This Wretched Hive Of Scum And Villainy
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  This Wretched Hive Of Scum And Villainy
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Author Topic: This Wretched Hive Of Scum And Villainy  (Read 52153 times)
Geoffrey Howe
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« Reply #50 on: September 25, 2021, 06:31:51 AM »

Matthew Paris in The Times today with what's on every Tory's mind: the creeping leftism of our not so blue government.
More and more the consensus is that government should fix all life's glitches, as Parris puts it. Unfortunately, the Conservatives, from political expediency and lack of ideological conviction, are acquiescing.

Hauntingly, he writes: "Colleagues may write about the Tories’ wonderful talent for reinventing themselves, but to what purpose if we no longer believe in the ruling ideas that drove us? I used to argue that we needed a centre party. Could it be, though, that it’s a right-of-centre party we lack?"



Quote
Aged 19 I joined the Conservative Party because I believed in the free market, in Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, and the quiet, patient but unstoppable power of price in regulating demand and stimulating supply. I believed that if you’re short of applicants for a job you raise the wage. I laughed at government attempts to control prices as a way of keeping down inflation. I knew you couldn’t buck the market. I did also know, as Adam Smith knew, that it’s not quite as simple as that. Conservatives accept that government has a role in ensuring free and fair competition, in underwriting standards, discouraging exploitation, protecting the environment, and sometimes in easing the shock of transition when market corrections in goods and labour bear too sharply on citizens.

But, underneath it all, a Conservative, or what used to be a Conservative, believes in the huge and in the end final power of supply and demand as accelerator or brake. We hear the socialist case for intervention and state control; we understand its force and its attraction; we accept that it will sometimes prove necessary; but our instinct, our default position, should be hands-off.

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Geoffrey Howe
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« Reply #51 on: September 25, 2021, 06:56:32 AM »

Jim Callaghan said forty years ago "there are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a change in politics...there is a shift in what the public wants...I suspect there is now such a sea-change - and it is for Mrs Thatcher."

I feel we are at such an inflection point; but, induced by the pandemic, the sea-change points towards collectivism. It is in such times that a principled Conservative Party is most needed. Boris Johnson has been found sorely lacking.
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CumbrianLefty
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« Reply #52 on: September 25, 2021, 07:19:15 AM »

And of course, said "sea change" is a real opportunity for a Labour party that isn't obsessed by itself.
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Conservatopia
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« Reply #53 on: September 25, 2021, 04:07:43 PM »

And of course, said "sea change" is a real opportunity for a Labour party that isn't obsessed by itself.

You're absolutely right of course.  But one could argue that the Tory obsession with staying in power (no matter what principles are thrown overboard) is equally harmful, both to itself and the country.

It's a silly cliché but the Tories really are becoming a Marxist party.  That's Groucho not Karl.
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Nathan
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« Reply #54 on: September 25, 2021, 09:35:01 PM »

I'm an armchair observer from overseas, obviously, and a left-wing one to boot, but it looks an awful lot to me like the Johnson government only seems "leftist" compared to the towering hard-right Thatcher legacy and the (overstated and mildly unfair) Blair-Brown reputation for capitulating to that legacy. I can't think of anything they've done that's made stateside news that would have been out of place for an early- or mid-twentieth-century Tory government, except maybe for some of the authoritarianism-adjacent policing/Home Office stuff.
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Geoffrey Howe
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« Reply #55 on: September 26, 2021, 04:22:10 AM »

I'm an armchair observer from overseas, obviously, and a left-wing one to boot, but it looks an awful lot to me like the Johnson government only seems "leftist" compared to the towering hard-right Thatcher legacy and the (overstated and mildly unfair) Blair-Brown reputation for capitulating to that legacy. I can't think of anything they've done that's made stateside news that would have been out of place for an early- or mid-twentieth-century Tory government, except maybe for some of the authoritarianism-adjacent policing/Home Office stuff.

The Home Office stuff is more bluster and bravado than anything really from what I can tell - hence why Patel's numbers are fairly poor amongst the base (obviously I'd rather keep it that way). They have made it more difficult to unilaterally remove statues but that's the least one would expect.

There is something to what you're saying on economic issues. Definitely from WW2 to 1975* we fell into a "Labour - 15%" approach and Boris is returning towards that. Of course that's partly because there is little appetite for economic liberalism these days. But I would take Harold Macmillan any day over this car-crash even if they hold fairly similar dirigiste economic views.

