Even the Blair years showed the benefits for all of low taxes, so why are we going back?

Henry Campbell-Bannerman said in 1903 as Liberal leader of the opposition: "To dispute free trade, after fifty years' experience of it, is like disputing the law of gravitation."

At the time he was railing against the Tories' colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain calling for protectionist tariffs.

The Conservatives have since learned from their mistakes regarding protectionism - we are now proudly a free-trade and free-market party, carrying the torch of classical Liberalism into the 21st century.

The Liberal Democrats seem to have forgotten these lessons they once so passionately taught us, while Labour seem to be suffering from learning difficulties.

Take for example the 50p tax rate, introduced this month. One financial crisis is all it took for Labour to return to their old unfounded, disproved prejudices regarding taxation.

Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson's incremental reductions in the top rate of tax from 83% in 1979 to 40% in 1988 cemented the growth of the British economy after the Thatcher years (with a minor blip in the early '90s) and greatly increased the wealth of the nation.

Figures published in yesterday's Financial Times from the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) show how this new orthodoxy continued under Blair and, crucially, remained the most effective means of redistributing wealth.

The IFS contrasted Labour's taxation plans in the 1992 election under Neil Kinnock and John Smith with the actual results under Blair and Brown between 1997 and 2010.

As alarming then as it sounds now, Labour planned to impose a 50p tax rate for all earnings above £36,375 - that's still only £56,000 in today's money. Yet by their own figures, the poorest in society could only hope to gain an extra £2 a week.

By contrast, since 1997 the poorest two deciles of society have seen their incomes rise by more than 10%. For the richest, their incomes have shrunk by around the same amount.

To dispute low taxation then, after thirty years' experience of it, is like disputing the shape of the earth.

But the first economic crisis Labour have had to deal with since the one they created in the '70s has exposed them for the flat-earthists they are. They simply cannot learn from their mistakes or, it seems, their successes.

As a small aside, the Financial Times claimed on the same page that levels of disposable income have greatly declined under Labour. According to the report,

The slowdown in household income has come as the population has increased fairly rapidly, but also as wages and salaries have been stagnant in spite of big rises in profits at companies.

Could this slowdown be a consequence of the minimum wage? After all, if firms have to pay their employees more, they are going to employ less of them. This increases unemployment (and with it, benefit payments) while those who are in work are heaped with greater and greater responsibilities - most likely less productively because of the stress they are under.

Businesses, refusing to see their profits shrink, come under pressure to compensate for this through further firing, slave-driving and generally treating their staff badly, perpetuating the cycle.

The minimum wage may go up every year, but it would not surprise me if the £5.80 received today is worth less in real terms than the £3 workers would have received before 1997.

No, this isn't 1979, but it is close

I recently came across a left-wing Twitter post which criticised the deliberate association of today's strikes with those of the infamous 1978/79 'winter of discontent.' To be sure, it's an entirely fair point - there were some 29 million working days lost to industrial action in 1979, with only 760,000 in 2008. We can hardly complain.

Unpopular as the BA strike is, it's highly unlikely this election will be fought on the issue of the unions as it was before Margaret Thatcher's landmark victory. That said, while the scale of the issue is far smaller than it was 30 years ago, the old trends are still visible.

Again we are seeing militant unions conspiring to damage and defeat a democratically-elected government (does that include Gordon Brown?) it disagrees with. Friday's Financial Times speculated that the timing of the RMT and TSSA's Easter rail strikes (in which only a fifth of services will run) was calculated to 'maximise the political embarrassment to the government' by beginning on April 6 - the day the election is expected to be called. Hardly uncharacteristic for the openly-Communist general secretary of the RMT, Bob Crow.

One of the great themes of the 1979 election and indeed the 1984/85 miners' strike was the undemocratic nature of the unions. Five years earlier Edward Heath fought, and lost, the 1974 general election on the question of 'who governs?' - such was the union stranglehold on the workings of government.

Surely the most enduring legacy of Margaret Thatcher's premiership is this has not been an issue for almost a quarter of a century. The principles of Parliamentary supremacy, the 'open-shop' and democratic ballots for strikes have been firmly established.

But it would be foolish to think that these issues have gone away for good. The planned rail strikes threaten to leave only a fifth of services running up and down the country on the basis of a 54% vote for industrial action. Given the overtly political timing of the strike, it does call into question the authority of the unions to take such a measure.

