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Scott Colvin: As Labour faces electoral defeat, it is getting nastier

Scott Colvin worked for the Conservative Party under William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard. He is now a political consultant.

There are many upsides to my job as a political consultant in the private sector, but attending Labour Party conferences isn’t one of them. But despite my political differences with the other side, the banter is usually friendly and often amusing.

Something had changed this year. During my three days in Brighton this week I realised the full extent of the fear amongst Labour politicians and delegates about the outcome of the looming general election.

We have all seen the evidence for ourselves this week: Brown glaring at Adam Boulton before tearing off his microphone during a televised interview; the trade union leader ripping up a copy of the Sun newspaper on the conference platform; Peter Mandelson trying to belittle George Osborne in his key note speech on the basis that he happens to look young. I could go on.

But I also encountered it myself in many heated discussions with senior policy wonks and MPs. In particular, I was genuinely startled by the importance they all appear to place on Cameron and Osborne being former members of the Bullingdon Club.

Some of the people I spoke to about this in Brighton ended the conversations literally red in the face, seething with rage at the prospect of the next Prime Minister being a former member of a university club which, in their words, “hated poor people”. They genuinely believed that linking the Bulllingdon with Cameron alone would be enough to prevent swing voters choosing the Conservatives, and to motivate the Labour core.

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October 02, 2009 at 06:32 in Scott Colvin | Permalink | Comments (8)

Shane Frith: It is time to expose the real harm done in the developing world by the Western environmental lobby

Shane Frith is director of the classical-liberal think-tank Progressive Vision. He has worked for Conservative MPs in the UK and National Party MPs in his native New Zealand. He is a former chairman of the International Young Democrat Union, linking young people involved in centre-right political parties worldwide, including the Conservative Party.

On Tuesday, Progressive Vision launched a new campaign called Green Monitor. Whilst groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth are no doubt well intentioned, they too often advocate policies without reasonable scientific basis that can result in the death, injury and poverty of vulnerable groups in Africa and Asia. We intend to highlight the real harm done by these groups in the developing world.

Those of us who live in the developed world often look with bemusement, frustration or even anger at the activities of the Western environmental lobby. Sadly, the effects of the environmental movement on the millions in the developing world can be far more serious. Policies advocated by environmental groups have led to the deaths of millions, the blinding of countless others and the impoverishment of tens of millions.

Like many my first memories of DDT is from stories in the 1970s and 1980s about how bad this chemical was claimed to be. As a result of these claims and the resulting hysteria, DDT was banned, first of all in the developed and then increasingly in the developing world. An apparent triumph for the environmental movement and planet Earth!

Sadly, that is not how things have turned out. The initial research that condemned DDT as a dangerous chemical was deeply flawed. It turns out that DDT, used responsibly, is not as harmful to insects and bird life as the original reports suggested. In addition, the weight of scientific opinion finds that there are no detrimental affects to human health.

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October 01, 2009 at 06:32 in Shane Frith | Permalink | Comments (16)

Alistair Thompson: Not only is the rise in anti-social behaviour a result of Labour's irresponsible policies, but they have also prevented the police from getting to grips with the problem

Alistair Thompson is a councillor in Portsmouth and part of the City Seats Initiative in West Bromwich. He also runs Media Intelligence Partners with business partner Nick Wood, the former press secretary to Conservative leaders William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith.

Whilst listening to the Today programme yesterday morning I nearly choked on my toast, after hearing Nick Robinson announce that Gordon Brown was going to talk about getting tough on the thugs and hooligans who roam our streets. This new initiative we learnt has been driven by the tragic case of Fiona Pilkington and her daughter driven to suicide because of anti-social behaviour.

Why did I nearly choke? Simple, because over the last 12 years Labour have weakened our police, created a mismatch of different groups with a shared responsibility for tackling the scourge of bad behaviour. And the truth is that all of Labours tinkering, new laws, money wasted on police bureaucracy, human rights and time spent talking about these problems has achieved nothing, in fact the problems are getting worse.

Take a case that I have been involved in my work as a local councillor. In the past a phone call to the police would have been the trigger for action. Now I had to tell the residents that the Council would coordinate the inter-agency response, involving the Police, Housing Association and Council, but before this could happen my resident had to keep a diary of the problems.

This complicated process took months and in the end the resident started to accept these problems. I still have her diary as a reminder of just how broken the system has become. I firmly believe that this Labour tick box exercise is not designed to stop these pint-sized rambos from terrorising their locality but so the Home Office can point at all the activity that is taking place. Sir Humphrey eat your heart out!

