The Conservative Party at Prayer

Strange, I'd always assumed it was the Conservative party which would be destroyed by the EU referendum, not Labour (update: though Michael Gove might still manage that). There's still time, but there's also something very interesting about the line-up of potential candidates. 80% of them anyway:

Liam Fox: "a society that actually aborts 180,000 unborn children every year is a society that needs to be asking a lot of questions about itself. For me it's a simple personal belief. It says, "thou shall not kill", it doesn't say, thou shall not kill unless Parliament says it's OK. For the same reason I'm against the death penalty. However, I do accept...that if the majority of the population decide that it's something they find acceptable, I've got to live with that. But I'm not going to be quiet and I'm not going to pretend that my views are other than they are for the sake of political convenience."


Stephen Crabb: "There's something unattractive about politicians who wave a flag called faith, but at a personal level it's important for me. The Old Testament talks about 'widows and orphans' - shorthand for the poor and vulnerable.

"Not a bad guiding star for social policy. Jesus Christ oozed compassion."

elsewhere, wisely but sadly: Warning of a "creeping intolerance" towards Christianity and religion, the Conservative Cabinet minister said "hard-edged secularism" had created "an enormous chilling effect" in workplaces that prevented people talking openly about their beliefs.

"I have never found it easy as a politician to talk about my faith," he said. "In an age where every word is watched for something that can be construed as a gaffe, off-message or representing some bigoted or irrational attitude, it is a topic which many of us steer clear of.

"It kind of makes life simpler."

Teresa May: “You don’t think about it at the time, but there are certain responsibilities that come with being the vicar’s daughter,” Mrs May admits. “You’re supposed to behave in a particular way.” She was always tall and walked with stooped shoulders because she was self-conscious. She was quite a swot at school. “I shouldn’t say it, but I probably was Goody Two Shoes.”

She was brought up listening to Test matches on the wireless with her father. Her pin-up was – I kid you not – one Geoffrey Boycott. “I have been a Geoff Boycott fan all my life,” she admits, laughing. “It was just that he kind of solidly got on with what he was doing.” ....

The Mays have no children, one of those “ultra-intrusive subjects” on which she has been silent until now. “It just didn’t happen,” she says quietly. “This isn’t something I generally go into, but things just turned out as they did.” She admits to a sense of loss. “You look at families all the time and you see there is something there that you don’t have.” As a strong Christian, she believes in making the best of the hand you are dealt. 

Boris Johnson: Boris Johnson has said it would be "pretentious" to suggest that he is a "serious practicing Christian" even though he "thinks about religion a lot".

Mr Johnson, who is tipped as a future leader of the Conservative Party, has previously compared his faith to the radio reception of Magic FM in the Chilterns (a metaphor which Cameron later borrowed).

Nicky Morgan:  "I've always been a Christian, but I suppose I particularly renewed my faith about ten years ago, shortly after being selected in Loughborough."The Church there was so active, that it made me realise just how much the churches contribute to community life, and that was something that I appreciated. So that was the moment for me to not just be a quiet Christian, but to step up and to say publicly that I was a Christian involved in politics," 

Tim Farron should call a prayer meeting. I'm serious.

Update: the danger of posting any politics story at the moment is that it can go out of date very quickly. Michael Gove "It's because I am a Conservative I believe in the rule of law as the foundation stone of our civilisation. It's because I'm a Conservative I believe that evil must be punished. But it's also because I'm a Conservative and a Christian that I believe in redemption. (source). The National Secular Society aren't going to know who to brief against first...

Update 2: Andrea Leadsom: "I always try to ensure that I'm doing what I think God would want me to... I try and keep in mind that God's there and guiding my hand and helping me...I try to keep my beliefs and my faith through the work I'm doing." from Christians in Parliament interview.

Sunday Trading: Is It a Consultation If Nobody Listens?

Update: the government has published its response to the consultation. You can hardly see for the smoke and mirrors. It state that a majority of medium and large businesses wanted more Sunday trading (there's a surprise) as did a majority of local authorities (not a surprise, as the Conservatives run a majority of local councils). The words 'majority' don't appear anywhere else, so from that we can infer that a majority of small businesses, other organisations, and individuals, were against the proposals. There's no summary of these stats anywhere of course, the only bits of responses quoted are those supportive of the policy the government already has. There are surveys and statistics which show it has negative economic and social effect, but none of these are mentioned. The response is just as skewed as the initial consultation. CofE official response to the government response here.