I am sure I am not alone in saying that unions ought to be exclusively economic organisations - that their very existence as political bodies challenges the legitimacy of Parliament and the democracy we have worked so hard to develop and - uniquely in Europe - keep over the centuries.

So while party funding is still a hot topic in Westminster, it is worth asking whether it is desirable or even morally just to have one of the leading parties in British politics bankrolled to the tune of 92% by a handful of trade union bosses - whose representativeness and own coffers are highly dubious.

Francis Maude made the point two years ago that union members are generally not given a choice over whether they wish to pay the 'political levy' to the Labour party and while only half of their members tend to vote Labour, it is not unusual for the unions to claim that 100% had coughed up.

This is a highly undemocratic situation comparable to the 'pocket boroughs' of the eighteenth century. The political levy is essentially a life-support machine for Labour no matter how unpopular they become, made worse still because of the backhanded way in which it is collected.

It is conceivable that, were it not for union funding, the party would have been permanently annihilated as a political force in 1983 under a wave of Tory and Alliance votes. The SDP-Liberal Alliance did, after all, collect more than 25% of votes cast in that election.

While I doubt the Liberal Democrats are exactly popular with readers of this blog, I challenge anyone to argue that they could be less disastrous for this country than Labour have been in the last 70 years.

After all, Lord Harris did say in 1990 that Thatcherism was 'more or less common ground between Conservatives and Liberals in the nineteenth century.' And whatever else you may think of them, at least the Lib Dems take civil liberties seriously.

Back to 1979 though, there are further parallels. The recent collapse in the Tory lead over Labour has led to expectations that May will produce a hung parliament. Ignoring the fact that political betters seem to disagree, it is worth looking at the polls in the run up to the May 3, 1979.

In the BBC's 'Decision '79' election coverage, David Dimbleby opens with the following statement;

Tonight we might still be reporting a walkover for the Conservatives and Mrs Thatcher, but the polls narrowed a good deal as [the campaign] went on. It may be that we see a straight Tory victory but it is possible we could find the Tories not winning the 318 seats they need if they are automatically to form the next government. There's even an outside chance, depending on how the smaller parties do, perhaps of Mr Callaghan remaining in Downing Street, perhaps even as leader of a coalition ... There was a lead at the very beginning for the Tories of over 20%, then at one point a very slight Labour lead.

As it happened, Margaret Thatcher won the election comfortably with a majority of 43. The rest, as we know, is history. She went on to win every future election she fought, with  landslide majorities of 144 and 102.

The lesson is, don't be too disheartened (or encouraged - Kinnock) by pre-election polls. They quite often mean nothing.

While we're on the subject of elections though, David Cameron has himself admitted that the party requires a swing larger than any in any election since 1931 to win a workable majority in May.

Well, let's take a look at that election. Stanley Baldwin led the Conservatives to a blistering 324 seat majority, while a discredited and divided Labour lost no less than 255 of their MPs. This was, by the way, in the middle of the greatest financial crisis the world had ever seen - sound familiar?

America today is an example of why we so desperately need electoral reform

It's a familiar predicament to some Conservatives this side of the pond - who do you support in US politics, Republicans or Democrats? That might seem like a very simple question to many on both the centre-right and -left of the British political spectrum, but international affiliations aren't always so clean-cut.

To some it may seem baffling, but there was a considerable swell of support for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential elections from within the Conservative party. It may have been a minority, but it was also a large one - boasting among its members none other than the increasingly independent Mayor of London, Boris Johnson.

A leaf through Obama's election manifesto gives some clues as to why this may have been the case - America strong but fair overseas, support for the middle classes, an enterprise culture, individual freedom, opportunity - all traditionally Conservative policies which reflect the far more right-wing nature of American society Obama needed to appeal to than here in Britain.

Then of course there was the historic lure of the first black president of the United States. For many - nearly 150 years since the abolition of slavery - this was reason in itself to support the Democratic ticket.

However, things change. Now that the post-election euphoria is over, President Obama is losing much support over his centralising and statist tendencies, particularly over healthcare. To some it no longer seems unjust or extreme to call him a socialist. Others see him as taking America down the same self-destructive road as Britain did in 1945.

