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Public sector partnerships are a dangerous medicine
Universal panaceas are what we all crave - something simple, to make everything better, fast. Unfortunately they tend to be unreliable; the rule in medicine is that the more ailments the panacea claims to cure, the less likely it is to have any effect at all.
It is hardly likely that snake oil can cure impotence and gall stones and cradle cap. So it may well be with the fashionable universal panacea of the moment - public private partnerships or PPPs. It would be very comforting to think that all the ills of public sector services could be cured by partnerships of one kind or another with the private sector. It is perfectly obvious, and now at long last most people are prepared to admit it, that the private sector does things much better. Perhaps by cosying up to this much healthier sector, public services will take on some of the same much-needed vigour.
My fear, however, is that, on the contrary, this cosying-up will merely transfer the infection of the public sector mentality to the private sector; it will be merely to spread the old British sickness. And this would have the result in some cases - to switch metaphors - of killing the golden goose that was supposed to lay some nice New Labour public service eggs.
I hope I am wrong. But I do feel that, in the current talk of public private partnerships and private finance initiatives, this is a point that is being overlooked. Why should we all blithely assume this partnership will necessarily be beneficent? Isn't it just wishful thinking in some cases? The central difference between the private sector and the state sector - and which explains why one works and one doesn't - is one of mentality. There are other factors of course, but the main difference is one of entrenched, institutionalised attitude.
The battle to put the public services right is seen these days as taking on the unions, as the Government is painfully trying to do as I write, over platters of top-secret canapes. But this battle is not merely a matter of taking on the unruly union barons over questions of pay and working conditions and jobs for the boys. It is - much more importantly - a wider matter of taking on a statist, intrusive, wasteful, self-protective mindset, which I believe now flourishes quite independently of union power, as well as in the unions themselves. It is this mindset that explains, in large part, the failure of the state sector. Yet in PPPs this mindset has, and will have, the force of the state, and of state money behind it.
Speaking of failure, I once asked my favourite City pundit, at a time of spectacular bankruptcies, what he thought was the most dangerous error in running a company. Pursuing something other than the job in hand, was his answer. What he meant was when executives, instead of concentrating on virtual widgets or pork belly futures, are absorbed in other goals of doubtful relevance to the business, or of no relevance at all - the pursuit of personal prestige, empire building, external political manoeuverings, job protection, getting permanent seats at the opera and so on. Taking one's eye off the ball, in other words.
That's what happens persistently - and I would say institutionally - in the state sector. Surely I hardly need list all the gender awareness and racism awareness and social inclusion and anti-oppression and social change agenda issues under which police and nurses and social workers are staggering. The amount of time, money, effort, training and paperwork consumed by these very peripheral concerns is simply astonishing; an idea of the best (misguided or not) drives out a very modest idea of the good, or even the faintly acceptable. And it's not always an ideal of the best; it can be something less altruistic. Why, for instance, are some trainee nurses made to read impenetrable French structuralists on sociology, but not taught how to take blood samples? I suggest that is all in pursuit not of nursing, but of higher status and professionalisation, imposed on them from the top by ideologues interested in things other than nursing.
To take another example, a training pack for workers with people with learning disabilities emphasises that the primary focus - the central value - of their work lies in creating social change. Yes, social change. You might have thought the primary focus lay in providing the best attention, support and encouragement for people with intellectual disabilities - an immensely demanding and time-consuming job in itself. But that, it seems, must take second place to the uphill work of creating social change. Quite aside from whether public servants should attempt it, this requires further training, monitoring, workshops, accountability, paperwork and, therefore, further employees, without any direct benefit to the client, but at ever increasing cost.
So what happens when public sector workers team up with a private sector organisation to provide a public service? Is it likely they will leave all that baggage and all that make-work behind? Isn't it more likely they will bring it and try to impose it? This is precisely what has been happening for some time now in parts of the voluntary sector, where PPPs have been going on for years. I've seen this in all sorts of charities, to my intense frustration, for many years. Any charity that depends on contracts from the public sector will find itself forced to adjust its ideals and aims to whatever the public sector orthodoxy happens to be. Ministers know this. Pressure groups know it. Charities, apart from those who go along with it, admit it. It is not partnership. It is nothing less than the nationalisation of compassion in other terms. People interested in freedom and choice should be wary of the notion of public private partnerships. They should look elsewhere for solutions.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, June 30, 2001 | Comments (0)
What do women doctors want? The chance to work part-time
Since the Government has rashly promised us "world-class public services", it will have to do something urgently about Britain's doctors: their morale is low; they frequently work in conditions that force down their standards; they are leaving the profession in droves; and there aren't enough of them to begin with.
