Thursday, December 08, 2005
Cameron - good or bad?
Two articles on David Cameron from the Guardian: one from Jonathan Freeland where he compares Cameron to Bush; the other from Simon Jenkins who sees him as the most exciting Tory leader since Thatcher. Both articles pay Cameron the compliment of taking him more seriously than the recent tory leaders. I'm curious to know what other bloggers feel about Cameron. Is he a real threat to Labour? Does the Tories' 'revival' have a real chance of getting them into power? Or will Cameron turn out to be as unsuccessful as his predecessors?
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Here's an account of Cameron's rise as recorded on a Conservative blog.
Here's another interesting opinion on Mr Cameron. Right Man, wrong ideas - according to this
article by Anatole Kaletsky.
Here's another article on Cameron by Matthew D'Ancona which is unwittingly revealing about their man. It is particularly interesting to note how Cameron is again compared to Bush (this time positively)while at the same time a recent poll found that 24% believe Cameron would increase public spending.
Brideshead Rebranded
Here's an american perspective on Cameron. Writing in the Salon Sidney Blumenthal also compares Cameron to Bush.
Anyway here's the link: http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2005/12/15/david_cameron/
While the Labour party still seem very nervous almost fatalistic about 'Dave' Cameron, some of the centre right are unconvinced. Here's an article from Cameron skeptic Alice Miles in the Times.
Bout time someone else contributed to Andy's Cameron thread. Here's Steyn, drawing lessons for Cameron from successful conservative leaders in the US, Canada and Australia:
http://www.opinion.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/01/10/do1002.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2006/01/10/ixopinion.html
Ideas win elections: glamour doesn't
By Mark Steyn
Telegraph
10/01/2006
Cameron goes up in my estimation. Spotted by SL.
Cameron declares himself a Zionist
Jerusalem Post
Jun. 13, 2007
Cameron must tackle welfare dependency
By Janet Daley
Telegraph
20/08/2007
...
[T]he cycle of chronic welfare dependency - remember that? We have been banging on about it since the early days of the Thatcher era. One prime minister and one social security minister after another has mouthed formulae for putting an end to unemployment as a permanent (and inherited) lifestyle. The Tories notoriously made themselves sound vindictive by going after single mothers who supposedly saw babies as a free ticket to a council flat.
Then Labour (and its famously puritanical Chancellor Gordon Brown) said it was determined to guarantee that every household would have at least one member who was acquainted with the "world of work". And where are we now? Faced with an apparently irreducible army of second- and third-generation unemployed, ineducable borderline sociopaths who are so profoundly out of touch with any sense of responsibility as to be in effect unemployable - and who are, in the great tradition of the feral pack, creating the street culture into which much of our urban youth is pulled.
One in four of what should be our working population is out of work at a time of economic growth and unprecedented opportunity for self-advancement. The second highest number of people ever recorded - 7.9 million - are "economically inactive". Mr Brown's pet New Deal programme has succeeded in finding real employment for only one in five of the lone parents with whom it has dealt.
And, to compound our problems, the jobs that all the able-bodied people in this legion might have been doing are having to be filled by immigrants who are happy to work hard and reap the benefits, but whose presence here puts pressure on housing and a health and education infrastructure that is already carrying the dead weight of all those chronically unproductive benefit dependants.
But why should not being in paid work necessarily be conducive to delinquency or even to civic irresponsibility? Obviously, many unemployed people manage to live honourable lives and raise civilised children. But the evidence is clear from the American experience, as well as the British one, that, when a whole tranche of the population is permitted to subsist indefinitely on state benefits, especially when that subsistence is maintained through several generations, the result is what we see before us.
It would seem that, at least in the Protestant cultures where work is closely (even if unconsciously) associated with virtue, people who do not work for a living - or do not live with anyone who does - lose touch with the basic concept of responsibility to others, and the sense of being connected to a world in which actions have consequences.
So unless we want to see more decent men - more virtuous fathers and able young graduates - murdered by roving bands of mindless thugs, and more of our mean streets run by outlaw gangs armed with knives and increasingly with firearms, some political party is going to have to say what seems now to be unsayable.
The only way to end welfare dependency is to end it.
Offering people counselling and "support" to get jobs will only help those who would have found work anyway. In the US, they were faced with an almost identical problem after Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" programme had installed a European-style comprehensive welfare system to "defeat poverty". The underclass that sprang up - with its crack dens and horrific crime rates - was tackled not just by the well-known zero tolerance policing policy but by drastic welfare reform.
Individual states such as Wisconsin were allowed to pursue their own innovative programmes, some of which would stand the hair on end of mainstream British politicians: single mothers were offered support for their first child, for example, but not for any subsequent ones; benefits were reduced and then removed altogether from people who refused even menial jobs when they were offered them.
But the greatest breakthrough came with Bill Clinton's 1996 federal welfare reform in which an absolute limit was placed on the time that any individual could live exclusively on benefits: no one was to be permitted more than five years of welfare dependency during his lifetime.
After that, you were on your own or in the hands of charities. And yes, a good many of the erstwhile unemployed had to take badly paid, low-grade jobs in the first instance. But most, statistics showed, moved on fairly quickly to better jobs and higher pay: the real cure for poverty, it seemed, was getting into work.
The American economy boomed as a consequence of the greater number of productive people, and crime rates fell dramatically. So will Mr Cameron be brave enough to name what is one of the clear remedies for the "broken society" about which he seems sincerely concerned?
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