Oppositions change also. Having faltered under an all-embracing moderate in John McCain, the Republican party is taking a particularly steep lurch towards its religious right, firstly with vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, and now with newly rising star Congressman Michele Bachmann. Theirs is a conservatism that, set out of the context of US politics, is quite peculiar and alien to many in the Conservative party.

For example, in response to Obama's health insurance plan, Bachmann told her supporters ;

What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this does not pass.

Supporters who by the way, dress up as Speaker Nancy Pelosi whilst holding "handfuls of bloody foetuses" and use photographs of Jewish corpses from the Holocaust under the heading 'National Socialist Healthcare', according the the Observer.

Aggressive, extremist and downright nasty, it is a conservatism that places great importance on opposing abortion and gay rights, while claiming that the 'real America' (in Palin's words) is the God-fearing Bible Belt of the South and the remote rural communities of the mid-West and Alaska. It is an essentially divisive brand of politics that could not be much farther from the inclusive politics of the Cameroons and the increasingly libertarian values of today's Conservative Future.

There is of course a reason for this - Britain's Conservatives are currently on the way up, while the defeated Republicans are doing much the same as Labour did after 1979 under Michael Foot - retreating to a safe yet self-destructive brand of radical extremism.

In this extremely polarised political climate - socialists to the left, religious fundamentalists to the right - one would be forgiven for thinking that the sensible American voter has very little room for manoevre, particularly when the two main parties together claim 96% of the popular vote. The Libertarian party - at present the largest third party - achieved only 0.8% in the 2006 midterm elections.

This is a recipe for political apathy, and it is no coincidence that voter turnout has rarely strayed above 60% in America for the last 100 years. Conversely, since 1945 British voter turnout has only dipped below the high 70s following Labour's landslide victory in 1997.

Interestingly, whilst America's current problem appears to be the lack of any real middle ground in politics, contemporary Britain appears to be suffering from an abundance of it. In my own canvassing around the Penistone & Stocksbridge constituency I am constantly being told by voters that they feel there is very little difference between the modern Labour party and the Conservatives, and that as such they do not feel inclined to vote.

One manifestation of this is that neither of the two main parties are willing to speak about immigration, despite appearing to be an issue of paramount importance to many of the voters I speak to. Another is that, in seeking the common ground, Labour has completely lost touch with its traditionally working class constituency.

Indeed, the most common response I hear while canvassing Penistone & Stocksbridge is that while the individual has voted Labour all their lives, they will never do so again. Some, attracted by socialist economic policies and a hard line on immigration, openly support the BNP.

In both systems there is a clear democratic deficit that must be closed. A situation in which voters will not vote for a party who best represents their views lest their vote be wasted is an incredibly unjust situation indeed. Worse still, when they vote for extremists because they feel they are not being listened to, this risks bringing down the democratic system itself.

The rise of militarism and fascism in 1920s/30s Japan, for example, happened largely because ordinary Japanese people had entirely lost faith in a corrupt two-party politics that they felt no longer represented them.

Some kind of electoral reform would go a long way towards renewing the youth of the state (to paraphrase Macaulay's speech on the Reform Bill, 1831) and giving people back the confidence of knowing that every one of their votes count - whether they wish to vote Labour, Conservative, UKIP, Green or Monster Raving Loony.

However, in this country there is one problem with introducing proportional representation or alternative voting, and that is the monarchy. Without a strong, directly elected presidency (as in France), a political system of this kind is at risk of deadlock and over-compromising consensus. This has been demonstrated no more vividly than in Belgium, which between June and December 2007 was unable to form even an interim government.

My own suggestions of republicanism have been met with a surprisingly passionate defence of monarchy, given the drubbing that the royal family frequently receive in the nation's press. However, that is not to say that there have not been sympathetic ears to the principle of the suggestion.

Some suggested making the position of prime minister elected - though this seems to have constitutional ramifications so complex as to make it impossible - whilst others suggested creating an elected position above the prime minister, serving as a constitutional representative of the sovereign (which in this case could mean either the monarch or the people) leaving the PM to represent the House of Commons.

Given that a similar situation exists in Commonwealth realms such as Canada and Australia, this doesn't sound like such an unlikely suggestion. While not an elected position, the Governer-General in these states serves as a representative of the Queen and fulfils the de facto duties of a head of state.