*Excepting 1970-1972, an oft-forgotten period of proto-Thatcherism, and genuinely a missed opportunity. Had Heath managed to stick to his guns I think the "Thatcher revolution" pursued ten years earlier would have been less painful.
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CumbrianLefty
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« Reply #56 on: September 26, 2021, 04:26:02 AM »

There is little appetite for economic liberalism even in the Tories because of what Osborne did in the earlier coalition years especially, and the consequences of it.
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afleitch
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« Reply #57 on: September 26, 2021, 04:30:18 AM »

I'm an armchair observer from overseas, obviously, and a left-wing one to boot, but it looks an awful lot to me like the Johnson government only seems "leftist" compared to the towering hard-right Thatcher legacy and the (overstated and mildly unfair) Blair-Brown reputation for capitulating to that legacy. I can't think of anything they've done that's made stateside news that would have been out of place for an early- or mid-twentieth-century Tory government, except maybe for some of the authoritarianism-adjacent policing/Home Office stuff.

The Home Office stuff is more bluster and bravado than anything really from what I can tell - hence why Patel's numbers are fairly poor amongst the base (obviously I'd rather keep it that way). They have made it more difficult to unilaterally remove statues but that's the least one would expect.

There is something to what you're saying on economic issues. Definitely from WW2 to 1975* we fell into a "Labour - 15%" approach and Boris is returning towards that. Of course that's partly because there is little appetite for economic liberalism these days. But I would take Harold Macmillan any day over this car-crash even if they hold fairly similar dirigiste economic views.

*Excepting 1970-1972, an oft-forgotten period of proto-Thatcherism, and genuinely a missed opportunity. Had Heath managed to stick to his guns I think the "Thatcher revolution" pursued ten years earlier would have been less painful.

It's clear economic liberalism has failed and you have a generation now who know nothing positive of it. What unites modern day Tories with their precedeccesors is the swiftness to use variance in income taxes (the threshold, PAYE/NIC etc) as a 'leveller' which it was up until the early 90's under the guise of it being a fair method of taxation today. Which it isn't.

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Filuwaúrdjan
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« Reply #58 on: September 26, 2021, 06:37:13 AM »

Mostly that article just tells you that Matthew Parris is extremely right-wing these days. But then he's started to openly advocate for eugenics so, no surprise.

I'm an armchair observer from overseas, obviously, and a left-wing one to boot, but it looks an awful lot to me like the Johnson government only seems "leftist" compared to the towering hard-right Thatcher legacy and the (overstated and mildly unfair) Blair-Brown reputation for capitulating to that legacy. I can't think of anything they've done that's made stateside news that would have been out of place for an early- or mid-twentieth-century Tory government, except maybe for some of the authoritarianism-adjacent policing/Home Office stuff.

I mean the Blair and Brown governments were a mile to the left of the Johnson government. Almost everything 'left-wing' that Parris is screaming about was just standard practice then and abandoned during the Cameron-Osborne era.
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CumbrianLefty
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« Reply #59 on: September 26, 2021, 06:40:55 AM »

Mostly that article just tells you that Matthew Parris is extremely right-wing these days.

But still voted LibDem at the last GE Smiley
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DC Al Fine
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« Reply #60 on: September 28, 2021, 02:13:46 PM »

Mostly that article just tells you that Matthew Parris is extremely right-wing these days.

But still voted LibDem at the last GE Smiley

That seems to be a meme among some commentators. A fairly prominent Canadian pundit spent the entire 2015 campaign complaining that the Tories were insufficiently committed to economic liberalism, before turning around and voting NDP Tongue
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cp
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« Reply #61 on: September 28, 2021, 03:55:24 PM »

Mostly that article just tells you that Matthew Parris is extremely right-wing these days. But then he's started to openly advocate for eugenics so, no surprise.

I'm an armchair observer from overseas, obviously, and a left-wing one to boot, but it looks an awful lot to me like the Johnson government only seems "leftist" compared to the towering hard-right Thatcher legacy and the (overstated and mildly unfair) Blair-Brown reputation for capitulating to that legacy. I can't think of anything they've done that's made stateside news that would have been out of place for an early- or mid-twentieth-century Tory government, except maybe for some of the authoritarianism-adjacent policing/Home Office stuff.

I mean the Blair and Brown governments were a mile to the left of the Johnson government. Almost everything 'left-wing' that Parris is screaming about was just standard practice then and abandoned during the Cameron-Osborne era.

Massive government subventions to private corporations spun as investments in welfare, creeping authoritarianism in immigration and crime policy, kowtowing to the finance sector, lip service to LGBT+ people that aren't affluent white men, Atlanticist foreign policy in service of thinly veiled neo-colonialism, and laughably shallow commitment to government/ministerial accountability.

