David Cameron on poverty

David Cameron is not a rhetorical speaker. He does not reach the verbal heights of a Barack Obama or of my old friend Mark Francois. He doesn't communicate the raw emotion of a John Prescott. However, he doesn't take the route of purely logical argument either. This is best exemplified by Gordon Brown, whose speeches are like being sprayed with information to a point that you start to lose the will to live. In fact, you tend to get the feeling that the main purpose of his speaking is to establish how intelligent Gordon Brown is relative to you. In any case, David Cameron has a very plain speaking style, in fact a studied lack of style that is either very natural, or the product of intensive training. The effect is pretty good though, and his conference speech was a statement of vision delivered without drama, except for one moment. At one point he looked right into the camera and told the Labour party not to dare to lecture the wicked Tories on poverty after their many failures. It was brilliant and spine-tingling, and I am told that it was electric in the conference hall.

My judgement, and that of most opinion-formers, is that David Cameron not only delivered an effective speech, but parked his tanks neatly on Labour's lawn. It was also the right thing to focus on. To paraphrase, the Conservative Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing. It is just that it usually doesn't mention it.

The politics of George Osborne's honesty

These are the numbers from the YouGov poll taken after George Osborne's speech:

CON 43% (+2) LAB 29% (+1) LD 17%(-1)

It appears that being straight with the British people doesn't hurt politically. This puts Labour in a bit of a bind. Can they credibly keep to their ostrich-like denial that the nation's debt is a problem? If they do then they sound dishonest, and a bit ridiculous. Bear in mind that every serious commentator and most newspapers accept that there is a debt crisis. Of course they could have a Damascene Conversion, but then they will be seen to follow the Conservatives, again.

George Osborne tells it like it is

In politics you don't tend to tell people that if they vote for you their lives are going to get worse. Labour certainly didn't last week, where the Chancellor and the Prime Minister announced billions of pounds of new policy and neglected to mention the word 'debt'. However, the country is in debt, massive debt, largely due to the same Chancellor and Prime Minister. The billions that they were promising don't exist, except as more borrowings on the money markets. In fact, the reality is that whoever people vote for at the next election their lives are going to get worse. The main difference between the two parties is that the Conservatives are actually telling people this while Labour are, well, lying.

George Osborne laid it on the line in his speech at Conservative Party conference. His theme was 'we are all in this together' and then announced a public sector pay freeze and a raising of the pension age for men to 66 among a number of measures designed to reduce government spending and actually do something about the nation's debt. This came after the Chancellor had sneaked out a pay freeze for senior public servants as some sort of pathetic spoiler. Think about it, the man had a platform last week when he could have made the announcement, but instead of facing his own party audience he tried to distract attention from the Conservatives instead. This is pathetic, student-level politics and fooled no-one.

The Shadow Chancellor was very impressive, not his delivery particularly, but his content. He seems to have struck a chord too. Editorials were consistently positive, and drew attention to the contrast between George Osborne's candour and Labour's spin at their own conference. For the Conservatives honesty may really be the best policy.

St. George's Community Housing gets the two stars

The deal was that if St. George's Community Housing, Basildon Council's housing organisation, got two stars following an inspection by the Audit Commission that they would get £142 million over five years to improve the housing stock. As previously reported the Labour government ratted on the deal and said that regardless of the result of the inspection there would be no money. Now they have have performed a bit of a U-turn, though 'bit' is the operative word. St. George's got the two stars and there will now be £5m this year, about half of the originally promised amount. This is much better than nothing, but nothing like enough.

That we have even got that much is due to careful lobbying by Basildon Council's Leader, Tony Ball, Basildon's Chief Executive and officer team, and the Cabinet Member responsible, Andy Baggott. We were also helped by support from the local Labour party, where the leader, Lynda Gordon, went against her own government and MP to back Basildon's tenants. All credit to her for that, though I suspect this compliment will not help her with her colleagues. Basildon Labour is a bit fractious you see.

Cameron on Marr

I caught the Andrew Marr interview with David Cameron this morning. Having asked Gordon Brown the previous week if he was on drugs, Marr clearly felt that he had to give David Cameron a kicking as well in the interests of balance. So, we had a question if a man from an upper middle-class family could really represent ordinary British people, guesses at David Cameron's net worth and a demand for the exact number of people who would be made unemployed by a Conservative government's cutting of public spending. Well, there is a name for the assumption that someone's worth in entirely defined by their parentage; it is called bigotry, and it doesn't matter if the key factor is taken as race or social class or whatever. You either believe that people can be taken or their own merits or you don't, and Andrew Marr clearly does not. In the case of David Cameron you could not possibility argue that he has escaped the travails and tragedies that we all encounter in our lives, and if you don't know what I mean by that then look it up, because I am not going to spell it out here.

As for his net worth, who the hell knows that at the drop of a hat? I certainly don't, and if an interviewer asked me about it I would probably tell them to shove off anyway. The irony here it that Andrew Marr is probably richer than David Cameron anyway, especially using the tax avoidance scams that the BBC arranges for its better paid staff, whixh the Times revealed today.

Then we come to revealing the precise number of people who would lose their jobs in an effort to curb Labour's disastrous national debt. It was never likely that David Cameron was going to answer that one, because the basic premise of the question is wrong. The reason that we need to cut government spending is because Labour is funding a large part of it by borrowing the cash on the international money markets. If this carries on the interest rates and taxes will have to rise in order to service both capital and interest payments. If that happens then the UK economy will not grow as much as it might, which means prolonged high levels of unemployment. So, the net unemployment levels where government spending is not constrained will be higher and for longer. What would also probably happen is that eventually UK debt could not be financed via the international markets, which would lead to forced cuts in services anyway. This is what the Labour government brought us to in 1976, and the repeat proves the old adage that the problem of socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money.

