Stuttering start to the Conservative manifesto
Welcome to 'Letters From A Tory', covering British politics from a conservative perspective. Please leave a comment if you have any thoughts about today's letter, and don't forget that you can CLICK HERE to get my letters sent to you by RSS every morning.
Dear David Cameron, Steve Hilton and George Osborne,
I’m not sure that yesterday truly marked the beginning of the election campaign, but it was nevertheless entertaining to watch the two main parties draw swords while Nick Clegg just sat on the sidelines and moaned. No-one scored a stunning outright victory yesterday, partly because Alistair Darling sprung an unavoidable trap, and the split newspaper verdicts this morning emphasises the point. Even so, it was your failure to deal with perfectly avoidable problems that left me shaking my head.
Let’s leave aside the ‘Can the Conservatives afford their promises’ histrionics, because I don’t think you can be blamed for it and you mounted a fairly reasonable (and rapid) response to the situation. What I want to know is how, after all these months in opposition when you should have been carefully planning everything down the last detail, your policies are so contradictory, confusing and cackhandedly presented.
1. Yesterday, Cameron reaffirmed that the Conservatives were the ‘party of the NHS’ and that healthcare was his top priority. Funny, that, because on January 2nd 2010 he said that the economic recovery was the top priority of an incoming Conservative government. Incidentally, on February 6th 2009, he said that education is “something we’ll give big priority too”, on November 16th 2009 the Conservative Party said climate change action remained a priority, and on February 15th 2009 Cameron said that introducing social welfare reform was an urgent priority. Forgive me for seeking some rather basic clarification, but isn’t this a bit OTT?
2. Having briefly scanned through the list of NHS plans in your draft manifesto, I was taken aback by how many of them were top-down policies. What on earth happened to localism and devolving power? Introducing a ‘health premium’ to direct resources at the poorest communities is fine with me, but your second new policy over new ‘maternity networks’ that will link up local hospitals, doctors, charities, voluntary groups and maternity consultants to share information, expertise and services sounds ridiculous from a government-in-waiting who champion letting local areas decide what they want and need. Other policies that didn’t come across as localist include outlawing single sex wards from Whitehall and making sure people have access to doctors and nurses outside local family doctor surgery hours. This sounds very much like top-down micromanagement on an astonishing scale – haven’t we had enough of this from Labour?
3. The confusion over marriage in the tax system was a truly embarrassing episode of media mismanagement, and I’m deeply disappointed that you have been so careless. David Cameron spent most of yesterday on the defensive over tax breaks for married couples after telling the BBC he hoped to bring them in but could not promise them, only to later issue a statement saying they would “definitely” come in. Surely you’ve been through your list of previous announcements and decided what is staying and what has been dumped? This is not rocket science.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
Witanagemot Blogs
If the Tories are being so ‘“honest and upfront” about their intentions’, why couldn’t they mention anywhere that their policies on the NHS relate to England only?
“Having briefly scanned through the list of NHS plans in your draft manifesto, I was taken aback by how many of them were top-down policies. What on earth happened to localism and devolving power?”
That was just to draw in the voters. They never meant it…
The Tories appearing to be offering the political equivalent of a Premiership side being 3-nil up at half-time then going all jittery and amateurish.
Final score shouldn’t be in doubt but perhaps the supporters are in for an unnecessarily nervous second half.
Get a grip Cameron.
I think what’ll turn out to be more important than the draft manifesto is the review process the Conservatives are using to get advice from the public about it. Yesterday evening they launched a website using Google Moderator which is soliciting questions and suggestions, to be followed up with an answers session with David Cameron on Friday. They’re also offering £1m to web developers to create an ‘online policy development system’ for crowd-sourcing policy ideas.
So, as much as their health manifesto is a tad rubbish (whoever would have guessed that would happen) I think there’s credit due for engagement.
BW, that’s been in force for quite a while so perhaps they just assume everyone get’s it?
Julia, your cynicism about the Conservatives knows no bounds!!
Talwin, very good analogy, never thought about it like that.
Stu, I’m also glad to see them opening their minds to all the ideas contained within the brains of the general public. There is a lot more good stuff out there which they haven’t tapped into yet so I hope they use this initiative to its full potential.
@LFAT – Don’t be so naive, LFAT! They’re deliberately glossing over it – don’t want to be seen to be the party of the English NHS, do they?
Catching up with JuliaM on your ‘most commented’ leaderboard is going to be a tough job, so I thought I’d throw in a fairly pointless acknowledgement that I agree with you and share your hope, LFaT.
When I was at school – grammar, so that shows you how long ago it was – at lunchtime we used to nip into town traffic warden spotting (they’d just been introduced and had collar numbers). Just as pointless and perhaps the reason that nowadays I am an even sadder version of my youthful self, haunting the internet instead of occasionally doing something useful.
BW, we can agree to disagree on this. If politicians always had to talk about ‘English education’ and ‘English healthcare’, it would just sound weird – despite, obviously, being accurate.
Stu, good on you, don’t hold back with your acknowledgements!
Talwin, even though I pour many hours into this blog, the thought of not having a Labour government makes me think this blog might be useful in some way (although I accept that Cameron probably doesn’t read it THAT often).
