Taxing Our Patience

It is not all that surprising that David Cameron’s Conservatives are now decidedly unenthusiastic about their pledge to raise the threshold for inheritance tax which they made two years ago.

This obvious reluctance is why so much ambiguity surrounds the issue and why the party leadership will not, if they can help it, be pinned down on the matter.

In late 2007 it became clear that Gordon Brown was readying the Labour party for a snap election. At the Conservative conference in Bournemouth there was an atmosphere of worriment and discontent. Opinion polls were consistently showing that the Conservatives were many points behind Labour when they needed to be quite a few points in front, and that as a result they were likely to lose any coming General Election.

Defeat would have condemned the Conservatives to another five years on the opposition benches and made it an unprecedented fourth election defeat in a row for a political party who were once considered the ‘natural party of government’ in Britain.

At that time the Cameron project was still very much a work in progress. In many ways it still is. However, before the party conference in 2007, David Cameron had seen little success in actually attracting the wider electorate to vote Tory. Despite all the hoodie-hugging speeches (okay, so he never actually said that) and pledges that marriage could, in his view, be between a man and a woman, a man and man, and a woman and a woman – the electorate were still not all that interested.

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Bristol North West

On Saturday I was in the constituency of Bristol North West with a few friends helping to deliver a new glossy magazine-style leaflet for the local Conservative candidate, Charlotte Leslie.

Bristol North West is among the most marginal constituencies in the country. It is seventeenth on the Conservatives’ list of target seats, and due to boundary changes the Labour candidate, who is not the incumbent MP, only has a provisional majority of approximately a thousand votes.

During the ‘Blast Day’, a group of sixty or so Conservatives managed to deliver close to thirty thousand of these magazines, which was very impressive. Those in attendance included Chris Skidmore, the Conservative candidate in the nearby constituency of Kingswood, and Nick Webb who was formerly the Chairman of Bristol and Gloucester Conservative Future.

I was also actually rather impressed by was the quality of the ‘Bristol Living’ magazine we were posting through people’s letter boxes. In the past the Conservative party has perhaps been guilty of presentational neglect in its leaflets. Talking down to the electorate is never a good idea, and obvious party political literature tends to go straight in the bin without being read.

Bristol Living is a variation of a similarly-styled magazine which the Conservative party is delivering across the country. The difference between these new magazine leaflets and older-style black and white literature is that they are in a format that people are used to reading. As a result copies are more likely to appear on coffee tables up and down the land rather than in a green recycling box outside the door through which they were posted.

Clearly though, presentation is not the only thing that matters. Substance is very important too – and this is currently where the Conservatives are often extremely lacking. While the magazine was good at introducing the candidate, in this case Charlotte, to the electorate, along with the causes she has been fighting for, including pub and post office closures, the party has not yet developed a detailed plan of what they aim to do in Government.

As I Was Saying

I have reluctantly returned to occasionally reading ConservativeHome. Despite the fact that it is often uncritical and utterly sycophantic towards the Conservative party, it does, from time to time, throw up the occasional interesting nugget.

Tim Montgomerie, in a piece entitled ‘Ken Clarke: Tories will get more pro-European in office’, has highlighted a few interesting comments made by Mr Clarke at a recent conference:

I think the need to be working with Obama will influence my party on Europe. It is still firmly Eurosceptic but it’s now moderate, harmless Eurosceptism. It’s a bit silly sometimes, like which group do you join in the European parliament, but full-blooded stuff like renegotiating the treaty of accession is as dead as a dodo. We’ve got lots of ideas on European policy on energy, security, relations with Russia, climate change, all that kind of thing [but] somebody like me is far more relaxed about all that [and if the Tories] get into office the pressure of the American alliance will make them more European.

Now, let us be reminded of what Mr Peter Hitchens perceptively observed about euroscepticism:

The word ‘Eurosceptic’ means ‘a person who adopts anti-EU rhetoric in opposition, and then surrenders to the EU in government’. This is inevitable. You cannot be in the EU and not run by it, any more than you can be a little bit pregnant. If you don’t like being run by it, you must leave, as all serious students of the subject long ago realised.

Ken Clarke and Peter Hitchens will be proven right, in time. I also suppose this just confirms what I was saying yesterday really, doesn’t it?

Same Old Same Old

I suppose that there’s a lot that could be said about Ken Clarke’s return to the frontbenches and the Shadow Cabinet – but I would have thought that by now we would know most of it already.

We know well that Mr Clarke is quite stringent in his pro-EU views. (Incidentally, at least they are principled, even if I disagree with them, which is better than can be said of many other MPs and young wannabes that spring to mind). We also know that he took to the stage with Michael Heseltine, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in 1997 to promote the Euro currency, and we know very well that he has been critical of David Cameron during his tenure as Conservative leader.

But, really, does any of this actually matter? Why is so much being made of Mr Clarke’s views on the European Union? What cause for disagreement, beyond rhetoric (which is so often meaningless these days), have Mr Clarke and Mr Cameron had so far? There is only a promise to take Conservative MEPs out the EPP-ED, which mysteriously failed to materialise, and a grudging commitment for a post ratification referendum on the Lisbon Treaty – but only if the General Election is held early, which it won’t be – that stands between them.

In fact, one wonders whether the Conservative party even has a policy on Britain’s relationship with the European Union which Mr Clarke could speak out against and break. I can’t think of one.

So, far from causing in-fighting within the parliamentary party, Ken Clarke’s re-emergence from the cold will simply mark another day of business as usual in the life of Her Majesty’s Official Opposition. Under Cameron’s leadership the anti-EU cause has not been furthered – there’s little chance that it will be.

Euroscepticism doesn’t mean anything anymore anyway – it is simply a phrase used by those in opposition who adopt anti-EU rhetoric, but when in government willingly surrender to the EU. It is inevitable. But then sadly I think we knew that already.