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September 30, 2009 at 07:00 in Alistair Thompson | Permalink | Comments (31)

Kwasi Kwarteng: Britain needs a manufacturing base - and pure free markets cannot be relied on to deliver it

Kwasi Kwarteng was Conservative Candidate for Brent East at the General Election of 2005, Chairman of the Bow Group in 2006 and a candidate for the London Assembly in 2008. He holds a doctorate in Economic History from Cambridge University, has worked as an investment analyst, and is currently writing Ghosts of Empire, a book about the international legacy of the British Empire.

It’s not often I find myself agreeing with Lord Mandelson, but during his interview on the Today programme yesterday morning he did say something with which many Conservatives would agree: Mandelson said that he thought we should, as a nation, have a manufacturing base, as well as a financial one.

This is common sense. We tell people in tough times to learn new skills. We tell communities to diversify their sources of income. This also applies to countries. Sovereign nations like Kenya are constantly being told by the IMF not to rely on coffee or a few basic commodities, but to develop other industries and revenue streams.

What is the situation, however, of our own country, UK plc? We were the manufacturing nation of the world in the nineteenth century, but towards the end of the twentieth century we became reliant, to a very considerable degree, on financial services. Where did that lead us?

I believe the City of London to be one of the greatest achievements in the history of capitalism. We should all be proud of our traditions of finance. Yet saying this does not mean we should neglect manufacturing.

For too long, a crude free market ideology has prevailed in which badly run companies like British Leyland were allowed to disappear. Tory figures like Lord Heseltine, who famously boasted about intervening “before breakfast, at lunchtime, in the evening”, were lampooned by the high priests of free trade.

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September 29, 2009 at 06:42 in Kwasi Kwarteng | Permalink | Comments (109)

Bob Seely: Is Patriotism going to be the next big political idea?

Bob Seely is a former journalist who served with British forces in Iraq from June 2008 to February 2009.

Benedict Rogers’ excellent post on Shariah got me thinking about patriotism, and why it may well turn out to be the next big idea to hit British politics, as well as a potential dividing line between the Left and Right.

Patriotism has always been a tricky subject for many Britons. Like a good suit, it has generally been worn in an understated way. Even Conservatives, especially the more urban elements of the party, have sometimes appeared uncomfortable with patriotism. Overt displays, such as in China where schoolchildren sing the national anthem twice a day, are inconceivable in Britain, and would be greeted by near hysteria from the ‘liberal’ Left were they ever proposed.

Yet viewed from Shepherd’s Bush rather than the salons of Notting Hill, I believe that a moderate patriotism is not only important - as ConHome’s articles on the subject have already shown - but that it has the potential to play a major role in energising our inner cities as part of a wider renaissance of English civic and national identity.

First, what patriotism isn’t. Patriotism isn’t an excuse for being nasty to foreigners, as the Left shamelessly pretend, and it’s not a genie that once unleashed, will play into the hands of the racist right and re-create a new generation of Oswald Mosleys – indeed quite the opposite, it’s patriotism that’s likely to defeat the BNP, not define it.

Patriotism is a very natural condition, it’s a desire to love, cherish, and care for one’s society. Apart from love of family, it is about the most fundamental instinct known to mankind. Patriotism through much of modern history has often been seen as a moral virtue – during the 18th century, for example, supporting the anti-slavery movement was seen as an example of enlightened patriotism. In the US patriotism is the natural condition of (almost) every American, including new immigrants.

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September 28, 2009 at 06:08 in Bob Seely | Permalink | Comments (116)

Jacob Mchangama: A UK Bill of Rights should be the first step in a human rights (counter)-revolution

Jacob Mchangama is head of legal affairs the Danish think tank CEPOS and external lecturer of international human rights law at the University of Copenhagen. His recent paper The War on Capitalism: Human rights, political bias was published by the Adam Smith Institute in June.

The Conservative proposal to repeal the Human Rights Act and replace it with a British Bill of Rights is a sound idea. There is an urgent need to counter the influence of the revisionist and unilateral activism of the European Court of Human Rights at the domestic level.

When the United Kingdom ratified the European Convention on Human Rights, its language and drafting history clearly envisaged the Convention as protecting against authoritarian and totalitarian practices. The Convention therefore included only classic civil and political rights and freedoms that protect the individual freedom of citizens and ensure that coercive state action be justified and based on the rule of law.

