has proven to be incapable of handling it.

The more important issue, however, is the politicisation - or “Ian Blairisation” - of the police. It needs to stop - and maybe the swift removal of Quick will do just that.

I have just returned from a selection meeting where the Watford Conservative Association selected its new Prospective Parliamentary Candidate, to replace Ian Oakley, who resigned from the post and the party after being arrested in connection with a hate campaign carried out against Watford Lib Dems - to which he later pled guilty and was sentenced.

But we have moved on from that and are looking forward to the future with our new PPC, Richard Harrington.

Richard was the best candidate from a very high-quality shortlist, the rest of whom will, I am sure, find the right constituency for them.

UPDATE: Richard has already launched his campaign website. Great start, considering he was only selected a matter of hours ago!

The Conservative Party is claiming to be the “party of the internet” with the appointment of Jeremy Hunt as “online spokesman“. Writing on the Blue Blog, he said:

It’s not enough just to have the best policies or the right people in politics these days. What’s the point of having a debate if the message doesn’t reach anybody? Or if you can’t listen to what people are saying they want?

New media offers up a wealth of opportunity for political parties to engage with the public - and the election of Barack Obama shows that the political party who wins the online battle gains a huge advantage.

So far so good.

The Conservatives have led the way when it comes to online campaigning. From Webcameron to the Stand Up Speak Up grassroots policy discussion, from livestreaming the 2008 Party Conference to having the biggest Facebook page of any UK party, we have embraced technology as a way to better engage with the public.

Our commitment to online campaigning was shown by our recent revamp of Conservatives.com, which has given the Party the most up-to-date, informative and accessible website in mainstream British politics.

This isn’t quite true, is it? Whilst the Conservatives have the best website of the British political parties, they’ve hardly been pushing the boundaries of the internet. Yes, they have have some good responses to the PBR, including the national debt counter, the widget showing each persons share of the national debt. But Labour had a better first bit of economic propaganda.

Today, however, the Conservatives have a good online wheeze - a free to download mobile ringtone of Brown’s “saved the world” statement at PMQs. Extremely clever, though quite how popular it will turn out to be, I’m not so sure. But it is a good start.

Hunt does finish his post really quite well though, in a way that bodes well for the future of Tory online campaigining, saying:

The internet provides political parties with the opportunity to reach a wider audience, especially floating voters and those not already engaged with politics. And my job is to make the Conservatives the party that best embraces the new politics of the internet, through blogs, videos, social networking sites and YouTube – and, ultimately, by ensuring Conservatives.com the best political site on the internet.

If you achieve that, you could indeed be responsible for winning the Conservatives the next election. So go on, show us what you’ve got!

The credit crunch/recession/”downturn”, whatever you want to call it, is now directly affecting politics. More than 10% of the staff at CCHQ is to be made redundant and a pay and hiring freeze is to be introduced as the income stream slows down.

What has happened is that the Conservatives failed to use the donations they were being given in the good times most efficiently, but instead needlessly wasted money. And the Conservatives are affected more than Labour because they rely on individuals donating money, rather than bankrolling by the unions.

It is disappointing that they have not used the money party members, including myself, have donated more effectively. But hopefully they have now woken up to this and will do more so in the future.

I am going to make a donation of as much as I can afford to the Conservative Party so that they can continue to fight Labour and hopefully achieve our aim of a Conservative government after the next election, whenever that may be held.

And I urge you to as well. Donate!

Are the police going to charge Damian Green “aiding and abetting misconduct in public office”?

Yet the News of the World claims that Green is “in the clear”:

TORY MP Damian Green and his Home Office mole will NOT be charged in the leak scandal, the News of the World can reveal.

Prosecutors say papers seized from Mr Green’s Commons office cannot be used as evidence in a trial.

They add that cops FAILED to conduct a proper search in Westminster.

Yet the Telegraph says that Scotland Yard is determined to “motor on”:

senior officers met with lawyers from the Crown Prosecution Service last week to discuss possible charges against Damian Green and Christopher Galley, who are under investigation over allegations of leaking confidential information…

Senior officials at Scotland Yard, who have been accused of being heavy handed, denied yesterday that they are “backtracking” over their actions or seeking to drop the case. They remain satisfied that they acted lawfully and proportionately, even though there is understood to have been disagreement at the highest level within the Met over whether Mr Green’s arrest should go ahead.

Which is true? They patently can’t both be. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Why does past political convictions mean that a politician should resign their post? Surely what someone has believed in the past means little in the present day? Political beliefs change over time. Mine certainly have in the three years since I started blogging.

Yes, a political journey from the IRA to the Conservative and Unionist Party is quite some trek. But obviously one that Maria Gatland has made. In the 1970s, she was involved in IRA gun-running, but in 1972 left the movement, and in 2008 she was a cabinet minister in a Tory council.

It has been more than thirty years since she left the IRA. Surely that is a long enough time for it to not really matter any more?

In my view, almost certainly. After all, thirty years ago I wasn’t even born.

The Conservatives are beginning to really start pushing the online battle back towards Labour. I commented a while back on the Labour’s far more web-orientated economic propaganda - even though it was pretty useless, as it was too large to be embedded in a blog, even in the main post!

But since then, the Conservatives have really been developing a far better approachm with the landing page being turned into a national debt counter, depicting Alistair Darling and a elongated red box.

And now they’ve developed a real time widget showing our personal share of the national debt created by Brown and Darling. Which, unlike the Labour embeddable tool, can actually fit in a blog sidebar, or in a header like I have.

Alongside this, they have also developed the iconic poster a bit further, with the tax bombshell now unwrapped [click to enlarge]:

However, what they haven’t done is put a dedicated page on their website to deal with the economic crisis or tax bombshell. There is nothing to develop these points further, to explain what they mean to us. Yes, there are speeches, news articles and the like, but they really need to be together in one place and part of a developed/developing narrative. And a repository of propaganda, so we don’t have to rely to emails and newspapers to get it, and so that they don’t have to rely on blogs to publicise it. This page - or pages - should also linked to from the tax bombshell header, so it’s more than just a pretty picture on the site.

So the Conservatives are on the way to using the internet a bit better, but there’s still a looong way to go.