Today’s Daily Telegraph has the skinny on the Midlands Industrial Council, one of a number of private funding conduits having been using since the now defunct ‘River Companies’ set up after world war two:

‘The MIC was founded in 1946 as a pressure group to fight the Attlee government's nationalisation plans and champion free enterprise. It has been giving money to the Tories for 60 years ...

‘Between April 16, 2003, and March 14, 2006, the Conservative Party received 52 donations from the MIC totalling £968,690.

‘Membership is exclusive, being invitation only. All have connections with the Midlands and none resides overseas. Members meet about five times a year, go to Westminster to lobby and each year discuss … the amount they want to give to the Tories. The fund varies with the political cycle, but is usually in six figures.

‘Only three of its members are known: Sir Anthony Bamford, the head of the JCB tractor empire, the truck firm founder Chris Kelly and Robert Edmiston, the head of the car importer IM Group.

‘A leading Tory benefactor, Mr Edmiston was put forward for a peerage by the Tories. But the nomination was blocked along with a group of Labour nominations by the Lords Appointments Commission.’

Telegraph journo Neil Tweedie – hi, Neil – adds:

‘Even helicopters are available, or money for a building survey. The more than 30 businessmen who make up the council are not short of the odd helicopter, or money.

‘As one well-placed source told The Daily Telegraph: "I once tried to add up their worth and gave up after £4 billion."’

Wealthy businessmen are make political donations for the good of their wealth, not for the good of their health. The reliance of both New Labour and the Tories on fat cat chequebooks cannot be healthy in a democracy.

Whatever happened to mass membership parties, funding by aggregating smallish donations from individuals who believe in the manifestos that are put forward?

Compare and contrast the piece with the speech of little more than a year ago, when the man who today insists he first got involved in politics to further Thatcherite goals insisted: ‘And let me make one thing clear. I'm a liberal Conservative … I say to Liberal Democrats everywhere: we're on the same side now.’

It’s just wonderful how he effortlessly manages to make out both cases with pretty much the same meaningless rhetoric. You see, Cameron is ‘modern’, ‘progressive’ and ‘mainstream’. He’s ‘decent, competent and comfortable with the modern world’. He favours ‘a forward-looking, open-minded, long-term approach to the big challenges we face’.

That’s terrific, Dave. But then, can you show me a single politician who owns up to being old-fashioned, reactionary, marginalised, indecent, incompetent, uncomfortable with the modern world, and favouring a backward-looking, narrow-minded, short-term approach to the big challenges we face?

Cokehead has yet to make his pitch for the disillusioned left yet. But given his support for the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq and his emphasis on social justice and the environment, Cameron’s speech positioning himself a socialist Conservative cannot be too far away.

But Oliver Letwin (pictured) – irreverently dubbed Oliver Leftwing by sounder colleagues – is a brainy type of chap. And as the Conservatives’s policy review director, he is licensed to dabble in ideas.

Hence a speech to Policy Exchange earlier this week - posted a couple of hours ago on Conservative Home - in which he comes up with nothing less ambitious than a Cameroon critique of Marxism.

After offering the standard Tory disclaimers that Cameron Conservatism is ‘radically pragmatic rather than radically dogmatic’ and indeed ‘profoundly sceptical of theory as a guide to political action’, he proceeds to reassure the world that it is nevertheless based on ‘coherent theoretical dispositions’:

‘First, it is an attempt to shift the locus of debate from an econo-centric paradigm to a socio-centric paradigm.’

Paradigms already! The man’s obviously been on the Thomas Kuhn, and the sun isn’t even over the yardarm yet.

‘Second, it is an attempt to shift the theory of the state from a provision-based paradigm to a framework-based paradigm, within which government (apart from its perennial role in guaranteeing security and stability) is conceived principally as an agency for enabling individuals, families, associations and corporations to internalise externalities and hence to live up to social responsibilities without the further intervention of authority.’

Nothing new here. This is straightforward advocacy of a Friedman/Nozick minimalist ‘night watchman’ state position. It’ll organise the armed forces, police and prisons – the ‘repressive state apparatus’, if we really are talking political theory - and that’s your lot.

Letwin’s call for individuals to ‘internalise externalities’ and ‘live up to social responsibilities without the further intervention of authority’ is Cameroon codespeak for greater freedom to pay for your own healthcare. The opposite of a provision-based paradigm is a no-provision-based paradigm, is it not?

Just to underline his admiration for the glory days of laissez-faire, Letwin evokes the world before the arrival of Marxism:

‘Before Marx, politics was multi-dimensional - constitutional, social, environmental as well as economic. But Marx changed all that. The real triumph of Marxism consisted in the way that it defined the preoccupations not only of its supporters but also of its opponents.’

That’s nonsense, of course. Politics before Marx – at least in Britain – was mono-dimensional, the exclusive preserve of the aristocracy and upper class families. The sort of people that used to send their sons to Eton. The sort of people that still do send their sons to Eton, as witnessed by … well, the Cameron Conservative shadow cabinet, for example. Little wonder Letwin and friends are nostalgic for that lost world.

Meanwhile, I know from researching my own family tree, at least one of my forebears died in a workhouse. Others probably knew what the inside of a Poor Law Bastille looked like.

Politics before Marx was the politics of rotten boroughs, the politics of the disenfranchisement of almost all men and absolutely all women, the people that the top Tory intellectual of the day, Edmund Burke, decried as ‘the swinish multitude’. Nor was politics ‘environmental’ in any meaningful sense. This was the period were the worst pollution excesses of the industrial revolution.

The real triumph of Marxism was to act as one of the intellectual catalysts that galvanised a labour movement that – through its collective political action – was a vital factor in every single worthwhile democratic and social gain reluctantly conceded by the British ruling class in the twentieth century, always in the face of Conservative opposition.

‘After Marx, socialists defended socialism and free marketeers defended capitalism. For both sides, the centrepiece of the debate was the system of economic management. Politics became econo-centric.

‘But, as we begin the 21st century, things have changed. Since Thatcher, and despite recent recurrences of something like full-blooded socialism in some parts of Latin America, the capitalist/socialist debate has in general ceased to dominate modern politics. From Beijing to Brussels, the free market has won the battle of economic ideas …’

Here Letwin is correct, at least for the time being. Neoliberalism has been the ascendant ideology of the last three decades. And the world we see around us – from the homeless of Britain to the malnourished of Africa – is the consequence of that ascendancy.

‘Cameron Conservatives have recognised the profound consequences of the fact that we have entered a post-Marxist era. Politics - once econo-centric - must now become socio-centric …

‘The first theoretical advance (the first paradigm shift) of Cameron-Conservatism is to see that fact clearly - to refocus the debate, to change the terms of political trade, to ask a different set of questions.’

The successor to socialism, Letwin reiterates, is the ‘provision-theory of the modern state’:

‘The provision-theory accepts the free market as the engine of economic growth. But, just as Clause 4 socialism once saw the state as the proper provider of goods and services through ownership of the means of production, so the provision-theorists of Brownian New Labour see the state as the proper provider of public services and of well-being through direction and control.’

Yet as Blair has made plain, state provision is not central to New Labour’s vision. It’s not even peripheral. New Labour has rolled back the frontiers of the state further than Thatcherism ever dared, from the privatisation of prisons to open up the NHS to private contractors.

‘The Cameron Conservative framework-theory of the state is fundamentally different … The framework theory of the modern state sees government as having two fundamental roles: to guarantee the stability and security upon which, by common consent, both the free market and well-being depend; and, much more controversially, to establish a framework of support and incentive which enables and induces individual citizens and organisations to act in ways that fulfil not merely their own self-interested ambitions but also their wider social responsibilities.

‘It is in emphasising this second duty of government that Cameron Conservatism distinguishes itself radically from the provision-theory of Brownian New Labour.’

Not so sure it does, Oliver. The last soundbite could equally well have been spoken by a Blairite of the Blears ilk as by a Conservative theorist. The serious twenty-first century left will have to construct a counter-hegemony to the common sense of both.

Three out of ten for the political sociology essay. And two of those marks are simply for having the chutzpah to try it on.

Oliver Letwin versus historical materialism? Bit of a no-brainer, really.

Conservative backbencher Graham Brady – the man who quit as Europe spokesman last May because he opposed party policy on grammar schools – reckons that his party’s leader isn’t going down well in Middle England. Brady argues:

"The changes David Cameron has made in the Conservative Party have been very successful in some places, and have been better at reaching out to a more liberal, metropolitan mindset.