This understanding of human rights owed much to British efforts during the drafting, and was in line with the British concept of freedom as pertaining to individuals and limiting the role of the state – a concept very much shaped by English historical developments such as the Glorious Revolution and the 1689 Bill of Rights.

It was these developments which inspired the American Declaration of Independence and its insistence on inalienable rights, which in turn would serve as the impetus towards the constitutionalization of the West, securing an unprecedented level of freedom and prosperity for Western Man.

However, the Convention’s original understanding has been radically altered by the interpretation of the Court. The Convention now confers a whole range of positive obligations – which are nowhere to be found in the wording – on the ratifying states. Thus the Convention’s emphasis on individual freedom has been supplanted by an increasing focus on the government’s duty to provide services and guarantees in an ever-greater number of policy areas traditionally left to parliaments and governments.

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September 27, 2009 at 07:00 in Jacob Mchangama | Permalink | Comments (33)

Andrew Mitchell MP: The tectonic plates of Zimbabwe are shifting

Andrew Mitchell MP, Shadow Secretary of State for International Development, recently became the first senior British politician to visit Zimbabwe in an official capacity in many years. Here, he writes about the progress he witnessed that has been made in recent months – and the challenges that remain.

This time last year the shops in Zimbabwe were empty, a cholera crisis that went on to claim over 4,000 lives was sweeping the country, most schools were shut and hyper-inflation of over 200 million per cent was raging. Today, markets across the country are coming back to life, most schools have re-opened and the faltering economy is being resuscitated.

Individual Zimbabweans are beginning to get on with the business of making a living again. At a township outside Harare I met Sammy, a young entrepreneur whose market stall was crushed by Zanu PF bulldozers before the election during a clearance operation aimed at scattering the MDC’s urban voters. Sammy now has a permanent hardware stall in the newly rebuilt Chitungwiza market, and he and a group of neighbouring stallholders are helping each other get by with a group savings and loans scheme. Around the corner, a father showed me around his carefully grown garden in which he had coaxed rows of lush green vegetables from the red earth so that he could feed himself and his family.

The tectonic plates of Zimbabwe are shifting. There has been considerable progress given the extraordinary circumstances, and it is almost exclusively down to the determination of Morgan Tsvangirai and his colleagues in the MDC. The events of last spring, when Robert Mugabe and his Zanu PF cronies stole the Presidential election, eventually gave way to a power-sharing agreement which so far appears to be holding. Zanu PF hoped that by giving the MDC the most difficult portfolios – the ones that would most affect the lives of ordinary people – the MDC’s failure would rebound to their discredit and Zanu PF’s advantage. The opposite has been the case.

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September 26, 2009 at 07:00 in Andrew Mitchell MP | Permalink | Comments (13)

Charles K Rowley: Obama’s "Long March" to the Social Market Economy

Charles K Rowley is Duncan Black Professor of Economics at George Mason University and General Director of The Locke Institute. He is the co-author of Economic Contractions in the United States: A Failure of Government, published this month by The Institute of Economic Affairs and The Locke Institute.

Over the period 1980 to 2000, the economy of the United States benefited immensely from the ‘Great Moderation’, a twenty-year period of pro-capitalist political economy ushered in by Ronald Reagan.

But the dynamism of the US has subsequently been undermined, first by the rapid growth of public spending under George W. Bush, and now by President Obama’s rush to socialize the American economy.

Right out of the starting gate, Obama resorted to crude Keynesianism, ostensibly to move the US economy out of recession. The massive budget-deficits initiated by the Obama administration, and supported by an overly compliant Congress, will have a minimally favorable impact on the recession at the price of major long-term harm to economic growth. Indeed, these deficits, together with those planned for the decade yet to come, threaten to impose significant damage on the US economy, indeed to destroy what remains of its growth-engine, laissez faire capitalism.

According to the White House’s own estimates, the federal budget deficit in 2009 will be $1.6 trillion, approximately 11.2% of the overall economy, the highest since the end of World War II. By 2019, the accumulated national debt will represent 76.5% of the overall economy, the highest proportion since just after the end of World War II. Unlike 1945, however, the US economy in 2019 will not stand hegemonic over a war-shattered world. The economies of China and India will, by then, be in excellent shape to challenge a poorly-performing state-capitalist US economy.