Visit this page today, and here's what you see

The Conservative government issued a one-sided consultation document, took feedback, and according to their website, are still analysing it. That would explain why, after one aborted attempt to railroad a change to Sunday trading laws through Parliament, David Cameron is trying again. This time, the change in law is being brought in under a sack through the most obscure back door the government can find:

What do you do when you want to change a law but Parliament won’t allow it? Simple: you smuggle it back as a late amendment to another Bill which has already been debated by the House of Commons and scrutinised by the House of Lords. That way, there’s no prospect of a vote and so no embarrassing defeat.

So the amendment won't be debated in the Lords at all. Democracy, who needs it?

David Cameron made an explicit promise on this on April 20th 2015: “I can assure you that we have no current plans to relax the Sunday trading laws. We believe that the current system provides a reasonable balance between those who wish to see more opportunity to shop in large stores on a Sunday, and those who would like to see further restrictions.” 

The Church of Englands response to this latest manoevre points out that the changes will damage family and community life, and lead to a net loss of jobs in the retail sector, mostly in smaller businesses. That probably won't bother the bosses of Next, or the Westfield centre, major donors to the Conservative party, who would be among those who stand to benefit from the changes. If taxation practice is made by deals with the biggest taxpayers, then sadly it wouldn't be a surprise if retail practice is worked out by deals with the biggest retailers.

Here's a number of reasons why the changes are wrong, which I sent in to the consultation. I'm still waiting to hear what the government will do when it has actually analysed our feedback, rather than ignoring it. What is the point of consulting us Mr Cameron? I'd rather you saved everyone the time and were honest. Better still, pull the amendment now. 

Moral Austerity: Steep Government Cuts to Promise Keeping

I'm starting to lose count of the number of promises the Conservatives made before the election that they have ripped up in the last 5 months. Forget the budget deficit, there is a widening trust deficit:

“I can assure you that we have no current plans to relax the Sunday trading laws. We believe that the current system provides a reasonable balance between those who wish to see more opportunity to shop in large stores on a Sunday, and those who would like to see further restrictions.”  Instead the government launched a hideously skewed 'consultation' on changes to the law, and plans to introduce back-door reforms have been headed off this week by rebel MPs. 

We will invest a record £13 billion in transport for the North....on top of our £50 billion commitment to build High Speed 2 – the new North-South railway linking up London with the West Midlands, Leeds and Manchester – and develop High Speed 3 to join up the North. (Manifesto p12)...electrifying the Midland Main Line from St Pancras to Sheffield.....electrification of the Great Western Main Line –bringing new fast trains on the route. (p12) 'frozen' in June 2015, with plenty of evidence that the Conservatives knew this wasn't a promise they would keep.

We will increase NHS spending every year. (Conservative Manifesto p9). All depends how you measure it. Rising in cash terms, but falling as a % of GDP.

we will back British businesses (p18)  (unless they make solar panels, steel....)

we will freeze working age benefits for 2 years from April 2016 (p29). I.e. they won't fall. A pledge Cameron repeated in the election campaign on a specific question about tax credits. 

Both promises broken.

I'm posting this not because I'm a standard lefty Anglican, but because I think trust is vital, and people who break trust, especially those who have specifically asked for it, need to be called out. If we get to a stage where words mean nothing, where they are said for effect (to get votes) rather than for meaning or truth content (i.e. you actually mean them) then we're stuffed. We can't afford to get used to a situation where we are routinely misled, and accept it as a fact of life, whether it's politicians, phone salesmen or advertisers.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Cameron is a serial promise breaker. This is not one or two incidents, where there's an understandable train of events that has derailed best intentions. Its systematic, habitual, deliberate, and seemingly done without shame or apology. If he suggests to Samantha that they renew their wedding vows, she should be seriously worried.

Deliberate deafness: the Conservatives and Food Banks

"Whoever shuts their ears to the cry of the poor will also cry out and not be answered." (Proverbs 21:13)

During the election campaign David Cameron pretended not to know how many people were using food banks in the UK. At least, I hope he was pretending, and actually did know the answer, because any Prime Minister that doesn't know what's happening with the most vulnerable in his society should resign and make way for someone who does.