"But they have not been making the same impact further away from London - in the north, in the Midlands, in places which really are an absolutely key electoral battlefield if we're going to win a general election.”

As a paid-up north London muesli belt socialist – albeit one who once had close ties to a small town in the east Midlands - I can’t help suspecting he is right.

I have always thought that not giving Kenneth Clarke the top job was the Tories’ worst tactical mistake of the 1990s. That brand of jazz-loving, pint-drinking, panatella-smoking Hush Puppy-clad pot-bellied bonhomie would have been just the persona to win over provincial good blokes across England.

It now looks as if the Europe-obsessed wingnuts of the Tory right will cause a few ructions this autumn, most likely around such standard hot button issues of law and order and tax cuts. Perhaps we’ll even see some ugly racism thrown in as a sideline.

Good. It will be helpful to remind everybody that underneath that Clinique for Men-doused metrosexual visage that Cameron so effortlessly affects, the Conservatives are still viscerally the Nasty Party.

David Cameron's front-bench MPs and peers hold more than 115 paid directorships and other outside jobs, in addition to their political roles, research by the FT has revealed …

"But you don't want a political class where all you have is narrow political experience and the only people who can afford to do it are those who are privately wealthy."

What a bloody weak excuse. At £60,000 a year, MPs are comfortably in the upper decile of salary earners. I haven’t got the stats to hand, but a wedge like that probably places them in the top 2-3% of the population.

It’s a very old socialist argument, but MPs do not need, say, £150,000 a year to function as part of the political system. They should be on an average wage, without other sources of income that could generate conflicts of interest. That’s the only way they’ll ever experience what impact their policies have on the rest of us.

How interesting to learn from the Electoral Commission website that an individual by the name Andreas Heeschen has donated £58,000 to the Conservative Party over the last year.

That’ll be the bloke who nows owns Heckler & Koch, manufacturer of the fine submachine guns and assault rifles that aficionados believe to be the finest in the world. Same old Tories, eh?

He’d better watch out. New Labour knows just exactly how to deal with hecklers, especially those with German-sounding names. Ask Walter Wolfgang.

The erstwhile Earl of Ancram (pictured left: he does mean Dylan covers, apparently) is clearly having none of that touchy-feely cross-party co-operation malarkey so beloved of wussy former Monday Clubbers like John Bercow.

No, the avowedly neocon former deputy leader of the party wants to see a return to the verities of bare-knuckle straight-no-chaser Thatcherism:

"Now [Cameron] must begin to unveil the party's soul based on those core values, principles and beliefs that form the timeless make-up of that Conservative soul."

The snag is, that unveiled soul is not an especially pretty sight. Whatever image the Tories try to project, they retain one single unrelenting purpose: to represent the minority of wealthy people that control society.

In the 300 years for which they have in one form or another existed, the Conservatives have made it their business consistently to oppose reforms that meant even slight inconvenience to the rich, from the abolition of slavery to the 1832 extension of the vote to the ‘swinish multitude’, from the Factory Acts right down to the minimum wage.

In 1914, they came closer to leading the armed overthrow of British democracy than the Communist Party of Great Britain in its wildest dreams.

When Ancram warns the Tories against appearing ashamed of their history, this is the history to which he is referring.

True, there have been sporadic periods in which they departed ever so slightly from the script. They were, for instance, fully signed up participants in the welfare state/Keynesian economics consensus from the 1950s through to the late 1970s. But let us not forget that it was also the Tories who, from 1979 onwards, overturned that framework.

In the process, they dragged the British polity to the far right of the European spectrum, a space it had not previously occupied since the Napoleonic wars.

Whatever image they try to project in the twenty-first century, the Tories today remain pretty much true to the history Ancram commends: they are reactionary, authoritarian, xenophobic, anti-European zealots, out of touch with the modern world, committed to the gradual erosion of state benefits, hostile to public transport and trade unions, and elitist on education.

In Marxist terms, they remain the main enemy.

The phrase ‘landslide victory’ is one of those tired clichés the journalistic style books advise hacks not to use. But one Daily Telegraph writer yesterday neatly turned it on its head, by proffering the opinion that Cameron’s Conservatives – 11% behind in the polls – face ‘landslide defeat’ at the next election.

After an initial surge in the polls after DC took charge, support has now fallen back to the point where he has no more backing than any of his string of ineffectual predecessors. His personal approval rating is just 21%.

If it wasn’t for my overwhelming political animosity to all Tories - all the time - I’d almost be tempted to feel sorry for the multimillionaire Old Etonian reformed cokehead. Is there actually anything he can do to restore Conservative fortunes?

Whether Cameron really and truly wants to change the Tory Party, or simply to pretend to the wider public that he has changed it, I’ll leave to better-placed observers. But after a decade out of office, it seems pretty clear that the activist base is irreformably locked in a Maastricht-era ‘bastard’ mindset.

The rank and file want euroscepticism, they want law and order, they want tougher immigration controls and they want lower taxes. And they want them now. That is about the sum total of the political ideas that they express. Or express in public, anyway. The crude ‘nigger minstrel’ racism stuff perforce remains sotto voce.

Compare this to the situation in the Labour Party circa 1989, when it too had not seen the inside of Ten Downing Street for ten long years. The long march to the right was already well advanced.

Sure, there was plenty more to come in the early 1990s. But the streets surrounding Walworth Road were already so littered with dumped socialist principles – from unilateral disarmament to the extension of public ownership – that there was barely room to swing a red flag.

The dilemma for Cameron is that are votes in comfort zone Tory politics. Not enough to win an election, of course. But enough to provide the world’s oldest political party with goodly representation in parliament and plenty of jobs for both MPs and bag-carriers. Burning a copy of the New Labour CD risks losing all that.

However much Cameron wants to donate the Nasty Party’s filthy Thatcherite hand-me-downs to Oxfam, there is no guarantee that new boots and panties will generate greater returns. Whatever he says in his speech this afternoon, a new conservative party with new priorities probably isn’t a runner.

Remember the derision in which posh Tory Chris Patten was once widely held for his resort to such demotic expressions as ‘gobsmacked’ and ‘porkies’?

Now things have got to the point where even posher Tory David Cameron can argue that Gordon Brown ‘bottled it’ in not calling an election, and nobody deems that worthy of comment.

Well, I do. As someone who really was born within the sound of Bow Bells, I have to register my objection to an Old Etonian worth £30m talking like he's rehearsing for a bit part in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Gordon Bennett, that geezer does me crust in sometimes. Leave it aht, mate.

Sadly, there are few working-class East London MPs left on the Labour benches capable of convincingly proffering the obvious Cockney proletarian response, delivered in a loud aggressive tone while clutching a broken beer glass: ‘Cameron, you bleedin' slag. D’you want some? D’you want some, eh?’ [Female noises off: ‘Leave ‘im, ‘e ain’t wurf it …].

At this rate, it cannot now be long before one of the Lib Dem leadership contenders reminds us that there is no black in the Union Jack. House!

Nigel Hastilow - pictured left - knew damn well what he was doing with his recent invocation of a 1968 speech from the Rt Hon J Enoch Powell MP. This was a straightforward attempt to find the Nasty Party’s clitoris.

This man, remember, is not some boy racer from Conservative Future, suddenly blurting out his true beliefs after six pints of pop on a Friday night at Romford Tory Club.

He is – or rather, was until he stepped down this morning – an adopted Conservative Party parliamentary candidate for a constituency near to Powell’s old Wolverhampton stomping grounds, and a former editor of one of Britain’s most influential regional newspapers.

And as Hastilow is well aware, Enoch was wrong. The River Tiber isn’t flowing with much blood. Britain hasn’t built its own funeral pyre. It is today a far more tolerant and less racist place than it was three or four decades ago.

But what was most offensive of all in Hastilow’s article was the subtext. Powell’s arguments were based on crude racist stereotyping, which linked the likelihood of people committing crime or being ‘feckless’ to the colour of their skin or their country of origin. Neither is a matter of choice for any of us.

There do exist political parties for people with views of this nature. Perhaps Mr Hastilow would be happier if he joined one of them.

It’s not that I’d normally exult in anybody’s death, you understand. I'm too much of a humanist for that kind of thing. While I recall being distinctly not sorry to hear word of the demise of Pinochet, for instance, I wasn’t jubilant, either. And of course, nothing that Thatcher - pictured - did remotely compares to the wickedness of the Chilean dictator.