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September 25, 2009 at 07:00 in Charles K Rowley | Permalink | Comments (7)

Jeremy Brier: Was the Lib Dems' seaside farce in Bournemouth the most hapless Party Conference in recent times?

Jeremy Brier is a barrister and the Conservative prospective parliamentary candidate for Luton North.

It’s always tragic to see great, beloved institutions fall from grace. On the other hand, it’s tremendously jolly to watch farcical institutions like the Liberal Democrats belly-flop off the Bournemouth pier. Devoid of a coherent philosophy under the maladroit Nick Clegg, I asked almost two years ago on this site: what do the Lib Dems want to be when they grow up? After this year’s seaside side-show, I’ve realised my question took too much for granted.

Arriving on the south coast on the luxurious political sunbed of being able to propose absolutely anything (since there is no chance of it ever being implemented), this week’s Conference gave the Lib Dems carte-blanche for a glittering array of attractive promises. And so, Day One began with Nick Clegg telling his key voter-base – students – that he would no longer abolish their tuition fees (the logic presumably being: why keep a populist policy for which you will never have to bear the cost, when you could just ditch it for no political gain?) and the scintillating news that the Conference “backed plans to ban airbrushing in adverts targeted at children”.

Yes, you heard right. Jo Swinson MP commented that

“Women face pressure from all directions these days. Hit hard by the recession, trying to juggle family commitments with work and home life, and bombarded with adverts that contain completely unattainable images that no-one can live up to in real life.”

All very well, but this ban is apparently aimed at adverts facing the under-16s. So, just to be clear for any multi-tasking children under pressure from the recession, you might be running short of pocket money and fighting off negative equity on your doll’s houses, but at least when you open your next edition of Heat the adverts will only contain pictures of normally good-looking people that are not “completely unattainable”.

Feeling better? Probably not, because aside from being patronising, unenforceable and easy for clever glamour photographers to side-step, this ban also excludes from its imperious scope actual photoshoots and stories. So poor little cash-strapped Jemima does not have to face a “completely unattainable” image in the Burberry ad before the contents page, but she’s still got to endure 90 pages of photoshopped scantily-clad models in the features section!

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September 24, 2009 at 06:19 in Jeremy Brier | Permalink | Comments (38)

Nick Herbert MP: The consumer should be king and free trade must flourish - but we have a right to know when we are buying British

Nick Herbert is Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

I don’t usually go to the pub at 10am in the morning, but Monday was an exception. We were gathered at an event for the Honest Food campaign at the Coach and Horses, a terrific gastropub in Clerkenwell, London.

While guests sampled a delicious brunch from the pub’s kitchen, as well as oysters from Essex, mutton from Wales, apple juice from Kent and cheese from Worcestershire - all organised by the Slow Food movement - there was a serious purpose to the meeting.

I was able to announce that Tesco has decided to support the Honest Food campaign and change some 1,000 of its food labels. This is a hugely significant step forward for the campaign, which I launched earlier this year in an attempt to end the misleading labelling of meat and to empower consumers to make informed choices about the food they buy.

The simple premise is that people have a right to know where their food comes from, and that the current system, which allows a pork pie made in this country from foreign pork to be labelled as British, is wrong. It is also damaging. Misleading labelling has undermined the improvements in farm animal welfare which we have made in this country, disadvantaging our farmers as well as deceiving consumers.

I would not want to see restraints on free trade even if they were legal – after all, Britain has important food export markets of our own. I believe that the consumer should be king, free to choose food from this country or any other. But real choice requires real information. As Jamie Oliver and others have demonstrated so effectively, consumers can find it difficult to back British producers if they want to because of inadequate labelling.

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September 23, 2009 at 06:50 in Nick Herbert MP | Permalink | Comments (22)

Margot James: How to deliver more for less in health and social care

Margot James is Conservative Party Vice Chairman for Women and PPC for Stourbridge.

I met the head of Adult Learning Disabilities and mental health at Dudley Council for a briefing on services and current issues the other day.

With the economy in a state of near ruin it is especially important that we protect what the media call ‘front line services’ for such vulnerable groups of people. Sadly if we are not very careful, such groups will suffer a disproportionate share of the cuts that are now being discussed by all political parties.

In just over an hour with the excellent head of service, Mr Richard Carter, I identified four areas where we could make substantial savings without affecting either the quality or the extent of the service received by those with learning disabilities and mental health needs.

