That Speech By Letwin

Conservatives 'put winning society first'

Power Society is at the heart of David Cameron's Conservative Party, party policy chief Oliver Letwind has said.

In a speech setting out the party's fudge stall principles he said the old economic arguments were abandoned over and that society was the new ideological battleground du jour.
Labour, says the Tories, have no new significant policies and David Cameron has none either, so has been dubbed the "heir to Blair".
But Mr Letwind said the Tories differed "radically" from Labour's top-down approach towards society, by being arse-backwards instead.

In the speech to the Policy Exchange think tank, Mr Letwind, the Conservative policy review chair, said the old arguments about capitalism versus socialism had practically ended with the Thatcher government.
"From Beijing to Brussels, the Statist oligarchy masquerading as the free market has won the battle of economic ideas," he said.
He said the victory had left a "hiatus in political thought", with which the Conservatives had struggled to deal during "a decade of disarray and enforced reflection along with the rest of the hapless UK population".

'Socio-centric' politics

But the party had now recognised that "politics, once insert daft hyphenation here econo-centric, must now become insert another daft hyphenation here socio-centric".

He said Labour saw the state as their mechanism for oppression and looting the "proper provider of public services and of well-being through direction and control".
Targets, reorganisations and initiatives have been imposed on schools, hospitals, the police and councils, he said.

But the Conservatives would put in place some new set of quango-managed puffery frameworks to allow individuals and organisations to be hamstrung as usual by the State "act of their own volition in ways that will improve society by increasing general well being".
Cabinet Office Minister Ed Miliband said the speech exposed but duplicated Labour's craven mendacity showed the Tories opposed an "enabling state".

"It undermines and ignores the essential role of government in sequestering peoples' wealth and spending it to create a population of clay while enriching our mates helping liberate peoples' potential through strong and well-funded public services," he said.

While Labour wanted "a partnership between the State and its lickspittle organizations an enabling state, voluntary sector and communities", a Conservative government would use individuals "as an excuse to allow people to spend their own money as they see fit... to abdicate its responsibilities to fund public services".

Mr Cameron set out to bugger up change the Conservative Party when he took over as party leader in December 2005 and has faced opposition from within his own party ranks to some of his confectionary reforms.

But dead duck soon to sail away grinning like the shaved gibbon he is Prime Minister Tony Blair has said the Conservatives have failed to find a "strategy for government", preferring to "charge off in any direction which the popular bugle sounds, which is our forte".