The Progressive

The Tories are missing the point on sleaze

Apparently the Conservatives are considering proposals to stop children of MPs from being paid public funds to work for them, but this really misses the point. The issue shouldn't be about who MPs choose to do their legwork (or not do the work as in this case...) but about whether the employment of staff with public funds is transparent and legal. If Derek Conway had been forced to declare how much he paid his family staff members and who they were, it wouldn't have taken a Sunday newspaper to dish the dirt - the fact would already have been in the public domain.

It would be more in the public interest if the salaries of staff working for MPs and peers were annually listed in bands of pay and that all familial relations were declared too. When the list of special advisers is declared their pay is divided into bands so that the ballpark figure is known, but not the exact total. This seems like a sensible way forward. Why penalise sons and daughters who could make perfectly competent researchers or caseworkers because of one dodgy MP who tried to bend the rules under the convenient cloak of 'honourability'? It's time that we got rid of this antiquated way of thinking about MPs, and forced them to instead to be open about who they employ and how much of our money is going into MPs' staff costs. Typical of the Tories to arrive at the wrong answer when faced with sleaze allegations.

Profile of a Tory donor

We've just heard the High Court judgment that the Tories won't be able to keep a £8.3m donation from the late Branislav Kostic, a 'drugs mogul'.

The court accepted Mr Kostic's son's argument that his father had been, inter alia,  "deluded", "insane", "not of sound mind", "mentally ill" and "paranoid" when rewriting his will.

While his case should arouse our sympathy, the court was left with little choice given Kostic Snr's description of Margaret Thatcher as "the greatest leader of the free world in history."

Why it's not a lurch to the right

It's not often that there's a meeting of minds between Andrew Rawnsley and Melanie Phillips. David Cameron's apparent inability to make up his mind about his post-Blair direction of travel, however, seems to have provoked just that.

Yesterday, Rawnsley reported the Tory leader's inner circle denying that their boss was engaged in a 'lurch to the right' after three weeks in which Cameron has desperately attempted to ward off a savaging by his rightwing critics by tossing them red meat on tax cuts, crime and immigration. 'If it is not a lurch to the right,' sniffed Rawnsley, 'it's a lurch all over the place'.

And today, Phillips follows up with a similar charge. 'The greatest harm,' she warns, 'comes not, as [Cameron's] critics think, from the word "right" but from the word "lurch".' She goes on:

This is because, whatever views he may have, it is even more important for a potential Prime Minister to be seen to have the virtue of consistency. If you don't know where you are with him, you can't trust him; and trust is ultimately what guides people to cast their vote. Opportunism is fatal to that trust. And the Tories' abrupt change of direction seems to be dictated by just such opportunism.

But both Rawnsley and Phillips seems to misread the nature of the Cameron project. As Bruce Anderson argues in today's Independent, the Tory modernisers' outlook has long rested on the view that it was the Conservative brand, not the party's policies, which lay at the heart of their electoral misfortunes over the past decade or so. In polls and focus groups prior to the 2005 general election traditional Tory themes - on crime, Europe, immigration and tax - were popular with voters; support for them plummeted, however, once their association with the Conservatives was revealed. The solution: rebrand the Tory party as inclusive and modern and ditch the 'nasty party' image of the Hague-IDS-Howard years.

As Anderson bluntly puts it, the Cameroons' aim 'was to lead the voters to reassess Toryism, not to sunder their party from the Tory tradition'. Cameron, he continues, is a 'small-c Conservative': 'a Kissingerian realist' on foreign policy and a man who 'happily worked for Michael Howard' at the Home Office and 'has never suggested that a single criminal should serve a single day less in custody for a single crime'.

And let's not forget the only three concrete pledges Cameron made during his campaign for the Tory leadership: to introduce tax breaks for marriage, withdraw the Conservatives from the supposedly federalist European People's party in the European Parliament, and ensure a more diverse mix of parliamentary candidates - in other words, rightwing policies presented by new faces.

Cameron may well have chosen the wrong path to No.10, but let's not pretend he's been panicked by the 'Brown bounce' into deviating from it.