Whether this elected position would be named Governor-General, President, or even Lord Protector, the question of electoral reform cannot fail to be an issue in future parliaments. It is absolutely vital in order to ensure that Her Majesty's government is indeed representative of her subjects and that our democracy is both strengthened and perpetuated.

However, this must be done in the spirit of full, honest and careful debate in both the country and in the House of Commons. It must not be done, as has been attempted by this dying government, in the spirit of expediency, populism and panic.

A conflict of loyalty

With the European Parliament elections over and with all our dutifully placed X's in that increasingly meaningless little eurobox, I'd like to take this opportunity to seriously challenge every single Tory voter out there. Having tottered home from the polling booth to the quite exquisite sight of a Prime Minister-in-roasting, my question to you is this. How close did you get to doing it? You know what I mean. Come on... how many times did that string-tied little pencil dart from one end of the (rather large) ballot paper to the other? In all seriousness? For I hazard there was barely a blue finger in the land that did not totter, even for a moment, over that most tempting of forbidden fruits - I speak, of course, of voting Ukip.

It is a temptation that has, for better or worse, already consumed a number of Adams from the Conservative party in recent months. Lord Pearson, Lord Willoughby de Broke, Lord Dartmouth, Stuart Wheeler, and most recently former chairman Stanley Kalms. Lord Tebbit may prove to be the latest casualty of this trend if he doesn't learn to keep his mouth shut. At the end of Tory Bear's Conference after-party in Birmingham last year, I myself (vaguely) remember having to help convince one young member (while blind drunk) that remaining with the Conservatives was the wisest and, in the long term, more effective choice over joining Ukip (p.s. if you're ever in a position to be DJ-ing at Party Conference, lay off the free champers...).

It seems to me that the cause of this whole storm in a teacup may be the nature of politics itself. The question being; is it all about integrity and conviction or is it simply pragmatism and expediency? Arguably the fine art of politics is finding a balance between the two - between what you believe to be right and what you believe you can do. Yet, in a two-party system it can often seem as though the latter assumes a significantly greater importance. This seems particularly true concerning the European Union because its very structure, it's raison d'être goes right to the heart of so many core Conservatives ideas on democracy, the state, the rule of law, markets, liberty and national identity. Every single one is touched (one might say trampled) upon directly by the EU. This fundamentally undemocratic, unaccountable, protectionist, coercive, illiberal, wasteful and vastly bureaucratic monolith that undermines, in every one of its institutions, the very idea of sovereignty itself - whether that be national or popular.

Yet still two of the three main parties wholeheartedly support our membership of this gorgon. Furthermore, that the Conservatives' position is ambiguous at best, non-existent at worst makes the matter profoundly more frustrating. Splits orchestrated by a few 'big beasts' in the 1990s have naturally made discussion of EU membership a taboo subject in the upper echelons of the party machinery. Yet practically every grass-roots Tory you are likely to meet is, for whatever reason, virulently anti-EU and I dare say, strongly for withdrawal. All the same, the Conservative party does nothing. The fear of splits is all-embracing and, right before a general election, perfectly understandable. The much-celebrated presence of Kenneth Clarke in the Shadow Cabinet - who has already spoken against party policy on a number of occasions - becomes something of a liability in this respect.

And yet the most pressing argument on the subject is also the one that appears to be the least heard. Namely, that the Europe the British people approved membership of in the 1975 Referendum was not the same as the Europe we have today. It didn't even have the same name - the European Economic Community sold to us then was of a Common Market and nothing more. Edward Heath, the incumbent Conservative Prime Minister at the time of our accession (1973), was very vocal on this point, stressing that it did in no way entail any loss of sovereignty, then or in the future. Labour incidentally were very much against the Common Market, which is why the Referendum took place following their election victory in 1974. How times have changed.

The puzzle is that, even having made this promise to the nation, Heath maintained to his death in 2005 that gaining EEC membership for Britain was his greatest achievement - even after the EU had already made extensive inroads into our national sovereignty. Today, more than thirty years after the 1975 Referendum, the EU makes more than 75% of the laws passed in this country. Yet we have been a denied a referendum on a treaty that would enshrine an even further encroachment of this already precious remaining sovereignty. Time and time again the British public are told that they are wrong by the political class, despite 55% opposing EU membership.

