Malcolm Blair Robinson
April 13, 2010 By Malcolm Blair-Robinson

The Conservative Manifesto.

I am not quite sure what to make of this. I would have expected a much more robust approach to cutting the deficit, reducing the size and scope of government and re-invigorating industry to provide local employment and improve the balance of payments. The Tories will argue that it is there in the detail, but there seem to be a lot of bits and pieces like a wandering branch line taking in all the beauty spots when what is needed, because of the urgency of the journey, is a fast, direct, main line.

I am unconvinced that there are votes (except votes already committed) to all this empowering people to take over this and that. I think the public mood is to pay for public services which they expect to be properly run. They note that Labour has failings, but this Manifesto may not convince those voters that the Tories have answers. We shall have to see. There is just a tiny hint that this may be a well to do view of what ordinary people want, rather than a view recognised by those ordinary people themselves.

As for this idea of co-operatives taking over public services. This smacks of Thatcher’s revolution. The sale of council houses, which sparked excessive house price inflation and neighbourhood and housing deprivation. The failure to modernise the national infrastructure. The total fiasco of the privatisation of the utilities, now owned mostly by foreign shareholders and in some vital cases, foreign governments. The idiotic market in energy which has hugely increased costs to the consumer and enriched on incalculable scales socially useless speculators. Finally, and biggest of all, the deregulation of the City, the deregulation of building Societies and the utter and complete breakdown of the principles of safe banking.

The things Thatcher did which were good, included bringing the Unions into a responsible line to help, not hinder, the economy. She made sense out of the tax system and put enterprise back into the economy. She gave the nation back its self confidence and gave ordinary people faith in themselves. She set an example the world copied. The rest, though glossy and exciting at the time, turned out to be an over simplification of what was needed and much has ended up bad. Some of it very bad indeed.

The reason the Tory party has been out of office for all these years is because the voters finally tired of that revolution. Let us hope this neat little volume is not an attempt at a re-make. There are much more urgent things to be done. If Cameron does win a majority and goes about closing things and putting people out of jobs, while giving tax handouts to the better off, giving away public services to co-operatives and telling parents to fix their own schools, he might find himself just where Edward Heath did; Prime Minister of an ungovernable country, which when asked ‘Who governs Britain?’ came back with the answer ‘not you mate!’

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