The British Medical Association recently completed a survey of young doctors that showed a very significant collapse in their idealism about their careers since 1995. It also showed that life as a GP has become so unattractive that not enough medical students are opting to train for the job; before long, there won't be enough GPs to maintain present numbers, which are already inadequate.
Something will have to be done soon about attracting more doctors and making them happier. Opportunely, the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) is to publish a report next week - Women in Hospital Medicine - chaired by Professor Carol Black, which will contain some detailed recommendations for training and employment. Since more than half of all medical school graduates are women, the question of what women doctors need and want is something the Government will not be able to ignore. It might even find the answers constructive.
I was one of the people who sat on the RCP working party that prepared the report. As I listened to one expert witness after another, men as well as women, it was forced on me, although I thought I knew it already, just how punishing most doctors' schedules are. There was something immensely gallant about the way these women doctors uncomplainingly found time away from their brilliant careers - and these were all successful women - to further other people's interests probably rather more than their own.
The hours of work demanded just to get by as a doctor are extreme; the extra hours needed to achieve something more - to take on extra academic work or to develop a special interest - are punitive. There will always be those few who are willing to dedicate most of their waking hours to medicine, often to achieve great things. But for most doctors, and certainly for most women doctors, something has to give.
Figures from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development strongly suggest that, while British doctors are well paid by European standards, they have to work about twice as hard. Literally: they have twice the workload. In Britain, there are only about 1.8 doctors per 1,000 people, whereas the average in Europe is 3.4 doctors. That corresponds with most people's personal impressions: it is hard to get much time with your doctor. Both GPs and hospital doctors are often desperately hard-pressed for time.
This is bad for the patient and also bad for the doctor; it means increasing strain at work, and increasing misery at home, too. That is because, obviously enough, the populace in general has recently been waking up to the idea that children need their parents; doctor mothers and (increasingly) fathers are less and less prepared to be out of the house for 12 hours a day, in the way that previous generations of doctors were.
The obvious solution is part-time work. Surveys among working women in general are pretty unanimous in finding that women would prefer to work part-time. Men are beginning to feel the same. The trouble is that part-time work is difficult to find, because most employers find it relatively uneconomic. You can impose it on employers, as this Government has tried to do, but those of us with Right-wing views are wary of trying to kick the market; it's usually counter-productive.
However, women doctors are in a powerful market position. They are (like men doctors) desperately needed and therefore, in a real market, they would have the power to renegotiate their terms of employment. Perhaps they don't really sense this, because life under the NHS dries up people's commercial instincts.
For all the reforms and talk of internal markets, the culture of the NHS remains profoundly statist; the state thinks it owns doctors - the Government's suggestions before the election that consultants should be handcuffed to the NHS for the first seven years of their careers is a perfect example of this attitude. Doctors' traditions of public service are easily exploited by this public sector mentality.
My own view - not, I must stress, the view of the RCP working party - is that doctors are effectively enslaved by the NHS. In an open market, women doctors (and male doctors and nurses, too) would long since have been able to insist on the working conditions that they actually wanted, from a position of great market strength.
Admittedly, that would end up being much more expensive for patients, whether we paid through our tax bill or our insurance bill, but we will be paying more in future whatever happens. I am reminded of a Calman cartoon in which a little man walks past a feminist holding a poster saying "Free Women Now!" and asks excitedly if he can have one. Free women doctors now. And men, too. Then perhaps we would have some when we need them.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, June 23, 2001 | Comments (0)
Boys will be boys, but they don't have to be little devils
For the past few days, I have been re-reading a remarkable book by Daniel Goleman called Emotional Intelligence. It looks like the kind of book that sensible people normally avoid, the sort of popular, American, self-improvement bestseller you find on the "How To" shelves, with a seductive hint of a promise in the subtitle; in this case, Emotional Intelligence - Why it can matter more than IQ. However, I ignored my prejudices and bought it.
