Britannia Radio

The Telegraph's leader is right but it is shameful that they should 
haver to write it!

The touchstone for that party to both win an election (that's the 
easier bit!) and to rescue the country from the dreadful mess that 
looms over us is will they tackle grandiose wasteful expenditure as a 
priority to go hand in hand with significant tax-cutting measures.   
The present proposals are inadequate but only because the party 
leadership refuses to grasp the nettle of cutting back the state to 
give them room to manoeuvre.

John Redwood, below, seems to grasp the point

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TELEGRAPH  - Leader  15.11.08
The Tories should be as angry as the rest of us

In the midst of a deepening economic crisis largely of the Labour 
Government's making, where is the anger? We don't mean in the homes 
of people who are seeing the value of their principal asset plunge to 
the point where it is worth less than the loan they have taken out to 
buy it. They are angry enough. Nor do we mean in the offices of small 
businesses struggling to get by in a suffocating thicket of rules and 
regulations while the banks foreclose on the line of credit they 
require to survive. They are furious. Nor do we include the newly 
retired, forced to buy an annuity at half the value it was six months 
ago, or those about to lose their jobs, or the pensioners on fixed 
incomes required to pay inflated council taxes for services they 
never see, or the hard-working couples in straitened circumstances 
who pay thousands in income tax and look on with astonishment as the 
Government continues to waste more and more of their money. They are 
apoplectic.

No, the place where there is a dearth of the splenetic anger felt by 
the rest of us is on the front bench of the Conservative Party. It 
is, frankly, quite astonishing that a government whose excessive 
spending and botched handling of the public finances are making the 
recession worse here in the United Kingdom than anywhere else, should 
be advancing in the opinion polls. How can this be? A major factor, 
it pains us to say, is the timid nature of Her Majesty's Loyal 
Opposition on the economy. For a long time, the Conservatives felt 
that Labour's shelf-life was expiring and there was no need to make 
any sudden moves. They tucked themselves into Labour's economic 
slipstream, changing the emphasis here and there but, by and large, 
following the same trajectory.

It was when this path took the economy over a cliff that the 
Conservatives should have applied the brakes and gone into reverse. 
Part of the problem is that they eschewed any coherent economic 
analysis during the good economic times and had too little idea how 
to respond to the bad. They became more fixated on tactical 
positioning at the expense of conviction and principle. As the Labour 
Government socialises more of the financial sector, it is the 
historic duty of the Conservatives unashamedly to extol the virtues 
of free-market capitalism, which, despite its flaws, leads to better 
outcomes most of the time for most of the people.

It is important, too, for the Tories to make a coherent case for a 
smaller state, not one shaved at the edges but with billions hacked 
from the unproductive, wasteful public sector. We are not talking 
about hospitals or schools or front-line services; but of unnecessary 
bureaucrats who are, even now, being recruited to perform functions 
that are of benefit to no one, but are carried out for their own 
sake. We are talking, too, about scaling back the bill for public 
sector pensions, which will be a huge drag on the economy in the 
years ahead. The Tories are reluctant to alienate public sector 
workers. But there comes a time when leadership involves pursuing 
policies because they are right.

For David Cameron, this could be a career-defining moment. 
Politicians are judged more by how they handle a crisis than how they 
perform when things are easy. It does not mean reshuffling spokesmen. 
It means finding the right language, expressing the right values and 
doing so regularly and simply, so that people appreciate he leads a 
party that understands their concerns. It means showing that the 
Tories are guided by a set of principles that recognise further 
growth of the state is simply unsustainable and that there is an 
overwhelming moral case for letting people keep more of their own 
money, not micro-managerial tax changes of the sort the Conservatives 
announced this week. It means being honest with the country and 
making clear that we cannot go on as we have for the past decade. To 
get even, the Tories will first have to get angry.

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JOHN REDWOOD Blog   15.11.08
Conservative economic policy

Yesterday the party officials kindly sent me their latest views and 
summaries of statements by front bench spokesmen, to read before 
appearing on Any Questions.

I was pleased to see in the document an emerging view that an 
incoming Conservative government will not necessarily keep to future 
Labour spending plans. The more out of touch with financial reality 
Labour's plans become, the more important it is that the alternative 
offers something better.

Conservatives have to have courage. Labour always lie, and say we 
want to cut schools and hospitals. I know of no elected Conservative 
who has ever wanted to do that. None of us came into politics to give 
our constituents worse education or health services. We do need to 
tell the public that there are many other expenditures undertaken by 
this government that are wasteful of undesirable, starting with ID 
cards and unelected regional government.

The official party line includes the following - the wish to save 
money on:
"The cost of social failure. Family breakdown, unemployment, durg and 
alcohol addiction - these social problems rack up the biggest bills 
for government, so we've got to get them down.
"The cost of unreformed public services. Massive top-down state 
monopolies cost more and deliver less, so we need to improve the 
running of public services through more choice, competition and non 
state collective provision.
"The cost of bureraucracy itself. All bureaucracies have an inbuilt 
tendency to grow, so we need to call a halt to the wasteful spending 
and inefficiency we have seen under Labour"

Exactly. Conservatives have to show they can deliver more for less. 
That should not be difficult when you look at the rambling Labour 
public sector, with its armies of box tickers and management 
consultants, and its fields of quangos and state owned banks.
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