“Big Society” – Conservative Manifesto

David Cameron stood in front of the crumbling, but iconic Batersea power station and  framed the launch of the conservative manifesto as giving power back to the people (Tooting Popular Front and Wolfie anyone?) by asking the voters to join them in forming the next government.

Once I got past the jargon (Labours was refreshingly buzz-word free) I felt much like I did after perusing the Labour manifesto yesterday. Once again there is a lot of effort talking about how tomorrow will be different from the last few years, but with no compelling vision for what the country will look like in 2015 if we were to believe.

The sharing government part comes from a proposed “Big Society”: a combination of decentralization and social responsibility. The idea as I saw it was that the electorate will be able to take over public services, choose the run their own school or hospital as a trust. No detail is given as to how that could happen,

“The Labour way assumes that only Big Government can solve our problems, but the alternative to Big Government is not no government: its good government, effective government”

Labour and the Lib Dems have both claimed VAT will have to rise to pay for Tory tax cuts and spending pledges. The NI rise, affecting anyone earning over £20,000, will hit small businesses “especially hard”, costing, according to the document, up to 57,000 jobs in small and medium-sized enterprises.

The Conservatives and Labour traded barbs over taxes (this is good, they get that the economy is the central issue). Labour proposes a 1% increase in National Insurance (social security for my American friends) for those earning over 20K/year. The Conservatives are not totally against the rise, but have pledged to raise the threshold for the higher contribution to 35K/year.

Cameron said nothing about keeping taxes where they are; both income tax and VAT (sales tax) were not mentioned. The Conservatives have said that the 6 billion/year hole left by pushing out the National Insurance raise will be met by efficiency savings. In an organization the size of the civil service that should not be a difficult figure to find, but the question comes why has it no been done before now.

This is one of my biggest problems. Labour offered some public sector workers guaranteed minimum wages. Call it what it is, a bribe. The conservatives pledged a public sector pay freeze for all but a million of the lowest earners (how many public employees are there in the country?)

Politicians the world over forget whose money they are blowing on legions of managers for the NHS (more managers than hospital beds…), quangos overseeing public services and civil servants micro-managing public services.

“Together we can even make politics and politicians work better. And if we can do that, we can do anything. Yes, together we can do anything. So my invitation today is this: join us, to form a new kind of government for Britain.”