This is a book I would like to give to every teacher, and above all to those who arrange school curricula - for a start, to those responsible for the current misery of the new A-level system. It has made me think, what I had long since suspected, that most schools are pursuing the wrong things in the wrong way. Most schools are unsuitable for many children, particularly for boys, and that is why so many schoolchildren are doing badly, and growing up to behave badly. I think it was my hero, J S Mill, who said that a school ought to be very good indeed, to justify depriving a child of his liberty.
When I first read the book, in 1996 when it came out here, I was interested in why boys underperform academically at school. This time, I found myself reading it in a week when newspapers were full of boys who had gone badly wrong - Timothy McVeigh, the killers of James Bulger, young Yardie assassins in south London, a suspect in the murder of Damilola Taylor, and the unhappy Prince Dipendra, to mention only the most startling.
Of course I can't pretend to understand much of these particular cases. But they do stand as representatives of a world of increasingly enraged, impulsive and un-self-controlled boys and men, who are increasingly alienated, unable to form relationships, miserable, resentful and violent - and most of them are not psychopaths, but began life as perfectly ordinary boys. There are all kinds of explanation on offer for this nasty new world: I am particularly struck by the suggestion in this book that the problem is, in part, a lack of emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence is a neologism, obviously, but not all neologisms are irritating and empty. This one has a faintly self-explanatory air. It is obvious enough that all kinds of highly intelligent people seem to fall by the wayside, and fail to use their gifts, while, contrariwise, many people of only modest intelligence make more than the most of theirs.
Cognitive intelligence (of the sort supposedly measured in IQ tests) may be genetically given, but it cannot be effectively used without qualities of character, such as self-control, persistence, the ability to recover from setbacks, to deal with powerful emotions and to recognise other people's feelings. These qualities of character make up emotional intelligence. And without these qualities, a person will, as they used to say in Dorset, be all brains and no intelligence.
So, obviously, a clever girl who is unable to handle minor failure and criticism, and who is overwhelmed by her own anxieties, will underperform intellectually. Exams are a test of character quite as much as of intelligence. Similarly, a boy of average intelligence who has never learnt how to resist passing impulses and distractions, who cannot discipline his efforts, who has little understanding or sympathy for others, will also underperform, but with much more disastrous results for himself and others: failing entirely at school, he will turn into one of those feral thugs and bullies we read about in the press. Without emotional intelligence, these children cannot make the best of themselves and their lives; rather they are destined to make the least even of what they have.
However I am convinced, like the author of this book, that emotional intelligence, unlike general IQ, can be developed. That is what was meant in the past by a moral or a sentimental education, although it has always been rather rare in practice. A painful mixture of bullying and neglect used to be the norm in education and, despite everyone's best intentions, is probably very often the norm today. A child needs a great deal of careful, personal attention, and constant good example, to learn self-control, proper self-respect and respect for others.
Children today cannot possibly get the attention they need, flung as they are into enormous classes, with children of all abilities, including the intellectually disabled and the emotionally disturbed, in one single Bedlam, subject constantly to ceaseless measurements, tests, assessments and exams of ever-decreasing value. What are none-too-bright, impulsive boys to make of this noisy, boring, impersonal muddle? What is the point of subjecting them to it? They will just opt out, like James Bulger's schoolboy murderers.
It is daft to aim at sending half the country's children to university, in the quixotic pursuit of equality. It is daft to expect so many to get some A-levels, and dumb the exam down to that end. Actually, it is daft to keep all children at school until 16. Intellectual attainments, especially bogus ones, are irrelevant for many children. What is needed much more urgently is a careful, discriminating attempt to show struggling children how to deal with their own powerful emotions, how to stay calm under pressure, how to avoid conflict with each other and how to try.
All children need this. Only then can they use their abilities, such as they are. Those who need it most - the least intelligent and most deprived - get it least. I am sending a copy of this book to Estelle Morris, in a spirit of public service, empathy and conflict avoidance.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, June 16, 2001 | Comments (0)
Out of touch with touchy-feely times
After the death of Diana, Princess of Wales there was a shocked and uneasy sense across the country of enormous change. At first it was difficult to describe, let alone understand; gradually it became clear that a major shift in sensibility had taken place, causing some new sort of geological divide between British responses. There was something of the same feeling about the election; it has been called a landslide, and so it was, but not in the usual sense.