Firstly, Dudley Council employ 70 social services staff ‘seconded’ to the Walsall & Dudley Mental Health Trust. Such large scale secondments are always problematic. Who are such staff accountable to? We have three bodies, the Local Authority, the Walsall and Dudley Mental Health Trust and the Primary Care Trust all trying to manage parts of a service that clients and carers assume is coming from one source.

Try being the carer going between all these organisations – I’ve done it myself with older people and its almost a full time job! We should consider merging all three groups under one management structure and budget. Definite savings at no detriment to service – in fact in my view such a move would enhance service.

Secondly, out of a total budget of some £24m for learning disabilities within the Local Authority, some £10m is spent on residential care. The cost of caring for some of the clients with more complex needs can reach £3,000 per week. These are private homes charging the taxpayer a great deal of money and their books should be scrutinized. Local Authorities account for almost 100% of their income. The Councils should work together to drive down costs whilst maintaining standards.

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September 22, 2009 at 06:04 in Margot James | Permalink | Comments (12)

Could Red Toryism insert a dose of conservatism back into the Conservative Party?

Michael Merrick is studying for a PhD in the School of Divinity at St. Andrews University.

There appears to be a hardening consensus behind the opinion that David Cameron, conscious of his electability in the key marginal seats that will decide the election, is seeking to present a Tory party sterilised of the toxicity that has plagued the Tory brand since the downfall of Thatcherism. In the economic sphere this quest for de-toxification has yielded positive results, for with it has come a limited realisation that the Thatcherite acceptance of neo-liberal economic policy was, in a sense, not really conservative at all, since it failed to protect against the excesses of blind markets and monopolising oligarchies precisely those things that conservatives are purported to cherish: the individual, the family, the community. This is a genuine development, and allows reclamation of a conservative thinking that is champion of the people, and protector of the civic realm.

However the development seems to have become stunted, for the Conservative Party seems to have become enchanted with talk of ‘progressiveness’ and the benign persona it bestows, an allure that has proved irresistible even whilst its possession requires the acceptance of the left-liberal worldview that underlies it. This capitulation speaks of a lack of confidence of the merits of genuinely conservative thought; Mr. Cameron has focused instead, to use the words of Tim Montgomerie, on ‘proving progressive credentials to the Left’. Quite why the Conservative Party should feel the need to do this is the point at issue; the answer, one suspects, is because it has accepted the left’s account of what ‘progressive’ thinking looks like. In accepting the terms that frame the debate, the right really has yielded its ideological foundations, and ceded to the interests of the status-quo.

Whilst this might all seem a little cerebral, the point is an important one, because at stake is a genuinely conservative appraisal of the problems that face contemporary society. As the Red Tory project started by Phillip Blond has convincingly argued, the homogenisation currently afflicting the political parties consists chiefly in the continuing adherence to a ‘post-1945 embrace of the state and the post-1968 embrace of the individual’. The argument is convincing, for the evidence is there for all to see. Conservative thinking has accepted an authoritarian statism that proceeds under the presumption that the state holds a monopoly on power and is therefore the only legitimate generator, dispenser and guarantor of it (note here how all three parties currently talk of pushing power ‘outwards and downwards’).

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September 21, 2009 at 07:00 in Michael Merrick | Permalink | Comments (13)

Lorraine Mullally: David Cameron should promise a referendum on reforming the EU

Lorraine Mullally is Director of Open Europe.

Less than two weeks before the second Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, opponents of the text still have some cause for optimism – such as the return of Declan Ganley to the disparate Irish ‘no’ campaign, or the new Europe Says No initiative.

But there’s no denying a ‘yes’ vote remains the most likely outcome, given the recent polls. David Cameron has reiterated again this week that he will hold a referendum on Lisbon if the Treaty is not yet in force by the time he gets to power. But if Ireland does ratify the Treaty, and Germany also finishes the job, signals from the Czech Republic and Poland suggest these last remaining countries would not be far behind. And with the Manchester conference due to open just days after the referendum, ‘Europe’ is going to be on everyone’s lips. A contingency plan is needed – and fast.

There is absolutely no mistaking the public mood on Europe now. A new YouGov poll for the Telegraph this week found that 57 percent of voters think that a Conservative government should hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, even it is already ratified. Clearly, the fact that the Treaty has been “successfully” forced through against the will of the British people does not somehow make it right. The Treaty will only have been in force for a few short months before the election.

But if Lisbon is already in force in Brussels, it would be a big step to have a retrospective vote on it. It doesn’t look like the Conservatives want to take this step.