The thing is, with me and Maggie, it’s personal. I am part of that generation of leftists that takes the Elvis Costello track ‘Tramp the dirt down’ – quite possibly the most concentrated dose of animosity and bile directed towards a living politician ever to make it onto vinyl - as something of an anthem.

It now may not be long before they do ‘finally put her in the ground’, as the ditty goes. The Iron Lady is currently – how can I say this kindly? – not in a good way. Now 82, she has lived on her own since the death of her husband five years ago, and according to more than one account, is rather partial to a drop of the hard stuff. Last month, she had to spend a night in London’s St Thomas hospital, after being taken unwell.

That’s why I was intrigued to pick up the Daily Telegraph this morning and read an article by Andrew Roberts, titled ‘Margaret Thatcher, an inspiration for today and tomorrow’. It’s not a one-off, either, but billed as ‘the first in a special series’. What's more, starting this Saturday, a set of eight CDs celebrating her life and achievements will be given away with the paper. Memo to self: collect the set.

Of course, the Telegraph is not popularly known as the Torygraph for nothing. Not only is it in the Conservative loop, it is pretty much the Conservative loop. So why the sudden outburst of Thatchstalgia? It couldn’t possibly be an attempt to prepare the nation for some sad, sad news expected some time in the not too distant, could it? Fingers crossed.

The quasi-religious tone of Roberts’ piece will make interesting reading for anyone familiar with Marx’s 18th Brumaire; the longing for a bonapartist Man on Horseback – or Woman on Horseback, of course – is palpable. Britain is facing social breakdown and economic ruin; who can save us now?

Just as in 1979 a hard-headed, realistic approach to tackling Britain's problems was urgently required, so is it today. Rather than feeling nostalgic for the certainties of the Eighties, Britain desperately needs another leader who will think, argue and act as decisively as Margaret Thatcher did then.

As someone who lived through the 1980s, I have rather a different take. My abiding memory of the decade is the planned step-by-step destruction of a kinder, gentler social democratic Britain that created the society – and thus the social problems – that we have now.

In particular, the degree of economic competence Roberts accords Thatcher at various points in his panegyric is perplexing, given his high standing as a historian. No administration in British history has inflicted such misery on so many in the name of misguided textbook economic dogma. A return to inflation in excess of 20% and three million on the dole would constitute a funny kind of national salvation.

Once Mrs Thatcher does get the obligatory state funeral, I’m sure someone – maybe even in the Daily Telegraph - will come out with the clichéd remark that we will not see her like again. I, for one, will be entirely glad of that.

A central aspect of David Cameron’s message is that the Conservative Party has changed. It is now, we are told, environmentally friendly, socially liberal and completely at ease with multiculturalism.

Yesterday – as part of a conscious attempt to appeal to progressive voters – the multimillionaire Old Etonian grandson of a baronet was even claiming that the Tories are now more committed than Labour to the eradication of childhood poverty. Welcome to the new cuddly centre-right.

And even speaking as someone who came out of the 1980s with a visceral loathing for Conservatism and everything it represents, it seems idle to insist that there are no differences between then and now.

Perhaps I shouldn’t too surprised. An ability to move with the times is one of the characteristics that distinguishes a living political organisation from a cult.

Being an openly gay Tory MP during the Thatcher years would not have been an option, for instance. Nowadays, nobody is bothered about Alan Duncan’s civil partnership.

There are even signs are that the once substantial minority of rather nasty racists present among the Tories’ local level activist base are much diminished. I have no reason to disbelieve the official assurances that the leadership was glad to see the back of Bob Spink, the clearly racist MP who recently defected to UKIP.

Yet clearly the old class instinct is still there. Even as his boss was pushing his credentials as the only true friend of poor kiddies, his sidekick George Osborne announced that the Tories are considering a further toughening of employment law following the recent spate of industrial action.

Workers, Osborne insultingly claimed, go on strike ‘at the drop of a hat’. This is nonsense, of course. Indeed, the degree of detachment from reality inherent in this statement is quite remarkable for a serious politician.

For a start, thanks to the anti-union laws that formed a key plank of Thatcherism’s offensive against the working class, it takes weeks to go through all the legal hurdles necessary to take lawful industrial action.

You can see the impact in the statistics. The total number of strike days taken last year, at just over 1m, is minimal compared to the average of 12.9m in the 1970s and 7.4m in the 1980s.

The truth is, Britons have substantially fewer rights at work than workers in any other industrialised country. When Labour was elected in 1997, employment rights were a national disgrace. Even after Labour’s introduction of a national minimum wage, the European social charter, union rights at GCHQ and the Employment Relations Act, they remain arguably the worst in the EU. Welcome to UK plc, where workers can be sacked by text message.

Unions are marginalised, little more than one lobby among many others, with the auxiliary role of unpaid health and safety inspectors. Rather than extending existing restrictions, there is a need to repeal the 1980s class war legislation and replace it with a charter of positive employment rights.

However much the Tories try to present themselves as the human incarnation of the Care Bear Bunch, their project remains that of providing a political voice for the minority of wealthy people that control society.

That’s why they have opposed everything in history that has helped the poor at the slight expense of the rich, from the abolition of slavery and the Factory Acts right through to the minimum wage. However slick the marketing, they remain at bottom the nasty party.

Historically, the acid test of a Labour government has always been this; what have been the acts of omission and commission done that the Tories will feel impelled to rectify next time they get the keys to Number Ten?

Drawing up a balance sheet of the period from 1997 to date, the answer this time round is surely very little. One of the reasons that Cameron has had such difficulty in defining a philosophically coherent vision is that Labour has ensured that very few points on the ruling class wish list remain unaccomplished. For the right, there are no particularly urgent tasks to hand.

So the odds are that the Cameron government of 2010 will thankfully not evince the sort of radicalism radiated by Thatcher once she got warmed up. That woman was on a mission from God to smash trade unionism, privatise nationalised industries and wipe out Britain’s manufacturing base in the interest of the City. Bereft of divine instruction, Cameron - by contrast - will just have to busk.

The handover will mark an alternation within a consensus, parallel to what was seen during the Wilson/Heath/Callaghan era. But this time round, the consensus is a very different one, based as it is on the free market and social liberalism rather than social liberalism and the welfare state.

Cameron and Co are not going to hike the gay age of consent back up to 21, reverse devolution or scrap the national minimum wage. Nor will there be any policies as monumentally stupid as the poll tax.

In short, lefties are not going to hate the 2010s nearly as much as we hated the 1980s. Doubtless we will find plenty to disapprove of, just as we have disapproved of much that has been undertaken by Blair and Brown. But for most people, Cameronism will amount to little more than Blairism without the all too occasional cherry on top.

Sadly, these are not my words, but rather a verbatim quote from John Stuart Mill. Such incisive invective would probably have made the Victorian philosopher a great blogger.

The tag of ‘the stupid party’ has accordingly stuck to the Tories for the last 150 years or so. Surprisingly, for the most part supporters have seemed to revel in what was clearly intended as a put-down.

By contrast, the left – for better or worse – has always attempted to ground what it does in political philosophy. Even British Labourism - unrelentingly theoretically backwards by continental standards and positively frightened of Marxism - has produced Anthony Crosland, Stuart Holland and Will Hutton.

Conservatives, by contrast, have rarely bothered with all that pointy-head book reading nonsense. There is an argument that, historically, the Conservative Party has been primarily a vehicle through which a layer of the ruling class ran the country on the basis a pragmatic platform that could be made up as they went along.

That strategy was not without success; after all, the Stupid Party governed Britain in the twentieth century for more years than the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ruled Russia.

Somewhere in the 1970s, that changed. Although the 1970 Heath administration half-heartedly flirted with ideas, it was only from 1979 that fashionable rightist –isms were elevated to the level of policy, in the form of a clearly identifiable Thatcher project.

Yet the task of devising such a project was straightforward, because the needs of the ruling class in this period were clear; it was imperative to deploy the free economy and the strong state against the organised working class. It only remained to come up with a name for the process.

As I remarked a few posts back, David Cameron – pictured - will find it harder to define himself once he secures office in 2010. Perhaps he will have little need for originality; New Labourism kept the main elements of the Thatcher settlement in place, if perhaps with a little sugar coating. Now the baton passes back to the blue team.