The result wasn't a Labour landslide, whatever Labour might like to claim; in an astonishingly low turnout, only 24 per cent of the electorate voted for Labour. That was rebuke, not a mandate. The result could instead be seen as a Conservative landslide, but only in the sense that the force of their defeat has tipped the Tories almost off the map, to flounder in the disputed Channel; supported by only 18 per cent of the electorate, they have only one seat west of Bristol and few north of a line from the Bristol Channel to the Wash. But the election was also a landslide in the sense of a major cultural upheaval, reflecting a new political geography for Britain.
I came to see, during the election campaign, something I didn't understand before. It is not just that the Tories are hated sometimes, or that they are embarrassing sometimes, or even that they are unelectable. It is that they are beginning to seem irrelevant, for several reasons. The one usually offered is that Labour has stolen their clothes, and it's true that that is the central difficulty. But another important one, I think, is that to many of the young, and the young middle-aged, the Conservative Party has come to seem like a superannuated freak show. Sometimes you can see what they mean.
I do not enjoy thinking this or saying this; I feel great affinity with Tories, and great gratitude for the enormous achievements of the Thatcher revolution. But four weeks of listening and watching have convinced me that it's true. It has something to do with the Diana divide; the contemporary obsession with being in touch (or out of touch), especially with feelings, but also with mass culture and mass fashion, breeds tremendous prejudice against anyone or anything which is not touchy- feely-demotic, and cool, such as the average Tory candidate.
However much conservatives and fellow travellers like me may despise Tony Blair and his camp for the lip-trembling tendency, we have to admit that it showed a better understanding of the electorate. Voters seem to want to be talked to differently these days. Many Conservatives, both insensitive and resistant to change, seem to have astonishingly little idea of how they now appear to others or how narrow is the sector which can even tolerate them. How, for instance, could any intelligent Tory publicist have permitted the embarrassingly genteel voice-over on the feral schoolchildren broadcast? Was it a joke?
I don't like the politics of the trembling lip either. But as La Rochefoucauld said, a man who doesn't accept the conditions of life loses his soul; so, too, politicians who do not accept the conditions of life - which include change, and maybe rapid and unwelcome change - lose their seats and their raison d'etre.
However, a change in style will be the least of the challenges which confront the Tories. Much the worst is the political muddle at the heart of the party. In crude terms - and the crude terms of politics are always unfair, of course - the Conservatives have managed to appear both uncaring and interfering. A political party can cope with one or other of those accusations, but not with both at once, obviously enough; people might vote for uninterfering-but-uncaring, or caring-but-interfering, but, to offer uncaring-and-interfering is electoral suicide, as we have seen.
There has been endless debate since 1997 about the balance in the party between authoritarianism and libertarianism, between liberty and traditional values. It is indeed a difficult debate, and muddle still appears to prevail; hence the confusion in the election campaign and the disastrous " pounds 20 billion cuts" story, and the ordeal of Oliver Letwin. No one quite liked to speak up about tax, because no one quite dared or quite agreed.
The Conservative Party has failed so far to meet the challenge posed by New Labour to reinvent itself. It failed to be radical, or bold, presumably because it thought it had some hope of office. Now that it has none for four years, or maybe for eight if Mr Blair has any success with the public sector, freed of the albatross of Europe, Tories can at last think the unthinkable; as the Sixties song put it "Freedom's just another name for nothing left to lose". These coming years in the wilderness ought to be very invigorating for the Conservatives, if any stay to find out.
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention. Admittedly it raises the obvious question of what happens to the unfortunate. What happens to compassion and community? Tony Blair talked of the Third Way, but that has proved to be an empty concept, just so much statist waffle. The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion. The voters think, wrongly, that Conservatives don't care about it. But actually they do, and have plenty of ideas about it. This is what the Tories should be questing for, in their wilderness. Then they might also find a new Jerusalem; they might again change the direction of British political thought. And feeling
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, June 09, 2001 | Comments (0)
I'm embarrassed to be a Tory
To me, as someone on the political right, the election campaign has felt oddly unreal, like a bad dream. As in a nightmare, there has been a certain perverse logic, but there have been bizarre incidents, and a persistent feeling of disorientation, as if people were talking about the wrong things, avoiding things, and offering explanations that don't quite make sense.