How much do the Tories care about poverty?

The Tories' Social Justice Policy Group have made it ever so difficult to find their report 'Breakthrough Britain' on the internet for some reason. A press release on Conservatives.com claims to direct you to the website of the group. Except at the time of writing it leads to a typepad page dated August 14 2007 entitled 'Poverty debate' which has absolutely nothing else on it. No report and certainly no discussion.

It seems extraordinary to me that a flagship policy group report has no easily identifiable webpage where any member of the public can see exactly what the recommendations are. Maybe it's because the Conservatives know that their 'Back to Basics' recommendations of re-subsidising marriage simply takes money from the poor to give to the more wealthy? Perhaps it's because, no matter how much they deny it, one-parent families are ignored in Tory solutions to the problems caused by low incomes and family breakdown?  Or maybe it's because in the end, after all Cameron's hand-wringing visits to disadvantaged estates, the Tories just can't bring themselves to care that much about poverty?

Tories - £100 for your jingoism please

We've always known the Tories have been good at raking in the money, but Conservative Way Forward's latest bash really shows the lengths they are prepared to go. On June 7th, Conservatives are gathering together at a black tie ball, price £100 a head (just under two week's worth of JobSeeker's Allowance) at a 'prestigious Central London venue', to celebrate 25 years of invading the Falkland's. The pitch for the dinner being run by Symposium Events, outlined in full here, reads like the opening to a Mel Gibson epic:

On the 5th April 1982, a large British task force set out on a 7,500 mile journey to liberate a group of tiny windswept islands in the South Atlantic. On 1st May, 25 years ago this spring, the Royal Navy embarked upon the biggest combined military action to take place since the Second World War. In the subsequent battle for the liberation of the occupied British territory - more than 1,000 men lost their lives.

So to commemorate the loss of more than 1,000 lives the Conservatives thought it would be good to have a jolly good knees up, with no less than the Lady herself in attendance. Whether or not the invasion of the Falklands was a good idea in the first place, this strikes me as a particularly disgraceful way to commemorate it.

And let's not forget how the whole episode arose in the first place. The Argentine junta would almost certainly not have invaded - and a thousand lives would therefore have been saved - if they had believed the British government had the will to defend the Falklands (let alone come and take them back).  Ministers had warned Mrs Thatcher in 1980-81 that the Government needed either to give the islands to Argentina or turn them into a fortress; she had refused to do either. The 1981 Defence Review had slashed the surface fleet, and the withdrawal of the last ship stationed in the South Atlantic, HMS Endurance, was the final signal the Argentines needed.  The official Franks Report into the events leading up to the war was full of damning criticisms of failings by the MoD and the Foreign Office in failing to anticipate or forestall the Argentine invasion (although somewhat redundantly, it gave the ultimate blame for the invasion to General Galtieri).  Recapturing the Falklands was a remarkable feat of arms by the British armed forces, but the whole episode was hardly Her Majesty's Government's finest hour.

Back to the kitchen

The Tories may be desperately trying to rein in their unruly Policy Commissions with promises that any future policies will have to pass “sound money tests”, but they should be just as worried about whether their policies pass ‘sound’ tests full stop.

Despite talking the good talk about flexible working, for example, I’ve just found out that one of the members of the Tories’ Social Justice Policy Commission is Kathy Gyngell, a Thatcher groupy and founder of the ‘let’s go back to the 1950s’ group, Full-Time Mothers. Their website asks visitors insightful questions such as “Are you tired of seeing your family's taxes diverted towards encouraging more childcare and absentee parenting?” According to a document put together by Hazel Blears, Kathy Gyngell has said that "When a child's mother dies, that is a terrible tragedy. But we impose that tragedy on every child when we leave them to go to work". So she’d not have much truck with Cameron’s pledge that: “flexible working and high quality, affordable childcare (should) become the basic entitlement of every working family”. I guess Cameron’s choice of Gyngell to sit on the Commission shows just how deep his commitment to flexible working goes…

Tories' secret election strategy

What will result in more people voting Tory at the next election?

A new party logo?

Championing the environment?

Polly Toynbee writing the Tory manifesto?

