Tackling nonsense claims the Conservative Party are homophobic.
One thing that drives me mad when looking at blogs and twitter feeds especially from Labour quarters is their insistence that the Tory party are going to take away the rights of homosexuals, heck they’re going to expand rights on asylum, and on giving blood.
The idea Tories “fought against civil partnerships” and other gay rights is completely untrue. Not just because Alan Duncan helped steer the bill through Parliament, but also because the voting figures for Tory MPs show completely to the contrary.
Gay rights have never been party poltical. Indeed, when IDS tried to make gay rights party political, the party rebelled: a fair number actively voted against the whip over gay adoption, and many more abstained – including several shadow ministers
Homosexual “activities” were decriminalised in Scotland in 1981, under a Conservative government, although that was quite some time later than in England. and Tory MP Edwina Currie proposed equalising the age of consent in 1994, but was narrowly defeated by both Tory and Labour votes (including David Blunkett). William Hague supported the amendment.
We also probably have the most active LGBT platform within a mainstream political party, I’d personally like to see Labour partisans tackle them over their claims the Tories are homophobic. (Here’s a clue, they wouldn’t win the argument.)
Squashing the myths that the Tories will damage Surestart
I’ve not been surprised recently by the thundering rhetoric recently from piss poor journalists and Labourites on twitter about Tory policy on Surestart.– they’ve never let reality get in the way of one of their little rants, especially when it’s one about David Cameron.
What will be done to Surestart is scaling it back, and offering more directed support to those who need it the most, as in line with a report by Demos. Cameron wants more emphasis on health visitors, and to reverse the middle-class capture of some Sure Start centres, that was it’s remit at first and it did it well – its expansion was costly, pointless, and defeated what it was originally intended to do which was to help the poorest families out of poverty. The problem the Conservative Party face however, is dealing with the public perception that they want to slash funding and damage Surestart. Shappi Khorsandi was quick to bring it up on Question Time two weeks ago, and was quickly put in her place by Ken Clarke, but the question we must ask is how common is this view amongst the wider public?
There are some in the party that would abolish SureStart now, quoting the 1.5bn pricetag, and reports which show up it’s substantial failures and it’s a view that I sympathise with. Mike Denham is right to point out that on the question of removing child care for working mums, the NAO report says that most Sure Start centres charge parents for the service at around the commercial market rate – and is a good illustration of the middle class capture that the party seek to avoid. What we must do though, as Ken Clarke rightly points out today, is not to make save cuts on those that need support the most, and given the high satisfaction rate for Surestart centres amongst the poorest families that rely on it the most, it certainly wouldn’t be wise to abolish it.
The party’s current policy however, is one that must be touted, the abolishment of Surestart must be rightly pointed out as a myth, and we must show that when it comes to targeting the familes most in need, it’s one that we hit with a bullseye.
It’s no wonder that Labour are no longer considered the Party of the NHS.
The Labour party always like to remind us that they are the party that strengthened the NHS after years of neglect from the ‘Nasty Tories’, yet as we’ve seen today none of the attacks land a blow.
If you call strengthening something chucking money at it so it looks a bit shinier and moves slightly quicker then the NHS really has been strengthened. On the other hand those of us who don’t feel that encouraging a culture of laziness and graft by paying off the medical workers unions, losing billions on projects of little real worth, or that even work and lumbering us with expensive contract payments for new facilities and services that won’t be paid off until we’re pensioners, probably by a Chancellor who is still doing their times tables and a PM who is yet to be born, is a million miles away from strengthening something.
Those are fairly minor points when you consider that spending on the NHS has grown at such an irresponsible rate over the last 10 years that it will probably be another 10 years before we see any major real increases, simply because there is no more money to lob its way. Labour have always claimed to be the “party of the NHS” so don’t you think it’s possible that people now feel anti-NHS thanks to Labour’s incompetence? Just a thought.
The Conservative party on the other hand do have the ideas to improve our health service.
Conservatives and the EU.