This is the fear that appears to drive the many crises in faith we are seeing among Conservative members - that the only realistic way to stop this now very open and unabashed drive towards political federalism is unilateral withdrawal from the European Union. What I gather is making Ukip so appealing is the belief that the Conservatives are never likely to deliver on this. As the only vaguely eurosceptic of the main parties, their ambiguity appears to make Britain's absorption into a federal European super-state and the permanent loss of our sovereignty all but inevitable. 

For make no mistake - if the Lisbon Treaty is successfully put into law, the sort of concessions that John Major extracted at Maastricht in 1993 will become a thing of the past. Britain's voice - which has always strayed far from the course taken by those in Europe - will be subsumed under a tidal wave of qualified majority voting in a 27-member union. Any who maintain the illusion that we have ever exercised any influence in shaping the EU would surely see this vanish under Lisbon. Our unique laws, legal system, economy and constitution would be mercilessly trampled under the stampeding tyranny of a foreign majority. Not for nothing did Peter Drucker claim in The End of Economic Man (1939) that 'The new freedom preached in Europe is ... the right of the majority over the individual'. Any power we have left to prevent the mauling of our constitution and our liberties would be lost. And let's face it - they've already taken quite a beating under Labour.

Don't get me wrong - I have no doubt that David Cameron dislikes the EU just as much as Nigel Farage. It's just that there is very little he can actually do. He leads a very broad-based party and would lead the country - both of which have very powerful and influencial voices against any radical change in Britain's membership. Some have a genuine enthusiasm for the EU, while others - though hardly enthusiastic europhiles - seem to believe that the consequences of our leaving would be too damaging to Britain's trade and standing with the rest of the world. It is also frequently leveled at the Conservatives - and not without justification - that any referendum on the Lisbon Treaty would be legally useless once and if it is ratified. The moment it becomes law, the only way to reverse it would be to leave the EU altogether. Indeed, this has been cited by Polly Toynbee and other 'liberal' voices as grounds for not giving the public a say in the matter at all. This kind of a headache I can perfectly understand David Cameron wishing to save for better days.

So what will he do? At this point the answer seems quite uncertain - he could really go either way, and the decision will reveal much about the strength of his convictions. Does he believe he can achieve more in positive dialogue with the EU or in unleashing the British public's misgivings to it? The whole conflict reminds me very much of the personal and political antagonism between William Pitt and Charles James Fox. As a biographer of Pitt and future Foreign Secretary, I do hope that William Hague might appreciate the analogy. He will, after all be the public face of this government's action or inaction with regards to Europe.

Both Pitt and Fox led factions in the House of Commons that called themselves Whigs (though Pitt is now considered the first modern Tory) and their policies were broadly of the same aristocratic mould. Both favoured some degree of electoral and constitutional reform, in particular limiting the powers of the monarch. However, whilst Pitt - as the King's First Minister - approached this with a great deal of caution, Fox passionately bellowed from the Parliamentary hilltops as a matter of personal and political principle. Where the French Revolution had effectively torpedoed Pitt's must-cherished hopes of reform (and at times even pushed him to suspend habeas corpus), for Fox it served only to fan the flames of his already very vocal radicalism and hostility to George III. Indeed, since the American Revolution he had taken to wearing only the blue and cream colours of the Continental Army at all times.

Of course, the crucial thing to note about the careers of Pitt and Fox is that for the 20 years between 1783 and 1806, it was Pitt and his party that were in government while Fox was in seemingly eternal Opposition. Indeed, it brings us neatly back to that fundamental question - what is politics? Is it the Foxite expression of pure, undying principle and integrity, or the more Pittite art of the possible? More specifically; is an anti-federalist more influential in the Conservative party or in Ukip?

I believe this question is central to the conflict raging in the hearts of a good many otherwise loyal Tory supporters. It will be one of the many difficult issues facing the new Conservative government when this current motley crew finally goes overboard, and will need to be addressed with both sensitivity and boldness. Failure in this task would undoubtedly be a disaster both for the country and for the Conservative party, the latter of which have arguably suffered enough over the question of Europe. Nonetheless, it will need to be settled. For, if you will excuse the reference, if it is not, the time may come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which we have ourselves wrestled with for perhaps too long.

