Difficult times

The impression during the recent Conservative Party conference was that we were already in electioneering mode with the Conservatives barrelling into combat at full tilt. I can’t say that I found either the party leader, David Cameron, or the shadow chancellor, George Osborne — sombrely telling us how bad things really were — particularly inspiring, but there was certainly more energy in the air than at the flat Labour event.

The Liberal Democrat conference this year was unusual because of the extent of internal party disagreement, with even the most popular politician in the country, the treasury spokesman and deputy leader, Vince Cable, managing to put his foot in things. He announced a new party policy plan, without consultation or pre-warning, for a mansion tax on houses worth more than £1 million, managing to upset not only his own party but a great many moderately well off working people and potential LibDem voters. The mansion tax would be levied to fill the gap caused in the event of additional laws to raise the rate of income tax being inadequate, but the one does not add up to the other, at least in the minds of most of the LibDem party and a large number of outraged voters whose entire wealth is in their homes. As it happens, it is all a pie in the sky, as the Liberal Democrats will not win an election — but they are in a position to gain or lose votes, and members of parliament.

The small parties are flexing their muscles, particularly the British National Party, led by the repellent Nick Griffin, a self-satisfied, violent, bigoted racist and now member of the European Parliament. The BNP is presently being forced to change a constitution that bans membership of non-whites. My feeling is that it should be left alone to be seen as bad as it so obviously is. Griffin had been given airspace on the prestigious BBC Question Time, chaired by David Dimbleby, recently. The worry for the mostly moderate population, and probably the BBC, and for Dimbleby was that Griffin did not come across as the madman he is; on kissing terms with the Klu Klux Klan among other extreme rightwing groups.

Griffin has canvassed carefully among the disaffected and has support, for example, from some families of young servicemen fighting a war and dying for a cause in Afghanistan that they believe has nothing to do with this country. He is playing all the cards about poor equipment for soldiers too, aligning his views spuriously but neatly with half the generals in the British army. The BNP also stands for corporal and capital punishment. Beyond that no one should imagine that there are not plenty of people in the country who might not consider themselves racists but have discovered they are afraid of the so-called Muslim threat, and have a long-time resentment of ‘people who come here and take our jobs’. There was a vast audience for the television programme.

The extreme views of the BNP are quite beyond the pale but the possibility of a lurch to the Right is always a fear if we get an overly triumphant Conservative Party again. Osborne may be correct in believing that voters expect to tighten their belts further after the last year or so, but his proposed spending cuts are hardly likely to be popular in reality, however necessary. David Cameron has gone out of his way to embrace liberal beliefs over the last few years of party-rebuilding, but he has not yet fully shown his hand. He attacked the big-size government in his conference speech and is determined to grab every element of the economy by the scruff of the neck, which it may not need. A doctrinaire approach to a reviving economy and heavy-handed government meddling in banking and the City may flatten those green shoots before they flower, even if it is a good electoral move to be seen to be bashing the bloody bankers.

There is some scary stuff going on over Europe too, that is doing nothing for the Conservative’s moderate image. Cameron has said that he will “not let matters rest” on the ratified Lisbon treaty. What this means exactly we don’t know, but he veers towards a worrying Euroscepticism that has most recently taken his party out of alliance with the European People’s Party into a new Eurosceptic alliance, the European Conservatives and Reformists. This group consists mainly of far-Right Eastern European parties, some with alleged anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi backgrounds. The shadow foreign secretary, William Hague, is in the United States of America, getting, we are led to believe, an ear-bashing from the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, who has no desire to see her country’s British allies marginalized with the thugs in Europe. On the contrary, the United Kingdom is most valuable to the US when it takes a front seat in European politics. William Hague, a disastrous party leader, is now a respected politician, with the stature of an elder statesman in spite of his relative youth. Neither he nor David Cameron is either anti-Semite or share many of the beliefs of the extreme Right in Latvia or Poland. Nobody should forget, however, that he is the product of Thatcherite nurture and a Eurosceptic to his backbone.

This week, with all parties back at the coal face in the parliament, policy and doctrine have gone out of the window as the ordure of expenses of the members of parliament rises again to the top of the agenda. The independent auditor, Sir Thomas Legg, has set levels for expenses such as cleaning and gardening at second homes, and is expecting members to pay back in arrears any larger claims made before the imposition of the new rules. Not surprisingly, there is an uproar among MPs who had not previously broken expenses rules, however lax and unsatisfactory they may have been. Cameron is taking a hard line, allowing him to manoeuvre out of parliament any MP with a tarnished reputation whose politics or person does not suit the current party image. The real bad eggs were weeded out during the traumatic summer cull and it is not surprising that some MPs are now feeling aggrieved over demands for repayment of relatively small and previously legitimate claims. The country as a whole thinks they all deserve everything they get and Sir Thomas’s approval ratings must be sky high.

Revived press attention towards the whole sorry mess continues to throw Parliament and politicians of all parties, even the decent ones, into disrepute. The House of Commons fees office and its largely anonymous staff must bear a good deal of the blame for not stopping the rot over corruptly excess claims which put this sickening saga into the public arena and continues to tar all MPs with the same brush.

Well, roll on the election and then we will see who we consider worthy of our vote, if anyone. Labour is doing its best to lose any election, Gordon Brown in particular, but I do not believe it is all going to be as easy as the Conservatives might like. The latest polls are quoting a Conservative parliamentary majority of 100 but the Opposition leadership has not yet won the heart of the country and talk of iron-fist policies and a doomsday scenario may or may not be what is needed come spring. There is certainly none of the excitement or hope for change we had when New Labour burst onto the stage with a fresh, new message. We now know it was flawed and perhaps we have grown more cynical as a result. Lord Mandelson still makes the Conservative front bench look like a bunch of schoolboys, but even his PR skills may only succeed in making the fight look less one-sided.