David Cameron has managed created a real opposition within the European Parliament before even before becoming PM, quite the amazing feat, and one of the promises he has been able to deliver on. An anti federalist solution that the Eurosceptics and the few Europhiles within the party (Yes, Daniel Hannan we still exist.) can rally around and fly the flag for – localism and free trade within the European Union, we don’t need Nationalist claptrap to achieve that, we need to put our opposition into action so that we can achieve the change we want
I am firmly of the belief that many with the party are not true Eurosceptics, just anti-Brussels, by that I mean against the policies of the EU rather than the idea of a European union itself. The EUSSR meme is in full flow, I’m not even sure if the people who use it actually do wear timn foil hats or whether they actually people it’s an effective way to make people anti EU. Cameron and his team are not Euro-secessionists, and will never cave into pressure from that fringe of the party.
What we should be doing is working constructively with the EU, not giving into pressure from other member states like the current Government have done for the past 12 years. It’s funny that we have jibes from the Labour benches that our so called ‘isolation’ within Europe will hinder us from having any influence, considering that the only thing that springs to my mind about what they have done in the EU is to release Britains rebate, and for what exactly? That’s where that sort of ‘influence’ gets us.A conservative government must stand up for the interests of Britain, as well as the EU as a whole.
But to have that the party must engage. We already have hard working MEP’s like Charles Tannock that attempt to follow the party policy of a European Union that devolves as much power as possible, but when they go to the grassroots to draw from them they’re met with this sort of drivel.
“Charles let me direct. You are a hardline europhile. You are advocating, indeed exhorting submission to the undemocratic EU.
You must know as well as the rest of us that our ability to ‘influence the Union’s policy in our national interest as much as possible’ is minimal. Minimal.
You write ‘in recent months William Hague has put more flesh on the bones of Conservative foreign policy’ and then admit that there are 26 other countries contributing to the EU’s foreign policy.
We all admire your stamina in returning time after time to ConHome and taking these brickbats but …and it is a big but…when will reality hit?”
I could ask (If I were to be so rude): When will the reality hit that you’re talking out of your arse?
If we’re going to win the election, the Conservative party need to stop whining about Lisbon,(When it comes down to the nitty gritty, I usually find there’s few things they would object to and the EU seccessionalists must admit to themselves it is never going to happe.n I don’t much like how many Eurosceptics use the referendum campaign just to try and stuff the EU altogether, and frankly neither does the electorate.
Clearing up the Conservative Position on the Human Rights Act
International law binds us to our treaty commitments – and that includes the ECHR. We cannot simply go back on that and “withdraw” from that Convention. If we were to remove the ECHR from our domestic law by repealing the HRA, then the effect would not be greatly different: we would still be bound to the European Court of Human Rights, and would thus have to act in accordance with the ECHR anyway.
A lot of the justice and home affairs ‘pillar’ is dependent on a mutual recognition of rights and liberties between member-states, and this is effectively what the ECHR has become – a minimum standard for all member states. To withdraw would create, effectively, a constitutional crisis in the EU. (Not that the ECHR orginates from the EU, it comes from the Council of Europe)
I don’t think that anyone representing the Conservative Party position correctly here, a British Bill of Rights has been suggested for a long time, and even when the European Convention on Human Rights was being made it was suggested as a possability for the future. Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights have been considering this issue at length, Gordon Brown has expressed interest in this policy – indeed, it was accepted by the Labour Party back in 1997 that the Human Rights Act was not the final word when it came to rights in the UK.
It was accepted therein as clear that any British Bill of Rights would have to build on the ECHR, and could not be a step backwards in that regard. That is probably what will happen, not necessarily even to give us new rights, but simply to make the whole thing more palatable to the public, which is why Cameron wants to create a British Bill of Rights to legitimate the culture of human rights in the UK and to build upon it, probably replacing the HRA as redundant.
If anyone, including Cameron, ever suggested (and some of the grassroots of the party have sadly) that taking away ECHR rights was a realistic possibility, then they’ve either not considered it properly are or talking rubbish. People have either fallen into this trap, or are purposely exploiting the publics ignorance on the matter in the name of political gain, surely not something a highly educated paper like the Guardian would do right?
The ECHR is one of the greatest documents on freedom ever written, now it’s time to make it legitimate, and even more refined.