I'm starting to wonder though. It's almost as if the Conservatives are choosing not to know about food banks. Priti Patel at the DWP claimed in Parliament that 'there is no robust evidence that directly links benefit sanctions and food bank use'. That's apart from the evidence provided by the University of Oxford, the Trussell Trust, Oxfam, the Church of England etc. The evidence is there, so has the government not seen it, or having seen it, are they incapable of accepting it?

The DWP itself has been keeping the Trussell Trust at arms length.  Despite government rhetoric about helping the poor through welfare or justice reforms, it seems odd that they wouldn't want to engage with an organisation that sees nearly a million people every year who can't afford to eat. You can almost see David Cameron and Ian Duncan Smith sticking their fingers in their ears and going 'la la la' very loudly whenever food banks are mentioned.

This is all too human. We're well practiced at blocking out inconvenient truths, which don't fit the world the way we've got used to seeing it, or the way we want to see it. The truth sets us free - and in the case of poverty, would set a lot of people free if only the government were minded to see it. But it may also involve admitting that we are wrong. Humility and repentance are costly, but I'd rather have politicians eating their words than thousands of people eating nothing.

Conservative Election Strategy - the final fortnight

Do you find yourself yearning for the phrase 'long term economic plan?' I know I do. From the day of its manifesto launch, the Conservative party has changed tack to a two-pronged electoral strategy

 - offering public assets (or in the case of social housing, the assets of charities) for sale at a discount. The ideas so far are all remixes of policies tried in the 1980s.
 - blood curdling threats about the SNP and what will happen if they get into power.

Confidential strategy documents found on a disused husky sled in a Witney garage show us David Camerons key messages from now until election day:

Weds 22 April  Warn that if the SNP get more MPs all school children will be forced to eat porridge and wear kilts.

Thurs 23 April  Proposals to sell off the whole of the East coast to private ownership, in the 'Shares for Shores' scheme. Politically astute, since that's where all the UKIP voters are, and allows border controls to be put into the hands of competent private operators like, um SERCO.

Fri 24th April  Propose to ban all Scottish MPs from parliament during any 'English Votes for English Laws' sessions, and use the savings in expenses and train fairs to install border checks at Hadrians wall, or wherever it is in the North the border with Scotland is.

Sat 25th April chillax with Sam

Sun 26th April Find a big church somewhere with some cameras. Canterbury Cathedral? No those lefties at the CofE wouldn't let me into the pulpit.

Mon 27th New poster: picture of Andy Murray looking grumpy 'Always coming second to a European, do you want people like this running the country?'  (Small print at the bottom reminds people that when he wins a major trophy, Murray still counts as one of ours)

Tue 28th  Remind the nation that the Scots used to fight and kill the English 'and given half the chance they'll do it again'. New poster of Nicola Sturgeon with a Rosa Klebb style shoe blade and blue face paint. Journalists point out Braveheart was set 700 years ago.

Wed 29th With the polls showing Labour inching ahead, time to remix another hit from 1980s. Memories are hazy about both about the spelling, whether it was a good idea or not first time around. Time to relaunch the Pole Tax, a levy on immigrants from Eastern Europe and suggestive dancing. Proceeds to be used to fund an unnecessary reorganisation of the NHS, because we haven't had one for 4 years.

Thu 30th  Trident to be outsourced to a consortium headed up by Rupert Murdoch, with shares sold at a discount to hard working families. 'Now every family can be a nuclear family'

Fri May 1st Warnings that for every vote cast for the SNP, a fairy dies. Pictures of sad children splashed across the Daily Mail.

Sat May 2nd Warnings that for every vote cast for Ed Miliband, a banker has to sell his yacht. Pictures of sad bankers splashed across the Daily Telegraph.

Sun May 3rd leave this day free for a random policy announcement not in the manifesto, like the Lloyds one.

Mon May 4th Get Eric Pickles to visit the one remaining coal mine and provoke a miners strike. That worked well last time.

Tues May 5th Get Jeremy Clarkson to visit Argentina and provoke an international incident, then we can invade the Falklands, that worked well last time.