Yet as an article in the Financial Times points out today, the Conservatives certainly are seeking some kind of intellectual content to what they will do once they are back in charge:

The Tory leader believes his immediate predecessors failed to impose a coherent philosophy on the party, instead filling manifestos with mismatched pledges chosen for their perceived electoral appeal.

In a telling comparison, Mr Cameron last week asserted: “We are beginning to win the battle of ideas in the way the Conservative party won it at the end of the 1970s.”

The article goes on to list ‘the thinkers who are reshaping the party’, who are said to include Oliver Letwin, Michael Gove, Steve Hilton, Nick Boles and George Osborne. Much attention is paid to the role of the think tank Policy Exchange, which is financially backed by Microsoft, BAE, Tesco and ‘wealthy individuals’.

Yet the underlying difficulty remains. Policy Exchange’s ideas seem to be a pick ‘n’ mix grab bag borrowed from the centre-right in other countries. Rehashing the latest hare-brained educational funding reform from Sweden with a dash of additional privatisation thrown in does not a platform make.

There seems little that can be described as an overarching theme; the quest for a defining Big Idea is proving as elusive as it did when New Labour briefly toyed with the concept after Blair got the top job.

It still remains to be seen whether the wonks can deliver the goods. The way the electorate feels right now, the simple expedient of not being the Labour Party is probably enough to see Cameron get the keys to Number Ten.

Meanwhile, he can muddle along, knocking an unpopular government policy here and camping it up for the benefit of the Daily Mail readership there. But for now, intellectually coherent conservatism can still be regarded as an oxymoron.

The voters didn’t get any say on this one, and nor did the hapless Tory backbenchers, for that matter. It would have been a damned impertinence to subject Baron Home of the Hirsel, fourteenth Earl of Home, to that kind of inconvenience.

Instead, a handful of leading Conservative figures selected Sir Alec for the job, by a process only paralleled by the mechanisms for choosing a new Pope.

They say Sir Alec was a good chap and a jolly nice fellow and all that. But as a paid-up, grouse-shooting, not particularly bright member of the upper class, he was very obviously out of touch with ordinary voters. Labour was quick to realise that, and leader of the opposition Harold Wilson hammered home the point. Repeatedly.

A year later, Wilson was in Number Ten. The Tories had been ousted from office after 13 years, with class politics one of the major reasons. From then on, the Tories were determined to broaden their appeal.

Home’s replacement, Edward Heath, became the first grammar school boy to lead the Conservatives. Later, things got more plebeian even than that, with the job later going to a petit bourgeois grocer’s daughter from Grantham, the son of a garden ornament manufacturer who went bust, and even a kid from a comp in Rotherham.

Until now, that is. As if to illustrate the statistical tendency of reversion to the mean, the Old Etonians are back in charge of the Tories. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, an OE with deep family roots in the ruling classes of several nations, has just been elected mayor of London.
Meanwhile, the party is headed by David Cameron, offspring of a stockbroker and the daughter of a Baronet, making him fifth cousin twice removed of Queen Elizabeth II. He is thought to be worth £30m.

Labour has historically been the party that represents the majority of society against the elite, so all this should present it with an open goal. I mean, Wilson was nobody’s idea of a prole, but he was still able effectively to highlight what the Tories are and who they represent.

But you can bet on one thing. Labour today - ‘ideologically neutral’ New Labour, with its schoolgirl crush on the super-rich - won’t try anything of the sort. That would smack of class politics, and we can’t be having any of that, can we? Not even if the other side are most insistent on its reintroduction.

This article first appeared as a guest post on Drink Soaked Trots. I am recycling it as I am too flat-out busy to post something new today. But watch out for some reflections on Crewe & Nantwich over the bank holiday weekend, plus a possibly controversial guest post from one of the Left List's media advisers.

I recently caught Martin Scorcese’s new flick Shine a Light - a straightforward rockumentary treatment of a Rolling Stones gig - at London’s IMAX cinema, which is fitted with the largest screen found anywhere in Britain.

On the way home, I remarked to my partner that a former underpass near Waterloo Station, surrounded on all sides by busy roads, is quite a curious place to build an upmarket entertainment venue.

‘Don’t you remember when it used to be Cardboard City?’ she asked. You housing professionals never let go, even on a Saturday night.

Cardboard City - for those not old enough to remember it - was the flipside of the yuppie 1980s, a visible manifestation of the consequences of Tory housing policy in easy walking distance of Parliament and 10 Downing Street.

The ‘right to buy’ was certainly popular with council tenants able to meet mortgage payments, and helped cohere the Tories’ electoral base. In the London Borough of Westminster, a Conservative local authority openly manipulated housing policy to gerrymander electoral boundaries.

Meanwhile, hundreds of homeless people had nowhere else to live but a cardboard box in a public underpass. As Old Etonian housing minister Sir George Samuel Knatchbull Young, 6th Baronet, famously remarked, one couldn’t even exit the opera without stepping over a rough sleeper.

Fast forward 20 years, and the current set of Old Etonians in charge of the Tories have launched the Homelessness Foundation, and even rounded up the heads of the major homelessness charities to sit on the advisory panel.

Shadow housing minister Grant Shapps admits that ‘homelessness has not classically been considered a right-of-centre issue’. Well, there’s a reason for that, Mr Shapps; for decades now, your party has done a pretty good impression of frankly not giving a damn.

Of course, the Conservative Party insists that everything’s different now, and that under David Cameron, it has essentially reincarnated as the Care Bear Bunch.

Things in politics are never static. Labour is almost unrecognisable by comparison to two decades ago, so automatic identification between the Conservatives then and now cannot be a valid exercise.

Nor do I blame the bosses at the Big Issue, Shelter and Crisis for playing ball with the opposition’s latest initiative. After all, they need to keep in with the party now almost certain to form the next government.

But have the Tories really changed? I’ll believe it when I see it.

But David Davis’s clever tactical feint of a resignation will substantially discomfit New Labour after yesterday’s vote for 42-day detention without trial. SAS Boy – pictured - has managed to outflank Labour from the left, and on a civil liberties issue, too. For the first time since rejoining the party 18 months ago, I am seriously questioning whether I did the right thing.

It would be wrong to dismiss the gambit simply as cheap populism. According to polling evidence, 69% of the public approve of the government’s proposals. That is worth bearing in mind, given that absolutely everyone I mix with in bien pensant North London circles is without exception aghast at the development.

Let us not be too hasty to build the guy up as a consistent and principled defender of basic democratic rights, though. His political views - especially his espousal of the death penalty and opposition to gay equality legislation - are sufficiently authoritarian to place a question mark over this afternoon’s sudden outburst of libertarian rhetoric.

As the Daily Telegraph reported this morning, much of the motivation in all of this is to reassert the factional position of the Tory hard right – and with it Davis’s long-term leadership ambitions - against the Cameroons.

Purely from a partisan standpoint, Labour supporters will welcome the potential re-emergence of trench warfare within the Tory camp. Yet such is the gravity of this question that a purely partisan response does not suffice.

It is indisputably the case that on the narrow point at hand – that of 42-day detention – Davis has the correct political position; the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party, a number of ostensible soft leftists included, has the wrong one.

Part of me almost admires the gesture he is making. In so far as it will keep up the pressure on the government to rescind the disgraceful legislation that the Commons carried last night, I'd even go as far as to call it a good thing. But a gesture it remains, and a deeply opportunistic one at that.

Nor will this performance a one off; spindoctors confirm that this theme will be central to Conservative agitation and propaganda over the summer months.

Notions of ethics have been central to western philosophy ever since Socrates, of course, and arguably constitute the basis on which political theory is grounded. Political thinkers of all stripes have historically evoked such concepts.

The trouble is, the clash of opinion over what is moral and what is not remains sharp. The right’s understanding of what constitutes the good society is necessarily far removed from that of the left.

Cameron offered the example of obesity. Yes, of course it is reasonable to ask most push the message that those who are overweight through lax lifestyle, rather than medical factors, to shape up. This is not to endorse the cult of size zero, but simply common sense. I write as someone currently trying to lose a stone and a bit to get my body mass index back under 25, and getting there slowly.

But short of providing and publicising the information that people need to make an informed choice, what else can a government do? Much as Cameron might mouth off against the evils of Terry’s Chocolate Oranges on tantalising display near WH Smith checkouts, it is unlikely that a Tory government will introduce restrictions against their consumption. Exhortation is as far as it can possibly go.

