Cllr. Gavin Ayling

This is in response to Is Cameron a Disraeli or a Salisbury on The Cameron Leadership blog:

On Newsnight Neal Lawson complained that Cameron tackling social justice is as bad as Blair being pro-privatisation - it damages the clarity of ideological positions.

This is to misunderstand as Hari appears to have done. We all believe in the same thing - making England a great place to live - it’s just on the methods of achieving that that we disagree.

The Conservatives, for their part, have been consistent since the 2nd World War - social justice should not come at the expense of fairness and freedom (except Thatcher’s msihandling/selling of Council homes and other notable example). The Labour party has been consistently for the individual at the expense of the wider economy, fairness or longevity.

As Conservatives we must strive for fairness in all aspects of life and also communicate individual responsibility. On BBC Radio 4 this afternoon a student at the University of Glasgow asked what society should be doing about the pressures on students which mean they often resort to eating ready-meals that are on offer. This question exposes the socialist point of view. According to this student, presumably, society should be banning two-for-one offers on unhealthy foods, providing free education to students on how to cook quickly and on a shoestring, and installing CCTV in student accomodation in case they decide to eat too much salt, smoke a cigarette or have a little more alcohol than is necessary.

At the risk of linking to Gareth twice in one day, Little Man in a Toque has it spot on when he says the following with his tongue firmly embedded in his cheek:

Charles Clarke, has reacted furiously to news that the estate of George Orwell is to sue the British Government for infringement of copyright.

People will only behave like grown-ups when they are treated like them. The government’s freedom incursions have been well documented elsewhere so I won’t go into them here. The arguments against social security are also made on this basis. Give someone a safety net and a way of avoiding poverty and they will not be incentivised to work hard and make money. Enterprise, it can be argued, suffers with state interference in starvation. I will say now, and forever, this is inhumane, but the general point is valid.

Unions, unfair dismissal tribunals and ‘tax credits’ encourage the me-first mind-set. They make people think that they have a right to certain things which, in truth, they have no right to. Until the Human Rights Act was incorporated into British law, the British citizen did not need a list of rights, they were assumed and allowed for from the time of the Riot Act onwards.

Having said all of that Cameron is right and Conservative when he says that the welfare of the disadvantaged should be a priority. Labour’s failures since 1997 have ensured that people living in sink estates have next to no chance of going to university. Tuition fees - which must be a right-wing idea at the best of times - have contributed to this, but the failure of schools to engage and of judges (or magistrates or the law) and teachers to discipline those who would disrupt mean that there is an underclass that is commonly known as ‘chavs’.