Even if there isn’t going to be a referendum on Lisbon, we must have the long overdue vote on the future of our relationship with the EU – a “referendum on reform”. Such a vote would help to inform the public about all aspects of our membership. I believe that finally consulting the people would shatter the permissive consensus among the political class which has allowed the continual erosion of our democracy.

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September 20, 2009 at 06:56 in Lorraine Mullally | Permalink | Comments (88)

Tim Bale: The Scottish Tories are getting their act together

Tim Bale is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Sussex University and his book, The Conservative Party: From Thatcher to Cameron, is due for publication early next year.

Judging from the discussions at a round table on the Scottish Conservatives held recently at the University of Strathclyde there seems to be widespread agreement that, after a difficult few years following the advent of the Scottish Parliament, the Tories are getting their act together. The event that featured contributions from Jackson Carlaw MSP; Andrew Fulton, Chairman of the Scottish Conservative Party; David Torrance, author of We In Scotland – Thatcherism In A Cold Climate; and the academic, Professor James Mitchell. The audience, brought together under the auspices of the UK Political Studies Association’s Conservatives and Conservatism specialist group also made it a lively affair.

There were all sorts of opinions expressed in a wide-ranging discussion, which means that absolutely none of the following should be seen as the product of some kind of consensus. That said, most observers seem to think Annabel Goldie is providing good-humoured, sensible leadership and has brought a degree of stability to a party that, a few years ago anyway, was seen, rightly or wrongly, as a bit of a rabble. She is relatively well-thought-of by the general public and events like the debates over the Scottish Government’s Budget suggest that there are a number of strong performers among the party’s MSPs.

The overall aim, though, has to be for the Scottish Conservatives to be respected as well as liked and to be seen to do well not simply because the party has exceeded low expectations. This applies not only to voters, but to the UK leadership, which according to some reports, still fails to take the party north of the border sufficiently seriously.

Changing all that will also mean the Scottish Conservative Party being seen as an outfit with policies and ideas of its own, rather than one that reacts to the proposals of its more powerful opponents, even if those proposals do sometimes actually borrow from, or at least coincide with, policies which the Tories themselves have suggested or support.

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September 19, 2009 at 07:00 in Tim Bale | Permalink | Comments (40)

Graeme Brown: The FTSE at 5,000 is still a mark of Labour failure

Graeme Brown was Conservative candidate for Ashton-under-Lyne in 2005 and works for a 'Big Four' accountancy firm.

There was great excitement last week in the financial world as the FTSE 100 moved above 5,000 for the first time since the collapse of Lehman Brothers a year ago. The FTSE 100 has now increased by more than 40% since March, and many economists and analysts are pointing to rising stock markets across the world as evidence that we are moving out of recession earlier than many people had hoped.

While indeed it is good news for shareholders, employees and anyone with a private pension that the FTSE 100 is rising again, we are danger of ignoring the Labour Government’s terrible record over the FTSE 100, the cradle of much of the nation’s wealth.

The FTSE 100 was formed in January 1984, with a starting level of 1,000. Thirteen years later, when the Major government was defeated, the FTSE 100 had more than quadrupled, to well over 4,000.

The day Labour was elected in May 1997, the FTSE closed at 4,456. Last Friday, September 11th 2009, it closed at 5,011. So after more than 12 years in power, the UK’s main stock market index has risen just 12% under Labour - less than 1% a year.

Compare this to other countries. In the same period from May 1997 to September 2009, the Dow Jones has grown 35%. France’s CAC has grown 40%. The German DAX has grown 60%. Australia’s main index has grown a whopping 80%, a testament to the Howard government’s handling of the Aussie economy.

So why has the UK stock market performed so poorly when compared to our European neighbours and our Anglosphere cousins?

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September 18, 2009 at 07:00 in Graeme Brown | Permalink | Comments (17)

James Bethell: The Centre-Right must take on the BNP - and not let the Left off the hook for its role in Britain's neo-fascist revival

James Bethell is Director of Nothing British.

It’s sad to lose, but how are you meant to feel when your team just doesn’t turn up to play?

That’s how it felt after another no-show by the Right when a handful of the English Defence League provoked a bottle-throwing riot in Harrow and a weekend-long tummy-button analysis by observers of extremism.