Weds May 6th Last minute changes to voting rules: anyone eating shortbread, wearing a sporran, with red hair, or singing Auld Lang Syne to be banned from voting. Or being elected. Or saying anything.

Thurs May 7th  Kick back with a bottle of Scotch and a plate of smoked salmon. Job done.

Conservative Manifesto: The Longest Coalition Document in History?

Hot on the heels of Labour, David Cameron published the Conservative manifesto yesterday. What was most immediately striking, apart from proposals to create social housing ghettoes (see below), was how much overlap the headline policies had with someone else:

 - no tax on people earning the minimum wage (UKIP)
 - raise bottom tax threshold to £12.5k (libdems)
 - extra £8bn on the nhs (Libdems, except it isn't, Clegg is promising £8bn per year, the Conservatives promise 'a minimum of £8bn over the next 5 years', which isn't the same thing)
 - freeze rail fares (Labour)
 - 30 hours free childcare for 3 and 4 year olds (Labour, though they only offer 25)
 - build more houses (everyone)
 - Right to Buy (Mrs Thatcher)

With the exception of the SNP, there are bones thrown in all directions, which either highlights political consensus, or flags up the scope for coalition discussions, depending on how you look at it.

Compared to Labour, it was a much easier document to work through, with some pretty detailed policy sections, and what looked like a comprehensive programme in a lot of areas. Here's what stood out for me:

1. Of the £30bn needed to reduce the deficit - it's 'fiscal consolidation', not cuts folks - £25bn is coming from public services, roughly half from welfare and half from other departments. There's no detail of where most of the welfare cuts will come from, apart from a reduced cap on total welfare income and scrapping Job seekers allowance for under-21s. There'll be a temporary Youth Allowance instead which stops if you don't take one of the 3m apprenticeships or a job.

2. There's a lot of specific regional and infrastructure spending, which makes me wonder why we couldn't have done some of it in the last 5 years. This is a bit of a dividing line with Labour, who despite talking about using borrowing to invest more, don't have the same commitments on infrastructure investment. Curious. However, it does allow them to name drop pretty much every region in the UK, which is politically clever.

3. A lot of devolution - more powers for all the bits of the UK, and for anywhere that chooses to have an elected mayor (and not if you don't!).

4. Tony Blairs Labour had a reputation as the champions of reannouncement, repeating declarations of new spending on several different occasions as though it wasn't the same cash over and over again. The Conservatives go one better, repeating the same announcement within the same paragraph. The pledge not to tax the minimum wage is basically the same as the pledge to raise the income tax threshold to £12,500 per year. At the moment, if you work on the minimum wage for 30 hours a week you earn £10, 452. And the threshold is 10.6k. How convenient! The Tories pledge to get the minimum wage up to £8 an hour, which will earn you £20 per year shy of the £12.5k threshold. So effectively it's the same policy, but announced in two different ways.

5. The married couples allowance stays, and rises marginally, and this is what qualifies as supporting relationships. There's passing mention of the 'troubled families' programme, but no indication of whether it will be renewed, expanded or scaled back. No mention of epidemic rates of relationship breakdown, fatherless families, and the effect all this has on the mental and emotional health of the adults and children involved. There is almost a conspiracy of silence around the family and how to support and invest in it.

6. On education, it looks like things will get a bit quieter - more of the same, rather than revolution. Worryingly for students, there is no mention of the level of the tuition fee cap, so it's left open for this to be increased. Watch this space. There'll also be loans for postgraduate degrees. The education budget is 'protected' - which means that if the number of pupils rises, so will the amount of money. It's not protected against inflation. So there will be a real terms cut in money going into schools under the Conservatives if inflation ever rises above 0%. So the word 'protected' actually means 'cut'. Again and again I was frustrated at the slippery way things were presented in this document, which then made it harder to give credit where it was due. Interesting that they keep the two flagship Libdem policies, free school meals for infants and the pupil premium.

7. The NHS - I really struggled to get my head round how politicians think about this. There's no point recruiting extra doctors and nurses if they're leaving as quickly as they arrive. 5000 nurses are leaving the NHS each year, mid-career. But responding to that entails accepting there's a problem, and like every other section, the bit on the NHS starts with a section on how poorly Labour did and how well the Conservatives have done. Sorry, but there needs to be more reality here. The section on mental health, apart from supporting mums during and after pregnancy (good) had very little. No specific targets, money, or policies. Not good enough.

