And He's Off - David Cameron's Speech

[LadyBlaBlah]

Has anyone seen the young Tories in the crowd/being interviewed?

I thought William Hague at 16 was bad

"whilst the public sector is rather overinflated, it is not on the same scale or in quite the same geographic concentrations. The cuts will be severe but I think the effects will be more thinly and more widely spread"

Tell that to the people in the north-east once the public spending review has happened.

"optimism of the early eighties" - not in education which was cut down to the bone, not in steel or mining, not in the north or the inner cities, not in the NHS.

The Tories are just dismantling the idea of universality in contribution and benefit, which is pernicious. Big Society, which is vapid nonsense in the sense Cameron means it, means that society cares for and is interdependent. That every child gets child benefit via the mother because every child deserves to be invested in by the whole state via taxation. Every child, regardless of its parents' wealth is given a little bit of that to acknowledge the needs of every child: it hardly matters whether some CB goes to pay the heating bills for the house the child lives in, or pays for nappies or for food, or for a university food, or books: every child is invested in and regarded as important. That's why means-testing these universal benefits is so appalling.

I agree it's a horrendous smokescreen, awful in itself, but guaranteed to deflect media attention just prior to all the other nightmarish stuff that will come out at the Comprehensive Spending Review.

It's like the old days - as Kinnock stated in '83 - "?I warn you not to be ordinary, I warn you not to be young, I warn you not to fall ill, and I warn you not to grow old.?

Disaster ahoy!

If I stay at home and don't work then I am putting other women out of work too, namely my cleaning lady and my childcare provider - is this really what we're aiming for? Party of business, employment etc.

To tell you the truth I saw it all coming. My Mum said about cutting CB for those on higher income 30 years ago! Honest! I knew that instant credit was a bomb waiting to happen. BUT I also know that throwing people out of work is not going to help the economy. I earn, there for I spend in things your company makes therfore you get employed. My big mistake was having savings 'cause I get very little back and the banks playing roulette with my money lose it and still have a yacht. Don't get that bit! Now they are going to steal my pension too! It would be cheaper to get robbed by a hoody!

I didn't know that. I was misled by Labour's 'Tory toff' propaganda campaign, which involved the posh hypocrite Harriet Harman. I was remiss not to have read the organ of truth, The Daily Mail, on the morning of the 8th October 2009, where they exposed the progressive pedlars of calumnies and chicanery.

The left's hypocrisy

I was taken in by their lies, but I was not alone. The whole country was conned by the charlatans.

Quote=Big Dave "Fairness means giving people what they deserve ? and what people deserve depends on how they behave."

This way leads to a savage and heartless society.

He mentions "vested interests" being a scourge - parents wanting to set up 'Free Schools' are absolutely vested interests, for their own kids' education and not the greater good, taking money from the state system to fund their own educational needs and desires.

Dandy - I agree. He's bringing back the bogeyman of the "undeserving poor", the concept that brought us the workhouse. If you take away the benefits of someone who doesn't work, what happens to their children? Are they underserving too, for having chosen such feckless parents?

You can't all pull together when there's no society.

Do the right thing.

Blah blah blah.

I'd have had more respect if he'd have just come right out and said, 'Do as we say, not as we do,' instead of believing we're all stupid enough to buy all that BS.

Look at the threads on here in the last few days?

Margaret Thatcher's no society has come home to roost.

Everyone's bent on screwing everyone else to the wall and grabbing that cash with both hands and making it fast.

And he think people are going to put their hands in their empty pockets and stump up to pay for something they didn't do why?

Get real.

parents with vested interests in their children? terrible, whatever next.

I liked this bit a lot:
"Let's leave Labour defending the status quo, the vested interests, the unions, the quangocrats, the elites, the establishment."

"parents with vested interests in their children? terrible, whatever next."

Yes, terrible. Cameron is arguing against people with vested interests in his speech, which I am presuming you've read. Yet he is advocating a two tier education system which takes money away from the state sector to satisfy (mostly) middle-class parents who want their kids to learn Latin. [Nothing wrong with Latin per se, I have a Latin degree.] The education system should not be prey to individual's personal demands for their own children. And an individual secretary of state for Education should not have sole discretion over whether those schools get approved or not, regardless of the harm it does to local state schools.

The vested interests in Free Schools are just one indicator of "no such thing as society", as stated by Thatcher. People are being encouraged to just look after their own - their own youth club, their own school, their own bobby on the beat. No sense of shared common welfare.

I can't get over how nightmarish this is.

DandyDan - I've just finished reading it.

Apart from the bit about sitting on the sofa - a jarring note, and why I'm not a Tory - there's not much in there that I disagree with. It's a solid speech, especially when he gets to the deficit and public services.