The point of the speech becomes apparent when you get to the paragraph decrying ‘the decades-long erosion of responsibility, of social virtue, of self-discipline, respect for others, deferring gratification instead of instant gratification’

These are all – in themselves, and at the abstract level – indisputably good things. Who is going to put their hands up and profess themselves to be against virtue or self-respect? Sure, it’s better to be responsible rather than irresponsible; nobody advocates blindfold jaywalking on the M1 while under the influence of alcohol.

But coming from a party with a distinguished track record in deliberately engineering mass unemployment as a weapon of class warfare, the ‘stand on your own two feet’ message is automatically suspect. It all too easily shades into a hatred for the undeserving poor.

The latest Tory sales pitch has purposely adopted the language of the ‘back to the 1950s’ brigade. Alright, Cameron doesn’t actually call for the restoration of national service and the return of the birch in junior schools, but the subtext is there, alright.

An ideologically self-confident left would have no trouble slugging it out with the Tories on Cameron’s chosen battleground. After all, there is a huge difference between morality, as represented by an individual freely making the choice to live his or her life by a certain code, and moralism, the wish to set down a moral code to which all others must comply.

He tells author Dylan Jones: ‘[J]ust as Margaret Thatcher mended the broken economy in the 1980s, so we want to mend Britain’s broken society.’ You have to laugh, don’t you?

For starters, I’m not sure where the idea that the 1980s Tories were somehow economically competent came from in the first place. As someone who lived through the last 18 years that party spent in government, I seem to remember the two deepest recessions of the entire post-war period, interspersed by an artificial inflationary boom, with high unemployment that Britain has yet to overcome one of the few constants of the period.

Rather than ‘mend a broken economy’, Thatcher took a social democratic Britain that functioned, albeit with undeniable difficulties, and injected a lethal dose of neoliberalism that smashed it to pieces.

The roots of the problems we face now can almost without exception be traced back to the 'no such thing as society' decade, when all the emphasis was on individualism rather than social responsability.

If exploitation in the workplace has increased massively, yet millions of workers are too cowed to organise collectively to improve their lot, that is because of the systematic weakening of trade unionism that was a core aspect of the Thatcher platform.

If there is intractable poverty in the face of sharply rising inequality, that is because of the continued roll-back of the welfare state that started under Thatcherism.

Homelessness was not a major feature of our towns and cities before the mass sale of council housing, while pockets of intractable long-term unemployment were few prior to the deliberate deindustrialisation of the Midlands and the North.

Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Or something like that; BoJo can tell you what it means. Alternatively, if you prefer your aphorisms in English rather than Latin, a sign frequently displayed in china shops often tells punters: ‘you broke it, you own it’. Perhaps Cameron’s words unwittingly reflect that maxim?

George Osborne’s piece for the Guardian this morning reads as if has succeeded in getting the middle class Labour electorate back to his place for a coffee. He’s dimmed the lights, and a well-worn Marvin Gaye compilation CD can be heard playing softly in the background as the espresso machine goes about its lawful business.

Now all he needs to do is say the right things, and he’s home and dry. So the smooth talking bastard starts muttering all the words a North London Labour voter longs to hear; progressive goals, baby. Social justice. Fairer society.

Don’t you just hate ‘growing inequality, falling mobility and rising poverty’? Hey, me too. Wow, we have so much in common.

OK, so he can’t help sounding a little glib, perhaps that bit too studied. But as we all know, by the time things get this far, the routine usually works, provided only that the intended conquest is half-drunk and up for it anyway.

That is what is so worrying; having been ignored and neglected by their political partner so long, left-of-centre public sector Guardianista types are bound to be feeling a bit vulnerable and perhaps even flattered by the attention. Will they be able to resist a night of illicit Tory passion?

What we have before us is a textbook example of triangulation, the US-originated technique of taking the values held most dearly by your opponent’s electoral base and then proclaiming them as your own. Dick Morris would have been proud.

The article is nicely ghosted, too. It opens with an attack on New Labour from the soft left, and from there the rhetoric just doesn’t let go. By the time a Tory shadow chancellor – and I’ll repeat that job title just to make the point: A TORY SHADOW CHANCELLOR – denounces the working of the unfettered free market economy, one is left feeling slightly breathless at the chutzpah of it all.

Osborne comes on like nothing so much as Polly Toynbee in drag, and he's, like, totally ready to lead. You could almost imagine him delivering these sentiments in a speech at the annual Compass Robin Cook Memorial Conference and bringing the audience to its feet. Oh Norman Tebbit, that thou shouldst live to see this hour.

Much of the cleverness is in the way that Osborne cuts so much with the traditional Croslandite grain. Blair and Brown have ‘dismally failed to deliver social justice’. This is indisputably the case.

By pointing to the real failings of the last 11 years, as judged from a social democratic perspective, Osborne has ideologically disarmed his target in a masterful display of fancy footwork.

Any cogent political case against the brand of Conservatism cannot help but simultaneously be a critique of what New Labour has done in office for the last decade and more.

For instance, Osborne insists: ‘We know that redistribution alone, as the sole policy tool to tackle poverty, has failed.’ Well, of course it has failed, if redistribution takes the form of redistribution from the working and middle classes to the super-rich, as it has under New Labour.

The politically sophisticated can read between the lines easily enough. ‘New fiscal framework’ translates as vicious and sustained public spending cuts, ‘tackling the root causes of poverty by harnessing the private and voluntary sectors’ equates to further privatisation of the welfare state.

But we’ve all ended up in bed with people we really shouldn’t have ended up in bed with. If he keeps on dressing up Tory chat-up lines in Labourspeak, the Old Etonian smoothie has every reason to expect a decent hit rate.

Marquand - pictured left - had resigned his seat to become his mentor’s chief bag carrier.

Jenkins – often nicknamed Woy, on account of his tendency to pronounce the letter R the way the rest of us pronounce W – announced: ‘I am leaving without rancour’. Quick as a flash, Dennis Skinner quipped in that Derbyshire accent of his: ‘I thought you were taking Marquand with you!’ Boom boom.

A classic one liner indeed, but perhaps a little unfair. This man probably qualifies as Britain’s leading living social democratic intellectual. Think of him, if you will, as the Ideas Man behind Polly Toynbee.

Over a long career in politics and academia, Marquand has displayed a definite ideological consistency, to an extent that makes him something of a broken record. It’s just that this consistency that has found expression through a bewildering variety of vehicles.

A Labour MP from 1966 to 1977, he went on to join the breakaway Social Democratic Party, sitting on its leading bodies throughout its entire existence. By the early 1990s he had metamorphosed into an enthusiastic Blairite; these days, he is an equally enthusiastic critic of Blairism, and was one of the 20 founder-members of soft left pressure group Compass. Now, it seems, he has rather taken to that nice young man David Cameron.

In an article in the Guardian today, he chides the left for habitually deriding DC as a closet Thatcherite. That is a serious misunderstanding, he reckons: Cokehead is actually a ‘Whig imperialist’, a term that appears to be of Marquand’s own devising, and moreover one that has not found widespread acceptance outside his own writings.

As befits a good pet concept, the term is conveniently malleable: for today’s purposes, it seems to mean what the rest of us would refer to as a One Nation Tory of the Baldwin, Butler or Macmillan stripe.

In other outings, Churchill is upheld as the main exemplar of this strand. Indeed, not so long ago, Marquand was arguing that Churchill-style Whig imperialism is nowadays ‘untenable’, as it does ‘not address the reality of a post-imperial Britain in a proto-federal Europe and therefore cannot mobilise the kind of support that would be necessary for a new paradigm to come into effect’.

Just hang on a minute, though. I seem to remember that as recently as 2003, Cameron was still a rightwing backbencher who mocked wind farms as ‘giant bird blenders’, called for ‘a massive road-building programme’, supported Section 28, and opposed the minimum wage.

True, he’s projecting a new image for electoral purposes, and very successfully too, it seems. But it’s quite clear what his gut instincts are, and ‘Whig imperialist’ seems an unnecessarily hifalutin way of describing a guy who is essentially just another Tory under the skin.

I expect the coming Conservative government that will be in office shortly will be rather more moderate than its 1980s predecessor. But that will be because that is what the ruling class requires of it, and not because of any inherent philosophical differences with the past.

But is that necessarily the case? Given the many notable incidents that studded Hezza’s long and illustrious career, many connotations are surely possible. Let me offer a number of alternative suggestions.

I think we can safely discount any desire to flounce out of the cabinet in a hissy fit over whether European or US interests are best placed to bail out a floundering UK helicopter operation.