8. The Big Society is back! All quiet for 3 years, whilst most of us got on with staffing food banks, there's now the new initiative to encourage volunteering (you'll need those extra 3 days a year if you're a governor of an academy, it's a couple of leagues up from being governor of a normal school, and that was demanding enough). I wonder what the Italian paymaster of Westlands, whose workers here in Yeovil will all be entitled to 3 days a year off, will think of that! It's an odd policy, but I think I like it. What I didn't like was the manifesto taking credit for £8bn a year going into heritage art and sport. It claimed this was 'public and lottery funding', but since the lottery puts in £1.6bn a year, that doesn't leave much for the government! In fact, it gets a tax from the lottery, so it makes a profit. Better controls on online pornography are welcome, but I'd have liked to see something on gambling and payday loans.

9. Not many people have picked up on the plan to cut the number of MPs to 600 and revise parliamentary boundaries. That could be quite significant in the long run.

10. Sorry but the Right To Buy plans are like the AV referendum (remember that?) a potentially ok plan scuppered by dreadful delivery. The AV option put to the vote was probably the worst form of proportional representation, and there are a lot of things wrong with the RtB format. Forcing the most expensive properties to be sold off? Well lets have a think. They'll either be the biggest ones (which Housing Associations have previously pulled down to build more, smaller units), or those in the nicest neighbourhoods. Smaller dwellings, and poorer neighbourhoods, will remain social housing. The long term effect is obvious: nicer areas will become almost 100% owner-occupied, and social housing will become more concentrated in areas of lower value. Around here, house prices in Sherborne were recently shown to be £100k higher on average than those in Yeovil. So if you applied the policy locally, all the social housing tenants would end up in Yeovil.

There's also an inevitable time-lag. It takes 10-20 years round here to find and buy land, get planning permission, and build new houses. Without being able to take out big loans, the housing associations won't have the money to buy land and build houses until the RtB units are sold, you can't replace them like tins on a shelf. So RtB will build in an extra shortage on top of the 1.4m that currently exists, around the time it takes to build the replacement properties.

11. Goodbye wind turbines. Subsidies for onshore wind will be scrapped, and they will 'change the law so that local people have the final say on windfarm applications'. Giving local people 'the final say' is a nimbys charter, nobody is campaigning for wind farms to be built on their skyline. What will Eric Pickles do with his time now that he hasn't got all those wind farms to veto? Words about 'cost effective' green technology suggest that economics, rather than carbon emissions, will be the deciding factor for any Tory greenery.

12. I'm worried about propsals to ban 'extremists' from working with children. We all know they mean ISIS sympathisers and the like,  but the way the cultural wind is blowing, anyone like me who takes the 'traditional' line on marriage is seen as a phobe and an extremist. Will there be unintended consequences?

13. The manifesto alludes to 'space for resentment to fester' over Scottish MPs voting on English laws. As I recall, this wasn't that much of an issue until Cameron stoked it up after the referendum last year. Standard marketing practice, create a demand ex nihilo then produce a product that meets the manufactured need. Shabby.

14. I was glad to see the case being made for keeping overseas aid at 0.7% of GDP, with some stats on lives saved, children immunised, access to clean water etc. This needs to keep being said. Well done.

There is a lot more to get your teeth into here than the Labour manifesto, but aside from the economy and infrastructure, where there seems to be a fair bit of thinking, other areas of policy get a token nod. There's nowhere near enough on climate change, family support, and mental health. The loud silences in some areas (food banks, details of welfare cuts) the slippery presentation in others (tax on minimum wage, EVEL, school and NHS funding) and the awful ideas around Right to Buy, don't inspire me with confidence. There's a programme of action, but true to Cameron there isn't much of an underlying philosophy.

Despite the levels of detail in some areas, it just doesn't leave me with a sense of a party which has really got to grips with all the issues we face. It's not just about the economy. The Bishops call for an 'attractive vision' of a society has fallen on deaf ears. The most eye-catching policies are of the 'retail politics' variety - vote for us and we'll give you this. There isn't much here, aside from the aid target and the volunteering scheme, that calls on us to put others first, to think of 'us' rather than 'I'.