The ugly new face of socialism in Barnsley

Zzzz..pffgh...bphff...nudge....NUDGE...huh? wah? hahh? Your correspondent was slumped on the precipice of catatonic vegetation at a local services committee in Dodworth, South Yorkshire. 'Any more questions?' Ripped out of this stupor by a panel of grinning nudge-nudge crony-socialist councillors, he for some reason felt it appropriate to blurt something out about the BNP's worrying surge at the last local elections (they'd come second in near every ward round here) and what exactly are you planning to do about it, eh? More fool you, the panel seemed to say - this geriatric slumber-party was strictly forbidden from discussing party politics (angers the blood you see) and besides, monotonous droning on the subject of what's allowed in which recycle bin and what to do about 'loitering' kids is far more interesting.

Anyway as it happened, one of the female councillors was quite keen to speak to me about this issue after the meeting. Turns out that at the very moment my mouth lept into auto-pilot on the BNP there was a member of this curious band of political mutants sat right behind me. Tosh, I thought. They know what people think of them and they should bally well be reminded. Naturally though Comrade 'Race-Hate' Porter felt the need to treat me to a passionate defence of that unique conflagration of idiocy and prejudice that so characterises the mind of homo nationalus.

What followed, as Porter oozed at indefatigable pace with seemingly no end was utterly bizarre. But like most things bizarre it was also utterly fascinating and really quite insightful. In one phrase Porter unshrouded the peculiar myseries of the BNP's success in threatening centuries of one-party Labour rule in Barnsley. While he was coughing up bile about the councillors present, your reporter chanced upon a diamond in the jetstream of slurry. Comrade Portly proudly, and with not a trace of irony touted inbetween his repeated and really quite annoying commitments to democracy that the BNP were 'more like old Labour'. Aha. Suddenly it began to make sense...

Anyone living in Barnsley will know exactly why the people round here have always voted Labour. Since the nineteenth century the town has been a predominantly mining borough, with a homogenous and heavily working class culture. In the '80s and '90s this appeared to be threatened as the remaining pits were closed under the Conservatives, which I can tell you has left a very real and lasting bitterness. The female councillor mentioned earlier seemed to think that the BNP's success was due to the recent trickle of immigrants into Barnsley (and I mean trickle) and what she called our more individualist and sectarian society, with people selfishly pursuing their own interests without regard for wider society. Now, this is typical and very familiar Labour windbagging of course, but in this case it reveals a particular weakness for Labour politicians - their inability to see that the working classes are beginning to feel abandoned by them. If anything, the truth is probably closer to what Captain Race-Hate said himself - that the BNP are indeed 'more like old Labour' in the ways that seem to count to folk round here.

For, what many people overlook is that the BNP are a staunchly anticapitalist party, and this is what makes them so dangerous. Take this festering nugget for instance, taken from a BNP magazine and posted on the Barnsley BNP blog

In its opposition to the global capitalist society, our rejection of free trade and call for tariffs on selected imports that can damage our remaining manufacturing base, all necessary steps to give some insulation from the worst aspects of unstable world markets, the BNP has again been proven right.

That of course could've been straight out of the mouths of the Socialist Worker's Party and no-one would have batted an eyelid. And, as anyone who has ever dealt with socialist groups before will know, if you oppose the entire economic and social composition of society as it stands then you can promise people pretty much anything. Combine this old-fashioned socialism with an almost ravenous opposition to political correctness and a good dollop of race hate and you have the uneducated working-class vote in the bag. Like the socialist parties, they can capitalise on what many people now see as there being no difference between the Conservatives and Labour. Indeed, in their insipid literature, they frequently refer to the 'Lib-Lab-Con' parties as one entity, with themselves as a revolutionary element representing true democracy.

All this presents a very serious challenge to both the Labour and Conservative parties in Barnsley. For Labour the lesson is clear - don't take your electorate for granted. Decades of guaranteed victory has made the party arrogant and distant from their voters. For the Conservatives, a more confidant, open and implicit approach to policy needs to be taken, specifically targeting and countering BNP campaigns. The nationalists thrive, unlike most parties, from targeting voters on both sides in their campaigns. The insidiousness of this multi-faced Medusa must be fought vigorously and in concert by all those who oppose prejudice and ignorance for it to be vanquished. For Labour and the Conservatives, this will entail putting aside their differences and working together in defence of our common values.

