An interesting view by Peter Hitchens* undoubtedly missed by most group members:
Toynbee Tories - another step on the staircase of surrender
Mail on Sunday, 26 November 2006
The liberal Left is full of glee that David Cameron's Tories have decided to dump Winston Churchill's sensible view of poverty and adopt instead the dangerous ideas of The Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee**.
Churchill wanted to help the poor. Toynbee wants to use the plight of the poor as a perpetual pretext to confiscate the hard-earned money of the middle class and give it to the State.
The change is revolutionary. The Left correctly sees this as yet another significant surrender. Why, soon they will be inviting Mr Cameron and friends to dinner in their Hackney homes.
.
.
End
==================================================
* Ex-Trotskyist turned Right-wing (can we still use this term?) columnist. On the same page as the Toynbee piece, he has a wonderful turn of phrase about representatives of the Association of Chief Police Officers, 'speaking the Martian dialect that passes for English among social scientists and lawyers.'
** Described recently by The Independent newspaper as 'the queen of leftist journalists' and who, incredibly, was a few short years ago briefly the BBC's Social Affairs Editor.
=================================================
Perhaps Hitchens is worrying unnecessarily. As I understand it, what Cameron said was that we should do more for the 'very poor' who are trapped in poverty due to those people’s lack of education, the breakdown of their families, their mental and physical illness or their drug addiction and that it is these problems that need to be tackled. Whereas all Chancellor Brown has done, Cameron holds, is to increase their incomes and somehow hope that this is enough to resolve their problems. So presumably the 'hard-earned money of the middle class' would be taxed no more that it currently is if the Tories were returned to office.
Paul Ashton
[log in to unmask]
2006-11-28
|