Centre for Social Justice - watch this space

The Centre for Social Justice, the thinktank set up by Iain Duncan Smith, published a poll yesterday to flag up a new project which could underpin future Conservative social policy. The headlines from yesterdays press release point to possible areas of policy focus, for example:


Family breakdown and the decline in the importance of marriage are cited by the public as key causes of the serious social problems facing Britain, according to a new opinion poll.

The survey found that 55 per cent of people – the equivalent of 25 million people across the land – say at least one of their local communities is plagued by broken families, crime and poor schools.

Some 60 per cent say that over the last few decades, marriage has become less important to society and that is having a damaging effect on the country.

And with 89 per cent agreement, the public identifies better parenting and stronger families as the key to mending the broken society.

We haven't seen that phrase 'broken society' for a while, I'm glad it still has some currency because it's still true, perhaps even more so in some places since the Coalition came to power. I also wonder why the CSJ needs to report again on families and parenting when it's already done so in a fairly meaty way, and only seen a few of its recommendations taken up.

Christian Guy, (his name, and who knows, perhaps a personal description too?) the head of CSJ, also flags up poverty as a key focus:  we have brought together a genuine team of experts with frontline poverty-fighting experience to help us draw up a new social policy blueprint to tackle the challenges of the 21st century."

A longstanding CSJ theme has been, in line with Conservative (and Libdem) policy, that local/voluntary/community solutions are better than those delivered by the state. The government is starting to  promote and support 'community franchise' approaches in key areas of social policy. Remember David Camerons 200,000 'problem families'? The money for that is going to local councils, who have to identify local providers who can deliver results. The local contract in South Somerset has gone to a church-based initiative, who are now fielding requests for information from other parts of the UK. Chris Graylings' ideas for mentoring recently released prisoners are based on the same model, and Sure Start is about to head the same way. At the same time organisations like the Cinnamon Network are promoting 'franchise' models of community engagement for churches - projects set up in 1 place, but which can be replicated in many settings without reinventing the wheel.

Update: this is all the more significant as a report today shows that one of these projects, using charities and businesses to get the long term unemployed back into work, has failed quite badly. 

This is a bit of a brave new world - it's been a long time since we looked elsewhere than the state to 'sort things out'. It's an interesting model - comparisons to the US and Victorians are wide of the mark, provided the state remains in place as a guarantor of quality and resources, even if delivery is left up to the voluntary or private sector. Labour co-opted many charities as arms of the state, throwing funding around with gay abandon, thus making many voluntary groups just as state-dependent as the people they were trying to help. Ironically, the Conservatives are actually taking this further. I hope this is as far as they go: devolving funding and activity may work better, but lets hope this isn't a step towards the state withdrawing completely, leaving the voluntary sector with all the caseload and none of the funding or policy leadership.

I hope the CSJ are going to be truly radical, and challenge everything which brings poverty and family breakdown. 24 hour opening, deregulation of Sunday trading, increasing shift work and unsociable hours all limit the time which parents and families can spend together. Extending parental leave at the beginning of life is good, but that's then rather undermined if, once little Johnny/Joanna is 1, the parents never see each other, or their child, because they're both working daft hours and the kid is in childcare from 7.30am to 7pm every day (the opening hours of our local nursery). When asked to draw a picture of the most significant person in their life, how many 3 year olds will draw their childminder or key worker?

And why are the parents both out to work? Because the average house costs 9x the average wage, compared to the 3x it did back in 1990. Everyone who got in on the property bubble? We did that. Yes, the state could have held things back, built more houses, told the banks to be more responsible about mortgages. But there's no way out of this without substantial pain, and at the moment new buyers are getting most of it. If the CSJ can find a solution for this (and make sure that all new homes have space for a family to eat together round a table, rather than the TV) then they'll have done something really radical. If we're serious about family breakdown, then the economic and 'free market' factors have to be brought to heel: not everything that business wants is good for families. There is no such thing as a free market, someone always has to pay. Part of the governments job (and ours too) is to identify the vulnerable parties in that equation, and protect them.