ThunderDragon Blog

Created by Tory Bear

What does Lord Tebbit mean by this comment?

If you sleep with dogs, you will get fleas.

Is his meaning:

1. Osborne secretly sleeps with canines;
2. Osborne has fleas;
3. Tebbit has slept with a dog and has caught its fleas, and is passing on the warning;
4. Tebbit wants to get his name in the papers and be recognised again.

Answers on a postcard…

Whatever it is that he has done, it’s not illegal.

So he had meetings with a rich Russian. And? So have lots of people. What the basic facts of this are:

• No money has been donated to the Conservative party by Deripaska or any of his companies
• No law has been broken.

The worst claim that can be made against Osborne is that he is guilty of having a lack of common sense and a malfunctioning of his political antennae.

No, he shouldn’t have been having meetings with a Russian billionaire, especially not when Britain is suffering from a recession. But he hasn’t done anything that is actually wrong - a view supported by the [Labour] chairman of the public administration select committee:

We are not talking about corruption here, there was no corruption. We’re not talking about law-breaking, there is no law-breaking. What there is is a massive misjudgement.

That’s it. A misjudgement, and no broken laws. So Gordon Brown can call for “the authorities” to intervene all he likes, but there is nothing to investigate.

Mandelson’s dealings with Deripaska, which appear to have been rather fogotten by the media recently, are worse considering his position then and now. And I don’t even think that he has done much wrong.

The most revealing thing that has come out of this is the apparent level of class snobbery that still exists today. Why does the family into which someone was born matter in the slightest? It’s what they have done that matters.

George [or "Gideon" as some bloggers seem determined to call him] Osborne has done nothing illegal and nothing wrong. All he has done is something rather silly - and that’s not a crime.

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.

Quite obviously the man who has presided over it, either as Chancellor, with responsibility for managing the nation’s finances and economy, or as Prime Minister, ultimately responsible for all govenment policy.

As Cameron said yesterday:

Who was it who said that he, and he alone, had rewritten the laws of economics to end boom and bust? The answer is our prime minister, the then chancellor, Gordon Brown. And my message to Gordon Brown is this: ‘You have had your boom, and your reputation is now bust.’

And George Osborne reiterated today:

While the regulation failed, the debt soared and no one called time on the age of irresponsibility

I’m not, however, convinced yet by the idea of an Office for Budget Responsibility. It’s almost as if they are saying that they don’t quite trust themselves to run the economy properly. But it can also be seen as an attempt to ensure that economic measures are not enacted in order to try and get short-term political benefits - and, when established, as a means by which all governments can be properly scrutinised when it coems to their economic policy and prevent another architect of an age of irresponsibility getting beyond their blueprints.

A very simple summary of the 2008 Budget:

Taxes: Up. Again.

And here is George Osborne’s videoed response to Brown’s Darling’s Budget:

Labour have already announced that they have stolen the Tories plans on Inheritance Tax and non-doms - and now they’re at it again.

This policy that Andy Burnham, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has just announced shows that Labour has no ideas or policies of their own. He claimed in an interview in the Telegraph today that there is a “moral case” for promoting the traditional family through the tax system - despite rejecting the policy in July when it was proposed by IDS, claiming that it would “discriminate” against some families.

So either they have decided that, actually, it doesn’t discriminate or they just don’t care that it does. Neither scenario is good for Labour.

What this shows is that Labour really do have no unique policies of their own. Brown is not leading the country but following the Conservatives. Osborne hit the nail on the head when he said:

Brown is obviously trying to shoot the foxes of Tory policies by claiming that he has the same. But considering that people are already pissed off at the fact that the two main parties are so close together in all but rhetoric, Brown’s attempts to make them even closer again will just disillusion people with him and his so-called “vision” for the country.

Stealing policies is one thing, but at least try and put some time between the policies you steal and longer between when they were first made and when you steal them. Labour just look even more weak, ineffective, and vision-less the more they poach Tory policies. Brown’s trying to win over the middle classes - he won’t this way. They are cleverer than that.

Image: Andy Burnham
Sources: BBC - article 1, article 2, article 3; The Telegraph