Cynical about real political choice? Moi?
There's nothing quite like the conference season to restore your cynicism in politics. Say what you like about the Liberal Democrats - irrelevant, idiotic, idiosyncratic - they at least have something approaching an actual debate, discussion and vote on new policies. Compare that to both the Labour and Conservative conferences, so far distinguished only by their congratulatory backslapping and err, almost indistinguishable policies, and you'd almost be forgiven for wanting to turn yellow and become a Minger.First though, it would be remiss not to mention today's flabbergasting act of political cynicism from Gordon Brown. For once, the Tory accusations of spin, electioneering and downright opportunism were more than valid. As oleanginous, creepy and rabid as Liam Fox is, it was impossible to disagree with his righteous anger about Brown's token mention of Iraq in his speech last week, only to fly to Baghdad during the Tory conference and announce a further draw down of troops. Even if we hadn't then learned that this further withdrawal was in fact nothing of the sort, with some of the 1000 soldiers who would be back by Christmas either already here or not even in Iraq currently, the truly shocking thing about this latest foreign policy debacle was that Brown had the nerve to go to Iraq at all, without at the same time announcing that all the remaining troops would be brought home almost immediately. The lunacy of remaining at Basra airport, supposedly as a backup force in case the Iraqi army or police need as at some point, even when we're told that a full handover will be possible within a couple of months, and with, surprise surprise, Basra quieter since we left, is self-evident. Our last act in Iraq could conceivably have taken place before Christmas - the final operation, to bring to safety the Iraqi employees who worked for our armed forces whom we owe a debt of both protection and gratitude to - and that would have been that. Instead, in a blatant act of political manoeuvring prior to the now almost certain calling of an election, Brown proved that he can still be just as deceitful, if not more so, than his predecessor.
The only mitigating factor was that today was just another day in the Conservative charade of pretending to be all things to all people, whether it was the presenting the alternative to authoritarian New Labour as being even more authoritarian, or promising to fix our "broken society" by shafting the ill and depressed into jobs they either don't want or can't cope with in order to redistribute to working couples. If you want a good giggle, you can read Ed Vaizey's hilarious CiF post about how the Tories are back on track due to their commitment to helping young people starting out in life; as WarwickLad in the comments puts it, by ensuring that the children of the well-off will have even less incentive to work or contribute to society, courtesy of their inheritance tax cut. Oh yeah, the Tories are back on track all right: a track leading straight to the buffers.
David Davis certainly wants to take them there. Reading through his speech, itself frequently broken up by self-indulgent video clips either involving individuals telling them how wonderful/right they are, or featuring those they've decided to champion for whichever fatuous reason, the only lasting impression you get is of, despite all Davis's protestations about how bad Labour have been over crime, immigration and terrorism over the last ten years, how little difference he's really offering. Davis wants less bureaucracy for the police; Smith last week offered them new computers for processing paperwork on the street and machines for taking fingerprints. Davis repeats a very recent news story about Devon police supposedly not being allowed to throw a life-belt to someone in the water without conducting a "risk assessment" first - in reality an on the spot evaluation by the officer of what might go wrong. The document Davis is referring to is in fact drawn up by the Devonshire police themselves, is a summation of their own policies on rescuing those in danger (it's not a requirement of the police to dive in to save someone - that's the job of the other, trained, emergency services, but naturally the vast majority would do anyway) and has nothing to do with the government, but anything will do to bash them; he also raises the story of the boy who drowned recently in Wigan when the community support officers didn't jump in to save him, except Davis refers to them as "uniformed officers" to obfuscate the point ever so slightly.
Next Davis refers to what happened to Nicholas Tyers, the fish and chip shop owner from Bridlington who performed a citizen's arrest on what Davis calls a "yob" and was himself arrested and charged with kidnap, only for the judge to throw the case out. What Davis doesn't mention is that the yob in question was 12 years old, and that the crime they performed a citizen's arrest on him for had happened the day before. All this is leading up to another inevitable - the rush to zero tolerance, which, amazingly enough, was what Jacqui Smith talked of last week. Davis lauds the completely incomparable example of New York once again to what could be achieved across the country, lifting his argument almost directly out of the pages of the Sun.
How will the Tories provide the extra prison places needed if zero tolerance were to be enshrined? By abolishing ID cards. The Tories' one decent, non-authoritarian policy on civil liberties apart from their opposition to longer detention without charge for "terrorist suspects", and they're going to spend the money saved from not introducing them on more cells, further entrenching the crisis in overcrowding which can simply not be built out of. It's a vicious circle - ever more people in prison leads to less effective rehabilitation and in turn more re-offending, but Davis has signed up to the fallacious Sun mantra that while the "bad people" are locked up they can't commit more crime. Who cares about what happens when they're released? The Tories are also still continuing with their head in the sand approach to the early release scheme, which they claim will lead to 25,000 inmates being let out around two weeks' early this year, even though the total has so far only hit just less than 6,500, and the prison population hasn't even dropped. If they hadn't been released slightly early the entire system would have snarled up, but seeing as they're not in power they can carp about instantly abolishing it.
So it continues. Davis' next wheeze is drug treatment programmes, which apparently work best when they are "abstinence" based. Perhaps we ought to get Davis addicted to crack or heroin and then see how he likes going cold turkey. On immigration the Tories will make sure it drops by putting a limit on economic migrants from outside the EU, which will of course be far removed from Labour's own impositon of a points system regulating who can come here to work, but to soften the blow Davis talks up the Gurkha who had to fight to live here, the Chinese cockle pickers, here illegally, and whom as a result the Tories woulld continue to promise to deport, but seeing as they're dead they can't point that out. The obligatory mention is next made to the evil that Smith also spoke of, human trafficking, talking of 10,000 women brought here and put to work as sex slaves; too bad that as in the US, the figures don't seem to stack up - Operation Pentameter, last year's operation find and free victims of sex trafficking, succeeded in freeing 88 victims. Human trafficking is a reality, but the numbers involved seem to be far below that politicians talk of. A police border force is announced again as well - a policy that Gordon Brown shamelessly nicked.
Oh, and Hizb-ut-Tahrir will be banned. So much for tolerance and respect, and a "hard-nosed defence of freedom". Radical Muslim organisations potentially far more dangerous forced underground than when they're out in the open don't apply.
Thing is, this isn't really entirely David Davis's or the Tories' fault. They've been hemmed in by New Labour, who've either stole the majority of their policies or been shoved so far to the right on home affairs by the constant screeching of the Sun that they've nowhere else to go. Davis seems in general to be something approaching an old style Tory libertarian, as his stance on extended detention and other matters has shown, that one gets the feeling that if he wasn't shadow home secretary the policy would be different. His, and his party's policies on that and ID cards are far more virtuous than Labour's disgraceful continuing attacks on civil liberties. It's just impossible to support the party's policies as a whole as because of how far right they've got to go to somehow outbid Labour. The above is proof of that failure, and how it's leaving the electorate in general with so little real choice.
Labels: Conservative party conference, crime policies, David Davis, Gordon Brown, Iraq withdrawal, Labour conference, spin, Tories
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Good blog! Link coming up......
Posted by
susan press |
Wednesday, October 03, 2007 6:35:00 pm
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