I'm talking about the Conservative campaign, though the same has been true of Labour's. It is not the prospect of a Conservative defeat that has seemed so nightmarish. It is the spectacle the party has been making of itself.
Some of what's wrong has been style. Unfortunately, style is more important than substance in electioneering, and that makes it more damaging, not less. There's the most obvious question of William Hague's voice. A voice ought not to matter so much, but it does, as anyone in telesales will tell you; politicians with any political nous should have recognised that long ago, and done something about it. To be so naive about public relations is in itself a sign of unfitness for office in this age of vulgar spin.
For all his eloquence, intelligence and courage, Hague's weirdly unreal inflection makes him sound as though he doesn't take anything seriously; from there it's only a single flat vowel to seeming not to care about anything. And being thought not to care is the Achilles heel of the Conservative party.
Even a man with the voice, looks and hair of Jude Law himself, however, could not have seduced the public out of their contempt for the Conservatives' insistence on asylum and the euro. That was a serious, perverse, embarrassing error. All senior Conservatives ought to accept responsibility for it, instead of preparing to duck it. They were warned against it, repeatedly. But they persisted, and they have made supporters like me look like xenophobic, bigoted, ignorant Little Englanders, and maybe even like racists too.
The arguments don't matter, good or bad. What anyone actually said doesn't matter. It was the emphasis, the deliberate choice of emphasis, that did the damage.
It was made much worse by the related lack of emphasis on what people most care about, and what it's been made to seem (quite wrongly) that Conservatives don't care about - schools, hospitals and social services. Why not put the record straight about the mythical Tory "cuts" of the past? Why not go in, all guns blazing, to attack Labour's lamentable record?
Instead, our attention was arrested by the bizarre story of the MP Oliver Letwin hiding away in the valleys of West Dorset, after a leak about tax cuts, hunted down by journalists, all too reminiscently of Keith Vaz. The Tories should have let him come out and say something openly, unashamedly about their views on tax. But they were, apparently, too timid to be truthful.
They don't appear to have a clear, coherent, radical Conservative policy on tax and benefits reform. And they don't appear to know, any more than Labour, how they will finance bigger spending on public services. So there were embarrassed disclaimers instead, and Labour was unnecessarily handed one of the best anti-Tory chants of its campaign - "pounds 20bn of cuts".
Meanwhile, there was that oddly unsophisticated, histrionic party political broadcast about roving rapists and feral schoolchildren. The message was ill-judged; the medium was laughable.
Then we had the dream-like sequence of Margaret Thatcher, swooping down (as she suggested herself in an ill-chosen joke) like a mummified corpse, to do untold damage to the Conservative campaign with her off-message cry of "Never to the euro". She managed both to show up and to bring down Tory prevarications. Europe has divided both major parties, and most people across all parties. The only electable position to take on the euro, whatever one's gut instincts, as both John Major and Tony Blair have understood, is on the fence, waiting uncomfortably upon events.
In any case, given Labour's promise of a referendum, Hague's warning of "only five days to save the pound" is almost as silly as Blair's shameful 1997 battle cry of "only 24 hours to save the NHS". Can these people be real?
There ought to have been a very important public conversation during this election about public services, and the Conservative view of how best to deliver them. There ought to have been a major debate about the limits of the state, and of bureaucracy and regulation. There could have been a relentless battery of triumphant attacks over the foot and mouth crisis, parliamentary reform, doctors' fury, teachers' fury, hospital patients' misery, Labour media manipulation, lies and sleaze. All this has been a gift to the Conservatives. Yet, if the polls are to be believed at all, they haven't even been able to make a dent in Labour's popularity.
This is the party I have always supported. I'd like to support it now. I am a convinced small c conservative. At the beginning of the campaign I thought it was hard to be a Tory; now it's beginning to be embarrassing. Reportedly the Conservatives think they've been running a good campaign; perhaps they are the ones who are dreaming.
The Guardian | Tuesday, June 05, 2001 | Comments (0)
My husband is voting Blair to keep out the socialists
Cassandra's fate was that people never believed her, even though she was always right. Mine seems to be that people are never quite sure when I am trying to be humorous. Not long ago I wrote on this page a long list of reasons for voting Labour, never imagining that anyone could take them seriously. Yet, to my dismay, I find that someone has, someone very close to home. I have been nourishing a viper in the bosom of my family: my husband has announced that he is going to vote Labour.
