Back To The Sixties For The UK's Tory Party

by Jeremy Hetherington-Gore, Tax-News.com, London

26 March 2002

The UK's Conservative party finally admitted its complete ideological bankruptcy over the weekend when it announced during a policy-making conference in Harrogate that it would put plans for tax cuts on hold and make public services the issue to win it the next election. Lower taxation, said senior Tories, would take second place to public service reforms in health and education.

Strikingly, the move came within hours of Baroness Thatcher's retirement from active public life: 'when the cat's away, the mice will play!'

The volte-face marks a significant change in Conservative thinking and a shift away from the party's traditional tax-cutting priorities. Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith promised to devolve control to hospitals, schools and local councils, and said that in order to defeat Labour, they would have to appeal to the poor as well as the privileged.

Duncan Smith has been on the 'Thatcherite' wing of the party until now, but he seems to have confused 'one nation' Toryism with 'one policy' government, and this move casts him more as the Vicar of Bray than as a disciple of the Iron Lady.

The Leader's more caring tone chimed with remarks by Michael Howard, the finance spokesman, who warned that "weak public services can do serious damage to the economy". Speaker after speaker stressed the need to campaign on health, education, crime and poverty - issues that the Tories imagine allowed Labour to throw them out of power.

Just to make sure that the electorate wouldn't be able to tell the difference between his party and that of Tony Blair (never mind the LibDems), Duncan Smith called for the selection of candidates that better represented women and ethnic minorities.

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