The Glenrothes Axis

The coming by-election in the Scottish borough of Glenrothes is one that is already looking to be a very close call between Labour and the SNP. It is also perhaps the most glaring example of how outmoded the traditional 'Left-Right' political axis is as regards politics within the United Kingdom.

As there is sadly, no Conservative presence in Glenrothes (as everywhere in Scotland) the two parties contesting the election are the immediately 'Right wing' nationalists and what one would presumably regard as their opposite, the self-described socialist and decidedly 'Left wing' Labour.

Yet in an election that cannot help but be defined overwhelmingly by the current state of the economy, there is actually very little to distinguish between the two parties' policies. Both are traditionally protectionist, interventionist, and in favour of State ownership. Both have been forced to climb down a peg or two in this post-Thatcherite political arena, but to be sure, only a couple.

For example, although Alex Salmond has paid lip service in the recent past on freeing up the Scottish economy for foreign investment, since becoming First Minister he has also sent Scottish State expenditure and benefit payments through the roof - a combination that would, to anyone with a reasonable grasp of economics seem utterly contradictory. But alas, it is exactly this kind of behaviour by Gordon Brown over the last decade that has landed us in the dire economic straits we're now in. Even worse, it appears that in his efforts to take a revised approach, the Prime Minister has got it the wrong way round - jettisoning the former while accelerating the latter.

In effect, by ditching the free-market rhetoric of Blairism from Labour policy, Gordon Brown has given the equally reactionary First Minister the green light to do the same. After all, it hardly opens the doors for a Tory take-over of Scotland. What it does do however is expose very plainly that on economic matters these two populist parties are completely out of their depth - meaning that in a crisis they invariably grasp for the same old tired straws of State intervention.

This shouldn't come as much of a surprise. There is a long precedent in Europe of seemingly opposite political parties of the 'Left' and 'Right' at each others' throats simply because their policies are so resoundingly similar. Indeed, the Nazis and Communists of inter-war Germany never ceased to tire beating each other senseless, but afforded very little attention towards the liberal and conservative groups. The Social Democrats too, had a rivalry with the Communists approaching that of which both had with the Nazis because all three were in competition for the same minds armed with broadly similar economic programmes. As economic disaster was the key to most of their electoral success, the conflict between them was bitter.

Unsurprisingly then, all three parties were fond of using the giant crimson proletarian superman on their posters - usually seen smashing through his chains and/or stomping upon the petrified faces of capitalists and priests. Nonetheless, this does seem to contradict the notion held by most of us that the ideologies behind these parties presented radically different visions on what the future of Germany should be. Indeed, the Third Reich and East Germany are both very real and chilling testaments to how the latter two would realise these differing but equally terrifying ideals.

Growing up with the idea that Nazism and Communism are as different as back and white, one may overlook the fact that the practical applications of their ideologies were not all that different. It is worth posturing that in domestic policy at least, the Third Reich and East Germany changed day-today life very little for ordinary Germans - even, to an extent - if you were Jewish. It is principally because all three had such a thin grasp on the study of economics itself that their policies were so resoundingly similar. As frequently put by the economist Milton Friedman - there can be no political liberty without economic liberty.

It is certainly no moot point that Hitler, a man who viewed economics as supremely unimportant in his grand scheme of things, should immediately jump to State ownership and direction as policy once his chief economist Schacht had stopped telling him what he wanted to hear on rearmament. Indeed Enoch Powell, a man many would wrongly associate with the nationalist 'Right' argued this precise point - observing that there was so little to distinguish the economic policies of successive Labour governments from the Fascist and Communist regimes of Europe simply because "they are all at heart totalitarian". Certainly in this light it can come as no coincidence that the celebrated fascists Oswald Mosley and Benito Mussolini were dedicated members of Labour and the Socialists respectively, before beginning their own political movements.

The point to be made here is this: when the crux of your policy falls on essentially one issue - be it the welfare of the toiling masses, national independence, the environment, religion or race - economic concerns inevitably take a back seat, more often than not as merely a tool used towards an end. Consequently it is always poorly understood, always misused and always abused. The consequence being, naturally, that it always ends in tears.

Conversely, the only surviving party in the United Kingdom that has ever viewed prudent maintenance of the economy and wealth creation as ends in themselves are the Conservatives. The United States has thus far been blessed by this trait in both the leading parties throughout its history. However, the Bush administration has been attacked for seemingly putting fiscal conservatism to one side in favour of pursuing an ideological foreign policy - namely, the neocon 'Towards an American Century' project. Obama too, seems set to repeat this folly with socialistic federal expenditure aimed at one slice of American society. This more European mould of politics is increasingly in danger of infiltrating the Anglo-Saxon community of nations as more and more political parties emerge with ulterior motives aimed at ever smaller sections of our society.

More than ever before then, conservatives in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia must stand strong with a One Nation base of support against this increasingly sectarian trend. We have a rich history to draw on. From the days of Tory paternalism against the Liberal 'millocracy' in the nineteenth century to the tides of Thatcherism against the undemocratic power of the trade unions; the Conservatives have been the only party in the United Kingdom to consistently unite these islands' inhabitants through an over-riding commitment to the cohesion of the Union itself. Who else has so successfully united agricultural and industrial workers with the landed aristocracy? The skilled working classes with a rising set of entrepreneurial of businessmen?

Unsurprisingly then, the Conservatives are also the only party with the accumulated knowledge and experience on economic and social matters to actually achieve this. They may be blamed for many things in the industrial heartlands of England, but it should be cited in their defence that the nationalisation of industry by Labour was the original sin. For ten years it must have seemed to the people of this country that Labour had finally 'got it' with the economy. Indeed, perhaps the most consistent complaint of recent years has been that, given Tony Blair's tough approach to law and order, there has been very little to choose from between the main parties.

Of course in hindsight we know that this really was too good to be true. The maintenance of the economy for the benefit of everyone was never, as it turns out, an end in itself for 'new' Labour - simply a change in tactics. The goal remains, as it was, the same. Socialism. Or, to put it in a few more words - handing all the proceeds of accelerated growth to the working (or more often, not-working) classes through damaging and massively inflated benefits and services while leaving nothing for a rainy day which your ideology has in any case expressly ruled out as a possibility; then, when everything goes tits-up, proceeding to blame it on the very people who raised you all that revenue in the first place before taxing and regulating them out of the country.

It doesn't take a political genius to see that in this way Labour has consistently been a divisive and counterproductive force in the running of British politics, because it has and always will represent the interests of only one section of society - one that happens to be disproportionately dominated by the trades unions who are once again forming the bulk of party funding.

This blinkered and interest-driven view towards policy will always be the downfall of Labour when it comes to economic matters. It nearly cost them their very existence as a mainstream political party in 1983. By 1997 Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had managed to successfully 'decontaminate the brand' so to speak, and make Labour appear electable again - for a short while even invincible. They had managed to convince us that after fifty years of wrecking the economy they'd finally gained some competence on the subject. This is no small feat, and they deserve some recognition for this.

But Gordon Brown has demolished this illusion as just that. It was a very fancy illusion, and darned convincing, but an illusion nonetheless. It is now not such a stretch to conclude that what Labour inherited in 1997 was in fact a Tory upswing in the economy - a Tory mistake fixed by the Tories - proceeding to hollow it out over the next ten years with a spendthrift attitude to public borrowing/spending prompted by an ideological assertion that there would never again be another economic collapse in Britain. "No more boom and bust" indeed! The very idea, that one can completely rule out this entirely natural outcome of the economic cycle and proceed to stick ones head in the sand, refusing even to prepare for the merest possibility of this eventuality shows an enormous degree of ignorance and arrogance on the part of Labour that is usually reserved only for the most feckless and stupid of individuals.

I put it therefore that Labour is unfit to govern. I put it that they have never been fit to govern and their trail of destruction in British industry and society since 1945 leaves very little to defend their claim to power. Furthermore, due to the deep-rooted socialist assumptions and instincts within the party, I do not believe they will ever conclusively prove themselves to be so. Attlee failed, Wilson failed, and now Brown has failed. It's a sloppy record.

This really ought to be the end of the road for Labour in Scotland, but without a fresh and renewed Tory presence there (perhaps by cutting the Scottish Tories loose again in the guise of a resurrected Unionist party?) all we can really expect to see is the replacement of one populist, spendthrift and economically ignorant party with another. The danger is that if the Tories fail to produce a real alternative to this socialist/nationalist economic axis, we may end up in a situation where it's no longer our problem.