There seemed enough airtime for anyone with an opinion. John Denham MP, the Communities Secretary, spoke thoughtfully about his fear of Mosley-style provocations that lead to the 1930s Cable Street riots, and then quickly replaced his sensible observations with nonsense after the Left accused him of pandering. Tony McNulty, the local MP, struggled to keep a straight face as he denied that Britain’s struggling working class have a legitimate grievance against the Government and defended multi-culturalism. Searchlight called for politicians to stop talking about immigration so much. A trendy-specs-wearing Martin Smith from the UAF was filmed (35 seconds into the clip) milling with the rioters with a big grin on his face.

The only thing missing was a contribution from anyone on the Centre-Right, let alone the Conservative Party. A request from Nothing British to CCHQ for a quote after it was all over on Sunday night got the response, “we’re waiting to see what happens”.

It was a typical example of the Right’s heads-down strategy that is rooted in the age-old but out-of-date “deprive the BNP of the oxygen of publicity” philosophy. After the BNP’s two wins in the European elections and nearly one million votes, this has become a convenient but dishonourable excuse for those wary of toxic subjects like immigration, social cohesion, Islamism, Europe and Britishness.

This silence has its dangers. If the Right does not step up to the microphone, they leave a vacuum that is quickly filled with a misleading liberal consensus: that the rioting in Birmingham and Harrow are caused by the Rothermere-ite press and manipulative British-jobs-for-British-workers political rhetoric; that the best way of restoring peace is to close down the debate about issues like immigration, integration and the competition for jobs; that these protestors are just dangerous yobs preying on the misguided fears of foolish people; that Britain’s ruling class doesn’t have a case to answer.

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September 17, 2009 at 06:20 in James Bethell | Permalink | Comments (94)

Richard Balfe: We must give trade unions a chance to be part of the solution rather than typecast them as part of the problem

Richard Balfe is a former Labour MEP who joined the Conservatives in 2002; in 2008 he was appointed to liase on behalf of David Cameron with Britain's trade unions. Here he reflects on what observed at the TUC conference Liverpool.

Yesterday afternoon, as Gordon Brown rose to address Congress, quite a few people wondered when would be the next time that the TUC President introduced "The Prime Minister" and who that might be. Yes - it is not beyond possibility that at this time next year David Cameron could become the first Conservative Prime Minister to address the TUC.

It would be fair to say that the political atmosphere is subdued, although it should be remembered that not all TU delegates are Labour and fewer than half of the Unions are affiliated to the Labour Party. Nonetheless, the TUC has always been thought of as a Labour heartland. In many ways it still is, but it is also a very practical place with most debates about workplace issues not political theory.

There are votes but never any close ones: all the problems are ironed out before the debate begins and even if there are difficulties they will normally be resolved by having two composite resolutions on the same
topic: both will then be passed with delegates mainly abstaining rather than voting against the one they do not like.

Occassionally the politics comes to the fore but in rather quiet ways. As Congress ended last night, the results of the election to the General Council were read out. Notably Bob Crow, scourge of the commuting public, was not elected to the TUC governing Council. However in the tradition of the best Clubs, his vote was not read out and only the winners had their totals announced. He was just "not elected".

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September 16, 2009 at 05:41 in Richard Balfe | Permalink | Comments (25)

Madsen Pirie: To transform Britain permanently, the next Government should start by taking the lowest paid out of income tax and replacing council tax with a local sales tax

Dr Madsen Pirie is the President of the Adam Smith Institute, a leading free market think-tank. His new book, Zero Base Policy, was published yesterday, and can be purchased via Amazon.co.uk.

Anyone who supposes that a dozen years of Gordon Brown's vandalism can be put right by tweaking a few policies and running things rather more efficiently is mistaken. The parlous state of Britain requires a jump-shift in policy rather than an improved continuity. Proposals which lie beyond the box of the commonly acceptable might not make for good election manifestos, but they could mend a broken economy and a broken society.

My Adam Smith Institute colleague, Dr Eamonn Butler, detailed in his book, The Rotten State of Britain, how bad things have become, and how the optimistic promises of 1997 failed to bring results. The UK, once a model low tax economy now ranks amongst the heavily taxed ones. The pensions system, then the envy or Europe, now faces an unfillable black hole. Where we were promised "education, education, education," we have lower social mobility and more children leaving school without any meaningful qualifications. In place of the comparatively free society we enjoyed, we now have a society of snoopers, with severe restrictions on our freedom of speech, of assembly, and of the right to peaceful protest.