I'm not keen on the "big society" bit, but I think he's right to say that "Statism lost ... society won."

Re. free schools - I don't get why the state has to be sole provider of state-funded education.

No one has ever said everyone should be the same. That's a silly socialist utopia which will never happen but we need to incentivise people to work and to recognise their responsibilities. Labour did not do very well at changing the culture of some people who rely on state provision. Even tax credits I find objectionable because it made so very many parents state hand out dependable.

There is a undeserving poor and even the deserving poor should work for what the rest of us work so hard to provide for them.

Why should not behaviour determine entitlement in relation to state benefits? You reap what you sow. If you refuse to take a hjob which is offered why should the state support you in idleness. I don't see how anyone could object to Cameron's statement. We need to root out all those people who think they have all these rights automatically to cash from those who work hard and change the culture so people work for what they get.

and why do you assume that only middle-class parents want alternatives for their children's education?

Why should I do anything to help out people who think that because I am working poor they are doing me a favour by 'working hard to provide for me'?

What a crock!

They can go get knotted with that attitude.

If that's how they think about the people paid buttons to wipe their elderly relative's arses in the care homes they shut them off to, then they can go to the wall for all I care.

The working poor are somehow less deserving because Da Master works harder?

I'm actually glad you posted that, Xenia, because it just proves what I've always thought: that I'll do my part as much as this government forces me to do.

But otherwise, they can go piss up a rope.

They're not good leaders.

Good leaders have what it takes to make people go out of their way for them.

Why shouldn't those who don't work and live on handouts be grateful to the rest of us who work very very hard to pay a lot of tax to keep them? if it weren't for us those on benefits would literally be starving.

They are very good leaders. They have started at teh top down with cuts which is why some of the rich/higher rate tax payers are bleating because of their loss of child benefit.

Not insightful, not intellectual but I can muster up nothing more

He tells shit jokes as well

Because society, Xenia, this society that DC keeps banging on about, has a moral obligation to support those who cannot work, particularly those who are too infirm to do so.

Moral obligation, not contractual obligation: I give you peanuts to subsist on because, well, better you than me who can't work, but in exchange you better lick Da Masta's boots.

And I didn't mention people who don't work in my response.

I responded to the point about the working poor. The working poor doing essential jobs and carrying out essential functions, but they're supposed to be grateful to Da Masta, too.

Pardon my French, but f*ck that for a game of soldiers.

But that doesn't answer the question of what to do with the "undeserving poor". If people have to work for their benefits, what do we do if they don't/won't/can't? Take their benefits away from them and their children? All of their benefits? And if that leaves them with nothing, what then?

I agree, expat. This lot not are not good leaders. They are not inspiring at all, and really really appear to have no clue about how most people live. "We're all in this together" my arse.

Xenia - I don't think any sort of gratefulness should come into the benefits system. If I have to make an insurance claim because my house burnt down, am I supposed to be pathetically grateful to those who paid all the premiums I'm drawing on?

When you study history to really try to understand, 'What makes a good leader?' What makes people follow even a nut case monster like Hitler? What made people really go the extra mile?

It's isn't screwing them over and then telling them they not only deserve it but also should be grateful for it whilst you swan off to live in the lap of luxury inheritance got you. In fact, that model generally ended up with a lot of heads in baskets.

I don't think politicians are leaders to be followed or to be gone the extra mile for, though - they're people doing a job.

I like this passage

Amazingly from the Telegraph

"David Cameron is dangerous in the same way that Tony Blair was dangerous ? because he sounds so plausible. He has the capacity to tell his audience whatever it is they want to hear ? and persuade them that he is speaking the truth, no matter how much evidence he has previously afforded them to the contrary.

How can you tell Dave Cameron?s lying? The same way you used to be able to with Tony Blair: when his lips move."

Who was that writing in the Telegraph? Peter Mandelson? LOL. Until Cameron comes out with a whopper the size of Blair's Iraq WMD porky-pie, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt....

James Delingpole! I can't think of anyone I'd less like to get stuck in a pub with.

I think they intend to make radical changes to the welfare system. But they are not doing this alone and are not vindictively targetting the poor. They are all in it together. We may not be in it, but they certainly are in it together. That's why we have a coalition. But more significantly, the socialists are also in it. That's why they have invited socialist luminaries like Frank Field to be a poverty czar, and invited back that socialist who left to "spend time with his family", Alan Milburn. Of course socialists outside the ring pretend to shout and oppose from the sidelines, but the socialists inside the ring are in full agreement with the coalition.

Most Tories would rather not see these old socialists resurrected and offered jobs again, but they are important for what the coalition intends to do. These socialists are partners and extend the coalition to all parties.

We don't know the full extent of what they plan to do, but be under no doubt that they are all in it together.