johninnit

Today’s Torygraph front page (look, I had to buy it for work, okay!), left me pretty speechless. The nasty party is well and truly back. Redwood and Osborne plan a new policy direction to launch on Friday, but it seems to be too juicy a story to keep wraps on.

The idea is that we could save a whole heap of money without a few little fripperies that no-one will miss anyway. Stuff like:

• Health and safety at work
• The Working Time Directive
• data protection
• Safe care homes
• ‘Best Value’ councils
• Home Information Packs (yes, well…)
• Food supplement regulations
• Venture capital regulation
• Money laundering restrictions
• Mortgage regulation
• Waste incineration regulation
• Unfair dismissal protection
• BBC services outside TV

I’m not sure whether to be happy about this. It gives us some pretty clear blue water to define ourselves against, makes Cameron look like a total charlatan for changing so dramatically, and will rally the Labour troops very nicely. On the other hand, it’s like something from a zombie film sequel – the stumbling nightmare has returned, and that is enough to scare me a lot.

Some of their points will go down better than they should with floating voters. Health and safety is very hard to defend against the braying anti-PC mob, as people don’t tend to notice the fact they haven’t lost any limbs recently. Likewise with the working time directive (everyone tends to think they’re the only ones working whilst everyone else is slacking off), even though this would really hammer millions of people in the worst jobs, who really need it to protect their vulnerable family lives from exploitative employers.

Maybe the things we need to focus on are the ones that scare people silly about their own financial situation. This might be moves to make it easier to fire you, or to transfer financial services regulation to some of the only people voters trust less than politicians – the banks. Add onto that a free hand for big finance, and the fact that without data protection regulation, the Tories’ sinister corporate pals will be able to snoop on you however they like. There could be a compelling argument about the Tories trying to hand us all over to the less trustworthy side of big business done up like a kipper.

Also good is the Liberal angle that the sums are wrong, topped with the fact they mightn’t be able to ditch the WTD without an almighty spat with the EU (they lost the legal argument last time they tried, so I don’t see how they can do it now. All that makes them look just a bit dim, and as though they’re playing to their true instincts rather than having genuine new ideas, or taking modernisation at all seriously.

Reaction to it going off half-cocked like this has so far been encouragingly bad, but it’ll be interesting to see how it plays across the Tory party. I wonder if this is going to get watered down come Friday?

Tags: deregulation, George Osborne, John Redwood, red tape, Tories

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 12th, 2007 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Cameron, Tories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.