Please tell me which regime I've referred to.
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EastAnglianLefty
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« Reply #62 on: September 29, 2021, 05:41:27 AM »

The interventionism of the Tories mostly comes down to being willing to step in when a system whose collapse they'd been warned about for years (and ignored) finally starts to collapse in a way that might make them unpopular. That's hardly state planning.
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CumbrianLefty
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« Reply #63 on: September 29, 2021, 08:47:54 AM »

I mean, even though much of the above list is true about the New Labour years - they were still well to the left of any Tory government (save possibly in the very final Blair years, but even then.....)

The really resonant critique of NL is that they didn't achieve as much as they could have done.
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Geoffrey Howe
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« Reply #64 on: December 09, 2021, 12:37:57 PM »

Spotted in today's Torygraph:

SIR - The only reason I have not cancelled my membership of the Conservative Party is that I want to have a say in the election of the next leader.
The election cannot come too soon.


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Blair
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« Reply #65 on: December 09, 2021, 01:17:53 PM »
« Edited: December 09, 2021, 01:25:28 PM by Blair »

Yes it should set alarm bells off when even ConservativeHome is putting out editorials about the PMs ability.

I'm just waiting for the realisation from Tory MPs that a new chief of staff, or a new cabinet minister won't change the fundamental problem.

I forgot to add that Johnson is also building quite a long enemies list; Jenrick, Williamson, Buckland, Mercer and co all added in the last 6 months.
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Torrain
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« Reply #66 on: December 11, 2021, 09:56:48 AM »

I forgot to add that Johnson is also building quite a long enemies list; Jenrick, Williamson, Buckland, Mercer and co all added in the last 6 months.

When the leadership election comes - and it must eventually, I expect they'll line up to support the other chap.

Though at this point, even staunch allies like Raab seem to be cooling on the PM, who seems to wield demotion as his only real form of party discipline.

The remaining Cabinet members aren't going to be much help either. It strikes me that:
  • Sunak has no need to be loyal - he's a viable candidate.
  • Patel has too poor a reputation to command much support (she's probably dependent on Johnson, rather than the other way around).
  • Truss is untested, and probably more likely to end up a hopeless challenger supported by the populist-right than a supporter
  • Gove only cares about Gove, and will probably run for PM, rather than support Johnson
  • Javid appears to have no real constituency within the party, and has too long a history of clashing with Johnson to be a plausible surrogate.
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CumbrianLefty
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« Reply #67 on: December 11, 2021, 11:02:50 AM »

Truss appears to be the most popular amongst the membership, believe it or not.
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Conservatopia
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« Reply #68 on: December 11, 2021, 03:27:24 PM »

Truss appears to be the most popular amongst the membership, believe it or not.

Not really that surprising.
FWIW she would be my first choice out of the likely candidates.
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Geoffrey Howe
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« Reply #69 on: December 12, 2021, 05:01:55 AM »

Torygraph now sending daily attacks on the PM's character - as if it hasn't been obvious for some time; but it is notable since they've traditionally gone down the "too Lefty" line.

Discontent is very much spread through all factions of the Party; it's difficult to identify a pro-Boris block - and the careerist element to his support is faltering for obvious reasons.
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Torrain
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« Reply #70 on: December 12, 2021, 05:27:05 AM »

Truss appears to be the most popular amongst the membership, believe it or not.

That’s disappointing. If we were to take any lesson from Boris’ premiership, I thought it would be not to trust loudmouthed populists with the PM’s seat.

(Bonus plots if they are a blond(e) former Foreign Secretary with limited ministerial experience and a history of gaffes. Man, they really might just be the same person).
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CumbrianLefty
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« Reply #71 on: December 12, 2021, 05:28:35 AM »

Torygraph now sending daily attacks on the PM's character - as if it hasn't been obvious for some time; but it is notable since they've traditionally gone down the "too Lefty" line.

Discontent is very much spread through all factions of the Party; it's difficult to identify a pro-Boris block - and the careerist element to his support is faltering for obvious reasons.

Some of the "red wall" group, still? Plus of course Nadine Dorries Smiley
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Geoffrey Howe
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« Reply #72 on: December 14, 2021, 04:12:27 AM »

I see Peter Hitchens has decided Liz Truss is a "Lefty liberal".
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Secretary of State Liberal Hack
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« Reply #73 on: December 14, 2021, 06:35:58 AM »

I see Peter Hitchens has decided Liz Truss is a "Lefty liberal".
She's a sleeper lib dem agent.
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CumbrianLefty
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« Reply #74 on: December 14, 2021, 07:58:54 AM »

I see Peter Hitchens has decided Liz Truss is a "Lefty liberal".
She's a sleeper lib dem agent.

Well she was one once, but then again Hitchens P was a Trot back in the day.
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