The Brexit Party may have lost the Peterborough by-election but it’s winning the battle of ideas. Just look at the effect it is having on the Conservative leadership contest. You could call it the Farage Effect.
For the first time in what seems like millennia, Conservatives are advocating recognisably conservative policies again.
Michael Gove says he wants to scrap HS2, replace VAT with a ‘lower, simpler’ alternative, cut business rates and introduce an Australian-style points-based immigration system.
Boris Johnson wants to slash income tax – increasing the 40p higher rate tax threshold from £50,000 to £80,000 – and to leave the EU on October 31 with No Deal if necessary.
Dominic Raab wants to cut the basic rate of income tax from 20p to 15p.
Even the squishy Jeremy Hunt has promised to slash corporation tax from 19 per cent to 12.5 per cent, the same rate as Ireland’s.
You may say this is all too little too late – and I’d be inclined to agree with you.
Frontrunner Boris Johnson, for example, wants to fund his income tax cut by raising the upper rate for National Insurance Contributions (NICs). So in effect, he’s not really cutting tax at all, just tinkering with the balance sheets in the manner of that arch Conservative-In-Name-Only George Osborne.
Still, you’ve got to admit it’s an improvement on the status quo ante. The Conservatives have been in government, in one form or another for ten years. Yet when you look at the policies they have introduced in that time, you realise that for all the difference it made we might as well have been run by Labour.
Here is a — by no means exhaustive — list of all the disastrous, very unconservative and mostly left-liberal things the Conservatives have inflicted on us in the last decade. (Thanks to all those of you who helped me compile this list).
Sugar tax
Appointment of Green ideologue Tony Juniper to head Natural England
Minimum wage
Failure to repeal Climate Change Act
Total failure to enforce equality before the law – so that now we have special protected groups with special rights including Sharia law courts
John Bercow, Oliver Wetwin, Sarah Wollaston, Dominic Grieve, Phillip Lee, Phillip Hammond, David Cameron, George Osborne, Johnny Mercer, James Brokenshire, Tom Tugendhat, Amber Rudd, Sam Gymiah
Highest tax burden for decades
Abolishing ‘no fault evictions’
Appointing leftist trades unionist Frances O’Grady to the board of the Bank of England
Planning a digital services tax
More subsidisation of childcare
Carbon price floor
Gender pay gap reporting
Appointing a left-wing economist to do the minimum wage review
Plain packaging
Effectively banning fixed odds betting terminals
Tobacco display ban
Creating Public Health England – a grotesque Nanny State quango run by leftist ‘public health’ sociologists
EU defence co-operation
Rebranding living within your means as “austerity” – thus making it harder for genuinely conservative administrations to cut spending
900 Met officers policing hurty words on Twitter
Reducing lifetime pensions allowance to £1 million
Refusing asylum to Asia Bibi, the Christian woman in Pakistan threatened with death for the crime of being Christian
Making it much easier for the left to characterise any conservative policy as ‘hard right’ or ‘far right’
Abolishing prison sentences under six months because – apparently – short sentences ‘harm not heal.’
Plastic bag tax
Continuing to fund left-wing/nanny state pressure groups
Not repealing Equality Act
Banning (very mildly) controversial speakers such as Lauren Southern from the UK
Anything in the childhood obesity strategy
Enabling men to become women merely on their say-so (aka ‘Pick your own gender: no Doctor’s Note needed).
Allowing Alison Saunders, disgraced former director of the Crown Prosecution Service, to pursue a rape ‘believe the victim’ policy resulting in scores of unsafe convictions
Banning the shooting of magpies and other pests
Banning gas fired boilers in new homes from 2025
Cosying up to St Greta – the annoying kid who gets her climate facts from Ice Age 2, probably
Throwing Sir Roger Scruton under a bus
‘Our’ NHS – a state-run monopoly with fairly dreadful health outcomes is, apparently, beyond criticism or redemption.
Making Theresa May their leader
2018 Porn Laws
Huawei 5G
Policemen will need degrees
Redefinition of the sacrament of marriage
Increase in dividend taxation
IR35 debacle
Project Fear
HS2 white elephant
Hinckley Point white elephant
Air Passenger Duty and other punitive green taxes
That’s enough, I think for the time being. Somebody suggested to me: “Rather than make a list of the unconservative things that the Conservatives have done, why not make it easier by listing the conservative things that they’ve done.”
OK. Here’s that list in full…
Yup. Ten years in office and not a single conservative thing achieved. That’s quite an indictment. And it’s no wonder that so many of you – me included – have so little faith in the Conservatives that they never want to vote for them again.
Then again, speaking for myself, I’m a mercenary tart. I’ve always been an ideologue, never a party loyalist. I’ll vote for whoever is most likely to deliver the largest number of policies that I approve of, sooner rather than later.
So, it’s over to you Conservatives. Do you want to live or do you want to fade into oblivion, destroyed by The Brexit Party?
Your move, squishes.
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