The key point made by David Cameron was that it was extraordinary for the opposition to be making the running on economic policy, while the government was sticking its head in the sand and pretending that it could run astronomic levels of debt indefinitely. Compare Gordon Brown and David Cameron in front of the same interviewer and only one sounded like a Prime Minister, and it wasn't the one with the job title.

Gordon Brown claims that he is going to cure cancer!

Just listened to Gordon Brown's conference speech. He claimed that Labour was going to 'beat cancer', unbelievable. Cancer is a complex series of diseases that are and have been the subject of intensive research by some of the best brains on the planet for decades. The idea that a government can wave a magic wand and just do away with it is just garbage. Actually, it is just a lie that plays on the fears of people facing such an appalling disease. You just have to wonder about the cynicism of someone who would do that.

Marr pops the Question to Brown on his health

Andrew Marr asked Gordon Brown about his heath in an interview on BBC1 this morning. This is after speculation in both the internet and the print media that Gordon Brown has some sort of a problem. He said:

A lot of people use prescription painkillers and pills to help them get through, are you one of those people?

The Prime Minister answered basically 'No'. Now, Marr was dead right to ask the question. I am the Deputy Leader of a Council, bit I suffer from a very serious condition, that requires me to pop a great many pills. I have been asked on a number of occasions about my health in relation to my post, and I don't resent it. It's a fair question to me and it was a fair question to the Prime Minister, especially as his job is much more demanding. I think he could have given a much clearer answer though.

As for the rest, he spent all of his time knocking the Conservative Party and trying to fudge issues like public debt and his u-turn on cuts. If he came across as just a bit less bitter and partisan and was just a bit more straight than he would be a great deal more credible. Instead, he just sounds glib.

Marr was pretty tough by the way, in a way that he never had been before with Gordon Brown, when he could interrupt Brown from reciting very, very long lists of bullet points that is. When I was taught public speaking it was put to me that spoken lists should have no more than three items, because people will forget the first by the time you get to number four. Clearly no-one has mentioned this to Gordon Brown.

Water on the Moon

Spacecraft have confirmed that there is water on the moon, both in ice form, but also in the regolith, or moondust. So what? you are probably thinking, and what has that got to do with politics? All right, space policy is not very high on the political agenda, but there are signs that this might be changing, with some limited debate on the UK joining the manned space exploration effort. Certainly, there is no argument about the importance of space, at least in terms of Earth's orbit. Satellites are now integral to everything from communications to navigation. Hell, my phone has GPS. The fact is that space policy is increasing in importance and that in the very long term it could have a strategic significance similar to deep ocean exploration by European powers in the renaissance.

Water on the moon is important because the two basic materials needed to support human life are energy and water. Energy is abundant on the moon in the form of direct and continuous sunlight. Water means that oxygen for air can be electrolysed and food produced, without total dependency on supplies from Earth, which is critical given the mass limitations of current rocket technology. Basically, water on the moon means that a moonbase and economic exploitation of the moon becomes much more practical.

What is astonishing is that the Apollo astronauts also found water, but NASA thought that was due to contamination and so announced that the moon was completely dry. I do wonder if that mistake had some effect on US space policy. If NASA had got that right and so the moon had seemed more interesting, would the Apollo programme still have been halted? That makes an interesting road not taken at least.

Daniel Finkelstein on saving the Labour Party

Daniel Finkelstein, who I met when we both did the Conservative Candidate's board, has written an excellent article on how to save the Labour Party. It is spot on in every regard, and it is very much at odds with what Labour is actually doing.

I really liked this bit:

Advising Labour on how to improve its position without advising it to get rid of Mr Brown is like advising someone how to deal with their cheesy feet problem without advising them to stop wearing shoes made out of brie.

There have been many hundreds of thousands of words written about Gordon Brown and the Labour leadership, but I return to my usual theme. There is no theory of organisational leadership, none, that suggests that there is any benefit in keeping a failing leader in post. Different poll ratings for possible alternative leaders or worries about the length of the leadership election process are all irrelevant. What is comes down to is if the man at the top can to the job, or not. If not, then he should go and go quickly.

Even assuming the Labour party is not inclined to follow that advice, Daniel's article is still very well worth a read.

LSC funding and New Campus Basildon

Basildon underperforms in further education. This is not a matter of opinion, rather a matter of fact, sadly written in the statistics for educational outcomes. So, some of our 16-19 year-olds are not getting the futures that they deserve, and that is a tragedy. There was a solution though, a £90m brand-new college in Basildon Town Centre, run by a consortium of existing educational establishments that would bring a first-class education to thousands of our young people. The money was coming from the national Learning and Skills Council, and the hugely successful New Campus Basildon pilot had already been established in the Icon building.

Now, the troubles with the LSC are now old news in that they promised vastly more capital to projects up and down the country than they actually had. So, it has all come to a halt and we have to recognise that this Biblical level of incompetence has put paid to our most ambitious plans for the education of our young people. They have been comprehensively betrayed by a combination of a stumbling quango and an indifferent Labour government, who both seem to have missed the point that these young adults are our future. We have to provide for them, because one day they will be running the world, and we need them to run it well. We aren't giving up though. Our local education providers, and the local LSC to be fair, are doing their best and Basildon Council will also do what it can. We clearly need an alternative plan for our young people's education, and we are going to have one.