Agreed. It’s pathetic. Especially the married couple’s thingy. To sort that out, you have to look at the bigger picture –
a) add up total income tax receipts
b) add up total taxable incomes before PA’s
c) add up total welfare payments.
And then muck about with a spreadsheet until you arrive at some combination of universal basic welfare payment and/or transferable personal allowance that does not discriminate against couples. Or just crib from the Citizen’s Income Trust.
What the Tories overlook is that the biggest couple penalty is for welfare claimants who stand to lose about £10,000 a year if one is working and they get married (or admit to living together).
Having glanced at the NHS draft, it’s a load of glossy bunk which is precisely what the NHS doesn’t need.
I note dealing with admin costs is almost an afterthought, when it actual fact it’s one of the NHS’ core problems.
Take, for example, wanting a new power socket in a room. Cost from a quality, qualified local supplier? £100+VAT. Cost to a Trust from the supplier they must use? £200 to £250+VAT.
It’s the same across the NHS, regardless of what is being supplied – once you’re a provider they go to, you can start naming your own price. And they’ll pay.
That’s money that could be spent on frontline treatment, or cut from the budget. And over the course of a year, when you consider the excess they’re paying it sums to a significant part of the budget.
Matrons overseeing wards are another thing that needs to be returned, improved cleaning standards would do more for dealing with MRSA than withholding cash – which will just affect services *more* (see the USA’s ‘No Child Left Behind’ for that).
This draft manifesto advertises The Party That Plans To Start Right Where Labour Left Off, which isn’t what this country needs right now…
I think that most of what is going on now is an attempt to exhaust labour. Cameron makes a few wooly policy statements, attempts to appear positive and constructive, then Labour weighs in with its typical ‘Conservatives eat babies’ hysteria and shoot themselves in the foot.
Cameron knows that the next government (if it does what should be done), might be the most unpopular government in living memory. I think his strategy is to make Labour portray themselves as unelectable, nasty and negative, so that it will increase the amount of time he has to get the economy back on track.
Remember what hapenned during the early Blair years? We all knew he was a vacuous pillock, but the vast majority of voters gave him two terms before they even questioned his competence, they just knew that they didn’t want Tories in charge and that was enough.
Very little of what David Cameron and the Conservative front bench has said in the last 6 months has been aimed at people who will probably [already] vote for the Conservatives. Yesterday seemed to me to be a continuation of the policy of moving the Tories into the vacuous centre-ground. It’s not pretty but it is necessary for a Tory win.
The next few months will be about the fight for the votes of people who only pay attention to politics in the few weeks before a general election who greatly outnumber those of us who keep a closer eye on things… Politics in general has turned into a professional wrestling event where each group has multiple top priorities and wants to beat down on the others to emerge victorious. Lots more talking to come that does will not translate to much in the real world. Unfortunately honest dialogue and sensible policy framing comes second to posters and slogans when seeking to win elections.
@LFAT –
I hope that Cameron, or at least his minion, occasionally does pass by here, hopefully to get a feel for what some Tory sympathisers may think. For, unlike Derek Draper’s early LabourList which was a pathetic encomium for New Labour, your efforts often generate a fair amount of necessary telling-it-like-it-is.
The scales are falling from your eyes, LFAT. Keep this up and soon you’ll be writing letters from a libertarian.
I’ve been looking at their £1m for ‘crowd sourcing’. The problem is, ironically, as with the NHS IT system that it’s conceptually flawed.
To create open systems, government should not be creating an IT system or APIs into which external sources can be plugged to enable two way data transfer. The NHS problem arose because the urge to *create* the platform ended up with engineers installing individual software packages on individual PCs, contracted and paid for from the centre.
This, I’d contend, was fundamentally conceptually flawed from the incept, based as it is, on the traditional office IT-department mode of CONTROL ALL, INSTALL ALL, LOCK OUT USERS AND 3RD PARTIES.
Instead, and for this, I’d quite like my million, ta, is to DEFINE XML DTDs (Document Type Definitions) to facilitate the transfer of information between compatible nodes. This way, whether the problem is getting a few hundred people to discuss a council by-law on a web site or transfering medical notes from my GP to my Consultant, you (tho government) aren’t getting involved in project managing software delivery on a local level from your lofty whitehall purch. Instead people are free to have the applications THEY need developed to plug into the HMG approved data-architecture framework instead of having money taken away from them and spent on their behalf on software that may look ideal from the centre but be useless on the ground.
Sigh.
Let me know if you think I should write this up and try and claim my million as, frankly, I could use the money!
I bet Cameron DOES read this blog. I know he reads Dale, Guido and ConHome and I’m fairly certain he reads a few others. It’s got to be at least an occasional peruse…
LFAT
All i have seen from both labour and conservative goverments, is an increasing goverment with a top down authortarian mentalility.
And policies which are based on “what sounds good in the papers”
Not sure why you are complaining about what is “buisness as usual” for either of em.
Why are you a conservative?
I know why you are not a liberal, far to often you have the attitude that “X must be justified” rather than “X is allowed unless there is a clear good evidence based reason not to”.
No chance. For a start, I’d have to pay for a new header for this blog.
@Stu –
I don’t agree, Stu. The Conservatives should be promoting what they think is RIGHT, not what they think is POPULAR. Just trying to match your policies to voters’ wishes shows that you have no convictions of your own and can’t be trusted.