Polly Toynbee comes in for some terrible stick in the comments on her article on Wednesday calling for ‘clever cuts, not slash and burn’.
She is absolutely right in the first part of her analysis. As I have written before, I don’t want Nick Clegg’s savage cuts, I don’t want slash and burn (and no, Labour spokesmen, I am not frothing at the mouth ready for massive cuts), and I don’t want to cut programmes that have a real effect in the future. What I do want to cut is waste, pointless spending, spending that encourages people to do the wrong thing, and programmes that are better delivered by a body other than the state. I appreciate that there will be programmes that we all want to see remain which may have to be pruned at least for now – but I want someone sensible to look at them and assess them properly.
Peter Tatchell had an interesting article the same day about how he would implement a Green New Deal. While we might disagree on some of the detail, it’s absolutely the kind of thinking that needs to be happening now.
Out of adversity comes opportunity – if we are serious about learning the lessons of the credit crunch, we should seize the chance to recast the way that we approach both raising and spending taxes.
I’m very attracted to Andrew Mitchell’s idea of giving voters a say over what a proportion of the aid budget is spent on. Could this be developed further? Would it be entirely impossible to seriously address the ‘no taxation without representation’ mantra, and really hand a serious amount of control to voters?
Of course we live in a representative democracy, and of course we all have our pet programmes and our pet hatreds that we would love to see abolished. But I would like to think that the Conservative commitment to localism will extend to control over how money is spent as well as taking responsibility for delivery.
I suspect that none of the three people I’ve mentioned would be entirely overjoyed to be so closely linked in my thinking. Yet I think that’s the key to changing the situation we’re in – we need to go back to first principles of what we want to achieve and focus on what works rather than dismiss an idea or an objective because of where they come from.
Related posts:
- What Polly Toynbee didn’t want to say
- Don’t panic, Polly – progressive Conservatism is alive and kicking
- Andrew Boff: London Mayoral Contest
- Why Peter Hain doesn’t matter
What links Polly Toynbee and Andrew Mitchell with Peter Tatchell?
Polly Toynbee comes in for some terrible stick in the comments on her article on Wednesday calling for ‘clever cuts, not slash and burn’.
She is absolutely right in the first part of her analysis. As I have written before, I don’t want Nick Clegg’s savage cuts, I don’t want slash and burn (and no, Labour spokesmen, I am not frothing at the mouth ready for massive cuts), and I don’t want to cut programmes that have a real effect in the future. What I do want to cut is waste, pointless spending, spending that encourages people to do the wrong thing, and programmes that are better delivered by a body other than the state. I appreciate that there will be programmes that we all want to see remain which may have to be pruned at least for now – but I want someone sensible to look at them and assess them properly.
Peter Tatchell had an interesting article the same day about how he would implement a Green New Deal. While we might disagree on some of the detail, it’s absolutely the kind of thinking that needs to be happening now.
Out of adversity comes opportunity – if we are serious about learning the lessons of the credit crunch, we should seize the chance to recast the way that we approach both raising and spending taxes.
I’m very attracted to Andrew Mitchell’s idea of giving voters a say over what a proportion of the aid budget is spent on. Could this be developed further? Would it be entirely impossible to seriously address the ‘no taxation without representation’ mantra, and really hand a serious amount of control to voters?
Of course we live in a representative democracy, and of course we all have our pet programmes and our pet hatreds that we would love to see abolished. But I would like to think that the Conservative commitment to localism will extend to control over how money is spent as well as taking responsibility for delivery.
I suspect that none of the three people I’ve mentioned would be entirely overjoyed to be so closely linked in my thinking. Yet I think that’s the key to changing the situation we’re in – we need to go back to first principles of what we want to achieve and focus on what works rather than dismiss an idea or an objective because of where they come from.
Related posts: