The Tories Are Lacking Principle

So, George Osborne has announced that there will be no new tax cuts before the next election. Hopefully Cameron will do another one of his Heath-like U-turns on this in the next year or so; if not, we won’t see the economy recover for the foreseeable future, and the Tories could get panned at the next election as a consequence.

No amount of massaging the figures can hide the obvious – our economy is stagnant. Granted, we aren’t in an economic crisis yet, but Britain is not moving forward in the way that we would like. This shouldn’t surprise anyone who adopts a conservative economic analysis. Britain’s specific economic problems are twofold – excessive spending and a dwindling private sector. It is a common myth that it is just “the deficit and debt” that are the problem. It is true that they are worrisome, but the enormous deficits are symptomatic of the real problem – excessive spending. Part of this spending problem is because our job-creating private sector is being scared abroad by oodles of red tape and high taxes, meaning we have to spend more money on unproductive public sector jobs and welfare.

Fixing the problem from a conservative (small c) perspective is simple – cut the spending (which we’ve already started to do, albeit slowly) and make Britain a more pro-business country, after hard-left socialists like Miliband, Cable, Balls and Brown have scared businesses away, or discouraged them from forming in the first place with their anti-business policies and taxes.

Therefore to most conservatives the answer is clear. Get us out of the EU – the number one source of stupid costs and red tape, cut useless spending projects, and limit government spending to the legitimate roles of government. Finally, cut taxes to a level that fosters the private sector and maximises revenue, not one designed to punish “the rich” and to try and redistribute wealth. This is the road to recovery and everyone with a conservative brain knows it.

Yet this is not a Tory party with a conservative brain; it is a party that is like an eighteen year old girl wanting to win X Factor. As a consequence it is more interested in what it looks like than doing the right thing; hence Cameron’s determination not to be seen as the party of those evil, horrible rich people.

If the Tories are the eighteen year old wannabe-singer, then the Lib Dems are the fat, loser friend that offers bad advice, convinced of their own self-importance because they happen to be friends with the popular girl. It is this useless, misguided friend that no-one likes anymore who is calling for property taxes, caps on bonuses, and the retention of the 50p tax rate on successful job-creators. The problem is that the Tories are listening.

Britain is a tired country, just like it was in the 1970’s, with unions too powerful, no private sector, high taxes propping up inefficient public sector industries, and too many people unable to find employment and stuck on welfare. Thatcher found a way out of this by following a pure conservative ideology, and by the end of the 80’s she had won three terms, and had turned Britain into a prosperous economic powerhouse.

The Tories can have the same success this time round, but only if they stop paying attention to their image and what people think of them in the short term, and stop listening to their annoying little friend that no-one else likes or cares about.

Osborne and Cameron have the opportunity to put Britain back on the road to prosperity – cut spending, reduce red tape, drop the EU, and cut taxes across the board to stimulate the private sector. Failure to do this will cost them the next election, and the blame with be on their shoulders. Unfortunately, from Osborne’s statements last week, it seems that they do not have the courage to do what they must.

The Only Word We Should Hear From Labour is "Sorry".

Jeff Randall leads The Daily Telegraph today with a scathing criticism of the Labour Party - a party that is currently trying to hurl blame onto the Coalition for the current spending cuts, despite Labour being responsible for putting us into ridiculous levels of debt in the first place.  Randall points to the incredible hypocrisy of Labour who, having spent and spent and spent the country into near oblivion, now turn around and criticise the spending cuts as "harsh" and moan about how it is going to affect the poor, and limit services etc.

Now apart from the fact that the cuts cannot significantly hurt the poor and drag us down into a Dickensian nightmare, because we will still be spending hundreds and hundreds and billions of pounds (well over a trillion dollars for my American friends) on services and welfare etc, it is also a bit rich for Labour to moan about it, even if that was the case.  Why? 

Well, as Randall's article shows, public spending grew by a stunning 50% in real terms under the Labout government!  This rise in spending is Obama-like in both its scale and its destructiveness.  It left us wide open to get nailed by a recession, and sure enough that is exactly what happened in 2008.  They can try and blame "the bankers" all they want, but the fact still remains that Britain was ridiculously unhealthy economically when the recession hit, which then only made things much worse.