Not only is this now a dead issue, but since 2004, Westland’s successor came 100% under the control of Finmeccanica of Italy. Ironically, then, Tarzan ultimately got his way on this one.

Nor can it mean the institution of a mass programme of pit closures, simply because there is no longer that much of a UK deep mining industry left to butcher.

Perhaps it indicates a barely suppressed desire to pick up the mace and swing it threatening in the general direction of Labour leftwingers innocently singing the Red Flag, forcing the speaker to suspend a parliamentary session, as Heseltine - pictured above - did in 1976.

But ultimately, I seem to remember that our man suffered a serious heart attack in Venice in 1993, leaving him temporarily wheelchair-bound. And where did this cardiac infarction take place?

In a hotel, of course. And that is a moment any of us would understandably want to avoid. Seen in that light, Miliband must be cleared on all charges of insubordination.

In a set piece interview with Sky – extracts here – he deftly counters the Great Clunking Fist’s accusations that he’s still wet behind the ears, pointing out that for all his experience, Gordon Brown has made rather a hash of things over the last year. There’s even the by now de rigeur sideswipe at New Labour from the left:

I just make this argument: who in the last year has thumped the poor and the working poor with abolishing the 10-pence tax rate? That was an appalling decision taken by a Labour prime minister.

Quite. Welcome to the world of Cameron’s Conservatives; environmentally friendly, socially liberal and completely at ease with multiculturalism. Not the Nasty Party anymore.

This is a development that many on the left are having difficulties in coming to terms with. Most are arguing that the apparent transformation is purely presentational, and that underneath everything, there lurks an unreconstructed Thatcherite authoritarian.

That’s a line I have previously argued myself many times. As a student, I wrote long essays proffering Gramscian analyses of the exact composition of the Thatcherite historic bloc.

As a journalist in the 1990s, I sustained a minor cottage industry in populist denunciations of the Tories as a bunch of reactionary, racist, homophobic, authoritarian, narrow-minded, anti-European, gin-and-Jag belt golf-club bigots. It was easy copy.

And it probably is the case that a large chunk of the rank and file want euroscepticism, they want law and order, they want tougher immigration controls and they want lower taxes. And they want them now.

But I’m starting to suspect that attempts to dismiss Cameron - pictured above - as ‘the same old same old’ are as wide of the mark as the Major government’s laughable initial efforts to brand Blair a closet ‘demon eyes’ socialist back in 1994 and 1995.

Electoral politics can and do reflect demographic changes; New Labour is the living proof of that. Perhaps we shouldn’t too surprised. An ability to move with the times is one of the characteristics that distinguishes a living political organisation from a cult.

The dilemma for Cameron is that there are votes in comfort zone Tory politics. Not enough to win an election, of course. But enough to provide the world’s oldest political party with goodly representation in parliament and plenty of jobs for both MPs and bag-carriers.

On the other hand, the ruling class of the 2000s has different needs than the ruling class of the late 1970s. It doesn’t have to undermine a confident and assertive labour movement, and the game plan of liberalising the British economy, as commenced under Thatcherism, was largely completed under Blair. Ironically, it may now be that the time has come for a certain degree of re-regulation.

The arrival of Cameronism shows is now possible to combine social liberalism with the retention of a core political project of providing a political vehicle for the minority of wealthy people that control society, in a way that could not have been done three decades ago.

In short, the coming Cameron government will of course do lots of execrable and reactionary things that the left will have to oppose. Despite the man’s protestations to be a progressive politician, it is unlikely to do very much that we would regard as progressive.

But there is little I can contemplate him doing that would reopen the deep social polarisation that split British society so deeply in the Thatcher years.

He will have a different mission statement, if only because a different mission statement is required of him. Simply to present the Tory leader as Maggie masquerading as Morrissey would be a mistake.

I FONDLY imagine that Russian oligarchs fit out their superyachts with all the restraint and taste so frequently displayed in the dress sense of the nubile Slavic blondes they tend to favour in the arm candy stakes.

So it might even have been the case that the sundry British guests on board Oleg Deripaska’s Queen K off the coast of Corfu this summer found the furnishings a little vulgar, vulgar, vulgar.

Then again, that probably didn’t matter too much to the man who was shortly to become Baron Mandelson of Foy in the County of Herefordshire and Hartlepool in the County of Durham.

As his former close associate, the rehabilitated influence peddler Derek Draper, once put it, Lord Mandelson ‘should stay away from rich glamorous people, because he seems to go gaga every time he meets one’.

But George Osborne may not have been so easily impressed with all that floating bling-bling. Despite the photographic evidence of his apparent willingness to consort with common-as-muck cocaine snorting hookers, he was born into a good aristocratic and monied family, after all.

The shadow chancellor is already a multimillionaire, with a £4m fortune to his name, and stands to inherit his dad’s upmarket wallpaper business. In 2003, when the firm delisted from the London Stock Exchange, it was valued at £12.9m.

And Nat Rothschild nicely embodies an old Jewish adage that has been used for several centuries to describe very wealthy people. Of course he is ‘as rich as a Rothschild’; that’s because he is a Rothschild, stupid. Not only has he made a pile as a fund manager, but he is heir to a $1.5bn banking fortune.

I suspect some readers might begin to see a common thread emerge here, a simon-pure exemplar of the tendency for a tiny minority of wealthy and powerful men – accompanied by their trophy brides and toy boys – to socialise together in darling little upmarket tavernas, irrespective of their ostensible political alignments to the ‘right’ or the ‘left’.

It matters little to me – and I suspect to most of you – who said what by way of tittle-tattle and/or open supplication to the Russian bourgeoisie. Did Mandy really ‘drip poison’ about Gordo? Gosh, how unlike the guy. He must have just got carried away after one ouzo too many. Easily done on your summer hols.

And did Ozzy really try to set up an illegal donation from a dodgy businessman who is close to an authoritarian regime? It takes a great deal of charity to accept his ever-so-finely-worded denials, which are fully deserving of a place up there with ‘I did not have sex with that woman’ in the evasive political soundbites hall of fame.

While BMFCH&HCD has magnificently spun this one to put the pressure on Osborne, the fact remains that the Brussels commissioner responsible for reducing EU aluminium tariffs over the last few years felt no compunction at accepting the lavish hospitality of a man who benefited to the tune of $50m from the move. That speaks a certain lack of integrity, at the very least.

But in the final analysis, the media concentration on the minutiae of this affair disguises the most pertinent point for ordinary British people, fearful for their jobs and homes in the hard times to come.

Our entire political and economic system is stitched up by the likes of Deripaska, Mandelson, Osborne and Rothschild, for the direct benefit of the miniscule global elite of which they are members.

What is being dissected in the press is the everyday operation of the class that rules over us, with all its petty corruption by way of gentlemen’s agreement for once on full display.

THERE are times when the Daily Telegraph comes across as little more than an oversized Conservative propaganda flyer, hell bent on pumping out simplistic agitprop slogans for the benefit of the more reason-resistant sections of the Middle England petit bourgeoisie. This morning’s edition is a case in point.

Here are a selection of headlines from throughout the paper: ‘Middle-class tax time bomb’; ‘Chancellor makes millions of workers earning £40,000 or more worse off’; ‘End of prudence as Labour runs up debts higher than at any time since the war’; ‘Why should we believe Darling’s rose-tinted view?’; ‘Labour again turns to favoured stealth tax’; ’800,000 will pay more to fund the cuts’; ‘Gordon’s save the high street strategy fails the handbag test’; ‘Labour lands Britain in a £1 trillion hole’; and ‘Darling fails to do the business for companies’. Yes, yes, I think we get the message.

No pretence of balanced assessment here, then. No dissenting opinions. No attempt to articulate a thought-out set of counterproposals from the centre right. Why bother with a serious analysis of Labour policies when you can just run with wall-to-wall knocking copy?

The reality is that the politicians the Daily Telegraph so slavishly supports are currently unable to tell the house journal what to say right now, because Cameron and friends have not got any better answers. So the paper just keeps screaming for tax cuts instead, in the hope that the readership won’t notice the gaping intellectual lacunae thereby involved.

Because whatever is happening is the real world, the right wing of the Tory party knows that there can be but one real answer. Economic boom? Cut taxes. Worst downturn since the 1930s? Cut taxes. Martians invading Leicester and driving south towards Northampton? Tsunami devastates Bristol? Advocate a 1% reduction in National Insurance, that should do the trick.