The counterpart of this critique is a programme of action to set Britain back on the path to prosperity and progress. This week the ASI publishes Zero Base Policy, setting out a shopping list of 33 proposals to put things right.

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September 15, 2009 at 07:00 in Madsen Pirie | Permalink | Comments (32)

Ryan Streeter: One year on from the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Britain desperately needs a culture of enterprise to be fostered

Ryan Streeter is a Senior Fellow at the Legatum Institute in London. He was previously a domestic policy advisor to George W. Bush at the White House in Washington, DC.

On the one-year anniversary of the global financial meltdown, Great Britain faces a choice: do we continue to reinforce a culture of safety and stability, or do we begin anew to create a culture of enterprise? When people hear the word “enterprise,” they often think “business.” But enterprise has always been more about hope, innovation, and the ability to convert plans into jobs and opportunity for other people. Not all businesses, on the other hand, are of nature enterprising. Enterprise is a cultural phenomenon more than anything, and it needs advocates and representatives. It doesn’t happen on its own, and Labour has done little to cultivate it.

Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers on 15th September 2008, Labour has responded with a programme of safety and stability: historically unprecedented non-wartime public debt, increased tax rates, intensified regulations on banks and investors, and other measures.

These actions are understandable in times of crisis, but Great Britain cannot regulate and tax its way back to a position of economic strength. It cannot shame investors, bankers, and “the rich” enough to increase GDP and create new jobs. To be competitive in today’s dynamic and disruptive global arena, the UK needs to focus on rebuilding a culture of enterprise. Any government hoping to restore Britain to a path of growth needs to incorporate enterprise into its central message and portfolio of policies.

What is a culture of enterprise? First, it is an environment in which the rewards are worth the risks one takes to start a business, experiment with a new idea, and pursue a well-planned vision. A culture of enterprise is a culture of opportunity. Second, it is an environment in which the virtues of productivity do not go unrewarded. Just as employers value employees who possess qualities such as thrift, hard work, and ingenuity, investors allocate capital to enterprises that likewise possess them.

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September 14, 2009 at 07:00 in Ryan Streeter | Permalink | Comments (10)

Mark Field MP: It is time to recognise the reassertion of Russian power and form a positive relationship with the country - recognising our requirement for Russian energy, trade and co-operation in dealing with terrorism

In an extended Platform article, Mark Field, the MP for Cities of London and Westminster, analyses the West's relationship with Russia and says that it is time to positively re-enegage with Russia based around a set of clear priorities.

Political stability in Iraq and Afghanistan; resolution in the Middle East; the rise of India and China; ongoing unrest in the Balkans and Africa. When predicting the foreign policy priorities for the UK in the coming decades, these issues and more feature in even the briefest assessment. But what of Russia? As the woeful mismanagement of the West’s relationship with that country in recent years has shown, Russia remains curiously low profile – a strange state of affairs given the Cold War history which cast a four decade long shadow on post-World War Two affairs.

This is a mistake. In recent years we have seen a reassertion, if not a full scale re-emergence, of Russian power that suggests that far from being on a journey towards democracy, Russia is in fact turning away from the West, becoming increasingly belligerent in the pursuance of its own interests and keen to re-establish itself as an independent-minded global player.

This matters to Britain. The invasion of Georgia in 2008, the cutting of the Ukraine’s gas supply in 2006, the steady influx of super-rich Russians into our economic and political spheres – all these events are relevant to our future security be in it terms of military commitments or energy. Without immediately giving some serious strategic thought to our relationship with Russia, and clearly assessing what we want from it, we risk getting psychologically outgunned by a country whose forte lies in exploiting the competing interests of Western nations and the hypocrisies those interests often reveal.

The West has had a complacent tendency to view the collapse of the Soviet Union as the end game in the international battle of ideas. Before the recess, I posted an article on China that suggested it is naïve to assume that country will become more open, democratic and liberal the richer it becomes. Similarly, Russia is no longer on an inevitable path to multi-party democracy, rule by law and press freedom. The free market economy and liberal democracy are not universally accepted as the only way to prosper fully, no matter how much we may protest. Indeed, while we like to assume capitalism and democracy are inextricably bound, the experience of the past decade or so in both Russia and China seems to suggest that capitalism can co-exist with an authoritarian regime - stability and increased wealth are a powerful combination. Capitalism may have triumphed over communism after the Cold War. Democracy did not.

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September 13, 2009 at 06:29 in Mark Field MP | Permalink | Comments (12)