Hoodie hugging on a mass scale?

Tory MPs and candidates engaging in community service in northern towns and cities?

Celebrity endorsements from Busted, Cilla Black and Jim Davidson?

No. The simplest way for a Tory to get more votes is... try and hide the fact that you are a Tory.

It worked for Patrick Cormack. The problem is his local association now wants to deselect him. According to the Birmingham Post:

'Executive members had also complained that he failed to display the word Conservative prominently on his election leaflets, he said. As I had the largest swing to the Conservatives in the country at the last election, I did not take that particularly seriously.'

Tories under pressure

As ever, the issue of Europe raises his ugly head in the Conservative Party. Tory donors are threatening to vote and support the UK Independence Party (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6262325.stm) with Stuart Wheeler saying his vote was "in doubt" because the Tories had "not been nearly strong enough on Europe". He was joined by former party treasurer Lord Kalms who told the Daily Telegraph "the option remains open for me... to vote UKIP."

To shore up support, Cameron has made reference to returning to “the ideas that encouraged me as a young man to join the Conservative Party and work for Margaret Thatcher" rather than follow Blair on the issue.

All of this follows allegations that the UKIP Leader has been promised a safe Tory seat  (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6209386.stm) and the defection of two former Tory Peers who have given UKIP their first representation in Westminster (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6243807.stm). While joining, they said UKIP was the "only party telling the truth" about Europe.

All this makes the Tory’s policy on Europe a mess – the right within his party are not going to leave the issue, and Hague has failed in his attempt to form a new political group in the European Party. This leaves them in a group of Pro-European Centre Right parties, which must serve to antagonise the right and the UKIP-friendly party members.

The opportunity this offers Labour – if the Tories run yet another election having to be hard line on Europe to keep Euro-sceptics on side – may look attractive if it squeezes the Tories' support, meaning they don’t win crucial seats. But for progressives, the launch pad in Westminster and growing credibility for UKIP might be cause to re-group and redouble our efforts. Pro-European policy was important in the creation of New Labour but not something the British public have kept with us on. Labour needs to once again be seen as pro-Europe, but also pro-reformed Europe, in a way that seems meaningful.

Loud and clear, please

A survey by CommunicateResearch has today placed Labour at 36% in the opinion polls, giving us of 2% lead of 2%. Although this figure appears small, and will no doubt change repeatedly until the country next hits the ballot boxes, it should not go unmarked or uncelebrated. A similar poll last month, for the Independent, gave the Tories a 4% lead. How have Labour managed to regain the lead?

Andrew Grice, Political Editor at the Indy, claims that Labour’s surge in the polls is due merely to the prominence of law and order issues in the Queen’s Speech earlier this month. Steve Richards, also in the Indy, argues that these ‘reactionary’ issues may give the party a lead at present but cannot secure a forth term for Labour. Richards claims that Labour have focused heavily on these issues, at the expense of its progressive agenda, thus leaving the Downing Street door open for Cameron. His advice: Labour needs to shout about its progressive policies “loudly and often”. Take heed.

For more information take a look at www.communicateresearch.com

Conservatives to vote against WW1 pardons?

The following is from a letter from David Cameron's office to a campaigner on the issue:

We are making no commitment about how we would vote on the forthcoming amendment to the Armed Forces Bill regarding the pardons.

Does this mean that Tory MPs might vote against  a possible group pardon?

I personally welcome the news that government's move to pardon more than 300 soldiers who were shot for military offences during World War I has been backed by the House of Lords. Although these incidents happened 90 years ago the stigma and strength of feeling attached to these executions is still strong amongst the relatives of those that were executed. There is also a wider sense of empathy for these soldiers. Many of these men endured tortuous conditions in the trenches which most of us cannot even begin to comprehend. Soldiers at the time were suffering from what these days we would diagnose as post traumatic stress disorder, but during the war, more often than not, they would have been ordered back to the front-line.

The men that were executed for refusing to rejoin the front-line were victims of this terrible war. Although the officers were doing their best to apply the rules and standards of the time, it is right that we acknowledge that in some instances injustices were done