The assumption that the editorial line of the paper is not entirely on the side of Monday’s pre-budget report is reinforced in a blog post from Iain Martin – a staffer, I presume – who boldly asserts in purest Mandyspeak that in ‘punishing aspiration’, Labour is ‘committing electoral suicide’.

Is that really so? Well, not on the evidence so far. The first opinion poll since the PBR finds that Labour has cut what was a 20%-plus Tory lead to just 4%, enough to give Labour the edge in a hung parliament.

But what particularly caught my eye were these findings:

The poll found that 60% of the public supported Chancellor Alistair Darling's announcement of a temporary cut in VAT and 72% welcomed his new higher-rate tax band for the wealthy.

But just 28% thought the PBR decisions would benefit them personally and only 27% said that they would lessen the impact of the economic crisis.

Got that, Mr Martin? The measures announced earlier this week are massively popular with the electorate, even among people who do not have a self-interested motive for backing them.

And here’s the really funny bit. You’ll never guess which best-selling daily national newspaper commissioned this valuable research …

STALINESQUE; reminiscent of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe; smacks of a police state; unprecedented; heavy-handed. Leading figures in the Conservative Party have been quick to slam last night’s arrest of opposition frontbencher Damian Green, who is suspected of leaking sensitive government documents to national newspapers.

Nine counter-terrorism officers searched his offices in the House of Commons and his constitutency, as well as his homes in Kent and London. Green himself spent nine hours in custody before being released on unconditional bail.

From what details have been made public so far, this appears to be a shameful display of New Labour authoritarianism, presumably designed expressly to put the frighteners on Green’s sources. It may be that details will emerge later that will vindicate the decision, of course, but nothing we know so far makes this come across as anything more than bullying on the most abject strain.

As Green points out, embarrassing the government is an important part of his job description. That brief will inevitably sometimes include putting information that New Labour wants to keep quiet into the public domain.

Yet just in case the Tories maintain their persistent pretence of perennial occupation of the moral high ground, it’s worth mentioning a couple of incidents from Britain’s last spell under Conservative rule.

Let’s not forget Foreign and Commonwealth Office clerical officer Sarah Tisdall, jailed in 1983 after anonymously sending photocopied documents detailing plans for the arrival of US cruise missiles in the UK to The Guardian.

Let’s not forget either Clive Ponting – a senior civil servant at the Ministry of Defence – who in 1984 sent two documents concerning the sinking of Argentinian warship General Belgrano in the Falklands War to a Labour MP.

It transpired that the vessel had been sighted a day earlier than officially reported, was steaming away from the Royal Navy taskforce, and was outside the exclusion zone when it was attacked and sunk.

That a jury subsequently acquitted Ponting on two charges under the Official Secrets Act is not the point; the fact is, a Conservative government made damn sure the case came to court.

The reality is that no government happily tolerates leaks of any material that put them in a bad light, and will freely use the powers of the state to discourage the practice wherever they deem that to be in their advantage.

Green is a member of parliament, of course. But that does not confer immunity from common law offences. Yes, his arrest is a disgrace, but not a disgrace qualitatively different from those of two decades ago.

Then there was Alan Clark - a keen amateur swordsman, by all accounts - who maintains in his diaries that Thatch used to act 'almost coquettishly' in male company, and adds:

But goodness, she is so beautiful; made up to the nines of course, for the television programme, but still quite bewitching, as Eva Peron must have been. I could not take my eyes off her …

Those who share his opinion are presumably the target market for a fetching and extremely kitsch novelty item, the Margaret Thatcher nutcracker, illustrated above. Yes, it is as gross as it looks, as the advertising blurb makes plain. Many on the left will find the obvious Freudian symbolism most disturbing:

Insert a nut up her skirt, squeeze her legs together and hey presto - your nut is cracked.

Obviously a hot item at just £9.99, and a sure-fire investment for collectors of political memorabilia, but not quite what I‘m hoping to find in my stocking next Thursday. What will they think of next? The Charles Kennedy combination corkscrew and bottle-opener can only be a matter of time. Other suggestions in the comments box, please.

THOSE of us that came to political maturity in more ideological times can be forgiven for wondering whatever happened to the notion that Labour and the Conservatives stood for fundamentally different ideas of how society should be organised.

While the turning point can be variously dated, it is patently the case that they no longer do. As a result, a certain degree of passion has long been lacking from mainstream politics. If you need further evidence, just look at statistics for electoral turnout in recent years.

Now some on the right seem determined to reinject the excitement of the Thatcher versus Benn years into the contemporary political scene. Accordingly, David Cameron’s speech yesterday - in which he proposed to cut public spending, so that the Tories can scrap income tax on savings for basic rate taxpayers – is being ridiculously overhyped by the Tory press.

This move from the Conservative leader was hailed by the Daily Mail this morning as ‘widening the political divide with Labour in his boldest tax proposals to date’. An editorial further hammers home the point: ‘A clear difference of philosophy is emerging between the parties. At last, voters are being offered a genuine choice’.

The Daily Telegraph’s front page splash outlines the story in almost identical words to its midmarket rival. Inside, columnist Iain Martin proclaims: ‘There is a clear and widening divide between the parties’.

Really? A few observations really do need to be made at this stage. For a start, the idea of cutting public spending and boosting saving in a recession is taking economic illiteracy to the point of batshit craziness.

OK, I’ll admit to coming from the standard Keynesian position of favouring counter-cyclical fiscal policy at all times. But the multiplier effect of sucking aggregate demand out of the economy like this will be deleterious in the extreme.

What’s the good in giving people tax breaks on the savings if they haven’t got a job, and are thus unable to save money in the first place? Just ask anyone who was on the dole in the recession of the early 1980s. Like yours truly, for instance.

In so far as Cameron’s announcement really is a serious policy idea and not another soon-to-be-forgotten publicity stunt, it is basically an effort to bolster the Tories’ middle-class voting base by means of a rather nugatory and equally see-through bribe.

It may indeed be the case that ‘65-year-old widowed mother’ Roberta MacCallum – one of two heartwarming real life case stories in the Mail - would be £400 a year better off. But the way things are going, that’ll just about take care of the poor woman’s gas bill.

Secondly, is this the best the Tories can come up with by way of an inspirational clear blue water bid to rally the troops to heights of ideological fervour not seen for three decades? Really must try harder, chaps.

Ideological politics proper is about the grand overarching themes, as developed over long centuries of political philosophy; it is about being for or against justice, poverty, racism, violence and democracy. A couple of extra quid a week for those with savings – and mostly, those with savings are by definition among the better off – is neither here nor there.

A.N. WILSON takes up a page of the Daily Mail today to ask: ’So why, 30 years on, do the Left still hate Maggie so?’ Hmmm, tough question, that. Where to start?

Occasion for this polemic is an outburst from Derek Hatton, deputy leader of Liverpool City Council in the 1980s while ‘a supporter of the ideas of the Militant newspaper’, but long since transmogrified into a millionaire property developer in Cyprus.

In an interview with a Cypriot newspaper, he tastelessly quipped that Margaret Thatcher’s mum should have had an abortion, blamed Maggie for today’s financial crisis, and concluded: 'She more than anyone destroyed the world we knew in England.'

As Wilson will be well aware, Hatton severed all ties with the left many years ago. It is therefore somewhat sneaky to hold him up as in any sense an authoritative spokesman for our political positions, and we are not obliged to defend the detail of his remarks.

But on this occasion, forget such quibbles. Because make no mistake, the left does hate Maggie. Really, truly and completely. It openly despises and excoriates her, not because of any qualities she may or may not have possessed as an individual, but because of the brand of politics she once exemplified and still embodies as an icon.

Peter Mandelson may have remarked seven years ago that ‘we are all Thatcherites now’, but I am still trying to work out exactly who is included in that ‘we’. Indeed, it is difficult to think of a sentiment more grotesquely offensive to Labour Party members of my generation.

Wilson – seemingly just as clueless as Mandy on this one - rehearses the traditional catalogue of the former prime minister’s ‘achievements’. Go to Nottinghamshire and ask miners who refused to join the strike of 1984-85 their opinion of Thatcher, he suggests.

I have a counter-suggestion, sir. Go to a pit village in Durham or Yorkshire and put precisely the same question to the many men who lost their jobs in the Tories’ pit closure programme and have never worked again, and whose children and grandchildren may also be unemployed. You might just find the response enlightening.

