Samizdata

Whilst the media is interested in the Labour leadership struggle (the issue of when statist Blair is going and whether he is going to be replaced by statist Brown or statist Reid or statist someone else), my interest has been directed towards the latest antics of the ruling group within the Conservative party.

A couple of days ago some of Mr David Cameron’s senior people (Oliver Letwin, David W. and so on) came out with a ‘turning point’ for the Conservative party, a major policy matter. This was to state that the Conservative party would commit itself to much more taxpayer’s money for the ‘public services’ (i.e. the government education, health and welfare programmes). The “traditional Conservative hostility” to such things was wrong (although the idea that the Mrs Thatcher cut government spending is a myth – in reality its growth was just restrained, but even that is now considered a crime against humanity). Indeed it is “part of being human” to support government spending increases without limit – so anti-government types may look human, but we are really not human at all. Mr Cameron himself took time out from his trip to India to denounce the idea of tax cuts in an interview with BBC radio.

Of course Mr Cameron may be in India to learn how to create an even bigger budget deficit than Britain already has (rather than just go and try and get some reflected glory from visiting the tomb of Gandhi – much in the way as he tried to get some reflected glory from the Nelson Mandela stunt last month), but it would be nice if he noted that India has far lower taxes than Britain has (total taxes – as a percentage of the economy) which is one of the basic reasons that its economic growth is faster.

If India tried to have the level of government ‘public services’ spending that Mr Cameron and his people would suggest (even as a percentage of the economy) its government deficit would be wildly greater than it already is – and the economy would collapse (which, given how poor many Indians already are, would mean starvation).

But then Mr Cameron does not want economic growth, he wants economic “stability” – but then he does want economic growth because he wants to “share the proceeds” of it, in order to fight “social injustices” and support the cause of “social justice”. Not just in Britain – but by providing government aid to all the poor countries of the world (far more than this mean Labour government is giving). → Continue reading: Cameron’s ‘Conservatives’ – the madness continues

The creation of a super-democratic body created by central government called the Standards Board for England, which can exclude members of a local council who were elected on a specific issue platform because ‘their minds are already made up’ has been described in the Telegraph as ‘hampering democracy’. This is rather like saying having your head cut off ‘hampers thinking’… true but more than a tad misleading. British understatement is alive and well it seems.

The Standards Board’s function is to prevent single issue politics by simply disallowing a ‘difficult’ elected councillor from doing what they were elected to do so ‘hampering’ democracy is not an unintended consequence, it is what the Standards Board for England does.

Face it, the whole point of the Standards Board of England is to prevent councillors who are elected on the basis of views unpopular with the establishment from being allowed to disrupt business as usual by asking difficult questions and proving resistant to being pressured by established political groupings.

So let us call the Standard Board for England and their network of ‘ethical standards officers’ what they actually are: Commissars.