It has been some consolation to discover that he is not really planning to do so for any of the reasons that I had suggested here. But he is quite serious. It is not that he is against our Tory candidate, Michael Portillo; he thinks he is a very civilised fellow. It is not that he is actually for our Labour candidate; he doesn't even know his name, which is hardly surprising as whoever-he-is has not troubled us at all with his campaign. The truth is that my husband is not simply voting Labour; he's backing Blair.
It is not, of course, that he likes Blair at all. He is as contemptuous as everybody ought to be of Blair's unprincipled populism, his cynical religiosity, his sentimentality and his lies. He is as contemptuous as everybody ought to be of Labour's shameless sleaze in office. He's well aware of Labour's failures in schools and hospitals. But he's going to vote Labour, and goes about saying so.
This is not good news for peace on the home front. Nor, probably, is it good news for the Conservatives. My husband, after all, is a convinced conservative, like me, and has always voted Conservative, since long before the glorious revolution of 1979. He is not only a long-standing Tory voter; as someone who has always worked in banking and business, and who hates statism and bureaucracy, he ought also to be a natural Tory voter. Judging by his defection, the Conservative Party seems to have lost Metropolitan Man, or Wine Bar Man or Central Line Man, or whatever my husband might be thought to stand for. It takes some explaining.
We met long ago as students, at a Left-wing demonstration in Cambridge in protest against the Right-wing policies of Harold Wilson. I forget now what they were. But we felt, like all young people with half a heart, indignation about the poverty and lack of opportunity among those without our advantages. So we thought we were Left-wing.
Then, on his train journeys from work in the City to visiting me in Cambridge, my future husband discovered Hayek. He became a convert to the open market and the Conservative revolution that Margaret Thatcher came later to personify; he was convinced that this was the way to a freer, more open, more meritocratic society, of greater wealth and greater opportunity for all. Reader, he convinced me, too. And he was right.
Holding those views then was unpleasant. We lost quite a few friends; most took the view that we had "reverted to type", meaning to self-interest. Our moral arguments for conservatism were drowned by sneers; meanwhile, under a quasi-socialist state, Britain's economy almost collapsed, whereupon it was rescued by Conservatism.
But a few of those sneering were also listening. One of them must have been the youthful Tony Blair, which is why he later, famously, was described in 1997 as "The Strangest Tory Ever Sold". He may not be a Tory, but he certainly isn't a socialist either. According to my husband, you can say what you like about Blair, but you can't accuse him of being a socialist, because socialists have principles, and he has none.
My husband's view is that the real enemy in this country is socialism - meaning state ownership, state control and the redistribution of wealth. Socialism was responsible for many of the greatest evils and injustices of the 20th century. Socialism is the destructive dragon that Mrs Thatcher wounded deeply, but could not kill; it is the many-headed monster that threatens Blair. And my husband thinks that every vote for Blair is a vote against socialism, and that nothing matters anywhere near as much as that.
The larger Blair's majority, the more power he will have against the forces of socialism that are rousing themselves against him; Britain's largest public service union, Unison, has already called for a "day of action" immediately after the election. The weaker Blair feels, the less he will be able to insist that what the country wants is Labour without socialism, that is, the strange sort of Toryism he goes in for, which is better than none at all.
It is not only against his own party that Tories must support Blair. Every vote for Blair is also a vote against the Liberal Democrats. The stronger Blair is, the less he will need even to talk to them; it's important that he be able to ignore them completely, since they are real, true-believing, virtual-card-carrying, loony Lefties.
This is tactical voting on rather an ambitious scale. Some may think it also rather unnecessary: Blair will have a huge majority anyway. However, I think there's more to it than that. I think my husband is embarrassed by the Conservatives as they are today - by their campaign, by the way they've shied away from the commitment to rolling back the state, by the way they've chosen instead to emphasise asylum seeking and the euro, with all their chauvinist appeal.
Conservatism such as this, he feels, will do nothing but inflame the unthinking, old-fashioned, socialist dragon. Vote Blair to defeat socialism and save true Conservatism. Cry Tony and St George! That is my husband's argument. Oh dear. It isn't funny.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, June 02, 2001 | Comments (1)