As I have said in my previous post, I do not fully agree with the distribution of the spending cuts, but there is no argument that spending cuts were absolutely 100% necessary.  Britain could still double-dip, it could still go bankrupt.  Britain is not out of this crisis yet, and yet Labour still argue that the Coalition is doing too much!!  It really is quite incredible.  They have destroyed business, wrecked the economy, seen our unemployment rate soar and made Britain the sick man of Europe once again - and yet they still don't seem to acknowledge that there is a problem, or that they are the primary figures responsible.

If there was any justification in the world, the only thing we would have heard yesterday from the Labour benches would have been "Sorry about the mess we have caused."  Of course, that didn't happen - all we heard was a mix of mockery of the Tories, and hand-wringing about the "poor and the vulnerable." 

Well, Mr Miliband and Mr Johnson, if government spending is so damn good, and your government was such a great bloody success, would you care to inform me why, after a 50% rise in public spending in real terms, that we even have any poor people?  With all that spending on "poverty" and welfare, shouldn't we have abolished poverty?  Shouldn't we all be living in some sort of healthcare/housing/public services paradise?  Wasn't that the whole reason for all these stupid programmes and schemes that drove us into economic suicide in the first place?!

Of course, we are not living in a welfare paradise, because government spending wrecks economies and lives, it does not fix them.  That is exactly what Britain has discovered in the last 13 years of a Labour government, and it is now time to make it right.  However, it needs the current Coalition to put forward the case for low tax, low spending, small government, or the chance will be wasted, and Labour will capitalise on this ridiculous situation.

Britain's Spending Cuts - Inconsistent!

With France having exploded into rioting over the last week over the extension of the retirement age from 60 to 62, we have seen similar outrage today in Britain as Chancellor George Osborne has announced what are, for the most part, pretty meagre cuts.

Do not be mistaken by the Left's rhetoric, these spending cuts are not strong enough, but they are a start.  The Financial Times for instance is trying to paint these as some sort of mega cuts, but 4.5% cut over 5 years isn't exactly earth-shattering  But, with a strong left-wing movement in Britain, as well as the hard left Liberal Democrats having significant influence in the new government, the current cuts are really all that are politically feasible.  And I believe that on the whole, these cuts will work out well for the Coalition.  It will restore at least some confidence to the markets, and possibly to job creators too, in spite of the tax increases that will hit over the next few years.  Personally, I would have liked to see more cuts to welfare, cuts and reform to the NHS (which has remained untouched), less cuts to the military and less tax increases (which will only prevent growth).

I have an article coming out over the next few days which specifically cover the military cuts, but in the mean time I would like to focus on something that caught my eye that not many media outlets have picked up on.  We have seen that NHS spending has been ring fenced, and this has been debated by many.  But, today it was announced that International Aid has been increased by a stunning 33% and Climate Change funding (whatever the hell that consists of) has been increased by a hefty 18% - you can find an easy to read graph of all the cuts etc here.

Now, I'd be pretty annoyed had they not been cut, but for the budgets to be increased!?  It is quite clear that this is a total fop to the Liberal Democrats.  No conservative with any understanding of immigration would support a massive international aid budget.  The only way to get countries out of poverty is to encourage market growth, not to support big government programs and fund state sponsored dictatorships.  There is no country that has been lifted out of poverty by international aid, not one.  In addition, when you are giving some of that aid to India - a nation that has its very own nuclear weapons program - you know your policy is broken.  Yet this is not being tackled.

Climate Change - well, unfortunately, whether or not you believe in Climate Change or not, this is nothing more than economic stimulus for supposed "green jobs".  As we have seen in both America and Britain, this doesn't work.  True green jobs, like almost every job, is created by the private sector, not by tax and spend policies subsidising pointless industries.  Again, conservatives know this, left-wingers don't, so why on Earth have we increased the budget?

The spending cuts tell us a lot about the strength of this coalition.  It shows that they have managed to get spending cuts through, but they have had a hell of a lot of compromises to make to the left in order to get them through.  Increases in Climate Change budgets and International aid are enormous concessions, as are enormous cuts to the military budget.  In addition, even with these moderate spending cuts, we are beginning to see a massive backlash from vested interests in the unions and public sector - it is not going to be easy

If the Coalition wants to try and push forward a conservative agenda that is going to put Britain back on the right track (so to speak), it is going to have to fight tooth and nail for it, and with the gaggle of "centrist" Tories and hard-left Liberal Democrats, I just can't see how they are going to do that.