The Falklands War is held up as a glorious moment in British history, which could not have been won ‘without her personal courage’. The reality is that Thatcher actually wanted this pointless conflict, which could easily have been circumvented by diplomatic means.

Her emasculation of trade unions made possible a climate of bullying and intimidation in many workplaces, leaving British workers with the lowest level of employment rights in any country in western Europe. Welcome to UK plc, a place where the employees can be sacked by text message.

Wilson even has the chutzpah to hail the supposed economic competence of a government that started by deliberately engineering a recession to destroy Britain’s manufacturing base and put three million people out of work, before launching into an artificially-generated boom that inevitably triggered a second serious recession.

But just as telling are all some of the things his encomium signally fails to talk about. Might I just mention here a certain Thatcher-sponsored reform of local government finance that went by the unofficial name of the Poll Tax?

This vindictive piece of class-based legislation was purposely designed to load most of the burden onto those least able to afford to foot the bill, and was so widely loathed that it had to be trialled in a part of the United Kingdom where the Conservatives enjoyed nugatory support.

Nor does the blatantly anti-democratic decision to scrap the Greater London Council and the other Metropolitan County Councils, simply because they kept electing inconvenient Labour administrations, rate a mention. Section 28 – a measure that adversely impacted on the lives of many gay and lesbian people – doesn’t get a look in, either.

These are just the points that occur to me off the top of my head. I’m sure if I sat down and thought about it, I could come up with dozens more reasons to remain an irreconcilable anti-Thatcherite. Sorry to go on, A.N. But you did ask.

IAIN Dale and John Redwood represent the not-so-stupid face of the Stupid Party; the Thatcherite blogger and the Thatcherite former cabinet minister are clearly very intelligent blokes. Yet both display an uncharacteristic degree of political illiteracy today, founded on wilful misconstrual of what can be included under the general heading of ‘rightwing politics’.

Iain - yes, we are on first name terms - has authored a post under the headline ‘Why the BNP is Left Wing (and Fascist)’. His reasoning runs like this:

But the fact remains that BNP beliefs DO have more in common with Socialism than with Conservatism - centralised command control, trade tariffs, state owned businesses ... I could go on. I struggle to think of a single issue which joins the BNP and mainstream conservatism. The Nazis were called National Socialists for a reason. Fascism is invariably described as a creed of the right. It isn't. As with the BNP, fascism has far more in common with the left, at least in political theoretical terms.

That the word ‘Nazi’ is an abbreviation of National Socialist is frequently trumpeted by rightists as conclusive proof that Hitler was some kind of crypto-communist. But what's in a name? Let’s give the matter a moment’s reflection.

Nick Clegg in Britain, Vladimir Zhirinovsky in Russia and Taro Aso in Japan are all leaders of parties that style themselves ‘Liberal Democrats’. Would Iain argue for one moment that they have some kind of common underlying political identity? Surely not.

Meanwhile, Redwood maintains on his website that ‘some socialists try to distinguish communism from fascism.’ The implication has to be that the two cannot be distinguished.

The origin of the nonsense peddled by Dale and Redwood can be located with some precision. If you want the fullest exposition, head for chapter 12 of Hayek’s ‘The Road to Serfdom’, tellingly called ‘The Socialist Roots of Nazism’.

That Hayek is the originator of the critique is itself significant. As the Austrian economist's support for Pinochet’s Chile underlines, he openly preferred free market dictatorships to social market democracies. In his ideal polity, the full franchise would not be extended to anyone who worked for the public sector or to anyone under 45. In short, he was not a committed democrat.

But more importantly, his proposition that any variety of statism is ipso facto 'socialist' cannot be supported by any serious historical investigation. Socialism by definition involves working class control of the means of production, distribution and exchange. In both Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, the capitalist class retained beneficial ownership of the commanding heights of the economy, despite central direction.

That is how come IG Farben ended up running the chemical factories of Auschwitz as a private capitalist company, on a for-profit basis. No wonder the bourgeoisie funded the rise of fascism to power in both instances, with the full connivance of the parties of the mainstream right. Naturally, fascist governments make it their first task to smash the organisations of the working class, especially the socialist and communist parties and the trade unions.

Despite Redwood’s protestations that the right is inherently democratic, layers of the Conservative Party - from the January Club in the 1930s to the Monday Club of the 1970s and the Conservative Democratic Alliance of the current decade - have always been prepared to flirt with fascism.

To underline the point, let me conclude with two quotes from Winston Churchill, a former Tory prime minister. Both are sufficiently well-known for it to be certain that Redwood will be aware of them. The first was addressed by Churchill to Mussolini:

If I had been an Italian, I am sure that I should have been wholeheartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism ... Externally, your movement has rendered service to the whole world.

The second - which dates from as late as 1939 - relates to Hitler’s rise to power:

I have always said that if Great Britain were defeated in war, I hoped we should find a Hitler to lead us back to our rightful position among nations.

I suppose, on Hayek’s distorted logic, that is enough to make Churchill some kind of ‘socialist’ too. I doubt that either Dale or Redwood would want to go quite that far.

But in short, just as the anti-Stalinist left has to face up to the reality that Stalinism originated within Marxism, the anti-fascist right needs to recognise that fascism is the bastard offspring of their tradition. Simple denial of reality does not obviate that requirement.

DAVID Cameron is not a Bolshevik; I feel I have to make this statement for the record, after reading Simon Heffer’s claim in the Daily Telegraph this morning that the Tory leader wants to ‘Sovietize capitalism out of existence’.

Given my political background, I probably do know rather more about this sort of thing than Mr Heffer. Until he can point to the exact paragraph of the Conservative Party manifesto advocating the transfer of power to the Tunbridge Wells council of workers’ and peasants’ deputies, readers are warned to suspect such contentions of hyberbole.

Yet oddly enough, it is only two months since our columnist pronounced that Labour’s move in buying bank shares marked ‘not quite the sovietisation of Britain’, but nevertheless ‘a pretty good start’.

Now - in a truly remarkable display of the Cunning of Reason - Cameron stands revealed by History as the Lenin de nos jours, the man with a (central) plan, alone capable of resolving the situation of dual power obtaining in Britain today decisively in favour of the proletariat.

Heffer’s disgust centres on the ‘moral capitalism’ speech our Old Etonian friend delivered at Davos recently, which he has down as ‘one of the most shallow speeches by a supposedly serious politician that I have ever read’.

That’s harsh; centrist boilerplate is much of muchness, no matter which politician delivers it, The speech in question – ‘greener, safer, fairer, blah, blah, blah’ - is no more egregious than other examples of the genre.

Yet Heffer avers - without real evidence, and via a detour into the theology of Ayn Rand - that its political content is some way to the left of Gordon Brown. It is described as ‘no better than socialism’, and condemned to culminate in ‘a socialist-style wealth-limiting, freedom-starved command economy’. Sorry, Simon, but what Cameron said was is nowhere near that promising as that.

The Conservative crypto-communist’s purported offence was to impugn the virtue of free markets. Heffer sees the very phrase ‘moral capitalism’ as a tautology:

Capitalism is deeply moral and hardly needs the adjective to qualify it. It is moral because it is about the exercise of free will between buyers and sellers: and few things can be more moral than allowing someone to be free. Capitalism is about the link between effort and reward. It is about the creation of wealth according to the quality of one's enterprise.

Except that none of this is true. Capitalism is in its very nature based on exploitation; the exploitation of labour power by capital, through the extraction of surplus value from the working class.

And spare us that tosh about effort, reward and enterprise; the bulk of wealth in capitalist society is inherited. The free enterprise revolution started by Thatcher and continued under Blair has seen a sharp decline in social mobility. Britain remains a class society. Ask any old Old Etonian.

And, lo, Mr Cameron complains about our capitalism having been "winner takes all", an assertion that is fundamentally untrue (for capitalism has enriched almost everyone in the free world to some degree) …

All that Heffer has to explain here is how come a majority of the population of an almost entirely-capitalist planet lives in poverty, while the economic downturn has meant government bail-outs for the bankers and the risk of redundancy and repossession for the rest of us.

…. but would not be immoral even if it were. After all, those who take the risks and have the superior judgment should have the rewards: anything else is communism.

If you are going to define ‘communism’ as anything other than dog eat dog, Mr Heffer, it is little wonder that the doctrine might be about to enjoy renewed appeal.

FEW revolutionary slogans are ever successfully transformed into singalong top twenty singles. But that’s the trick John Lennon pulled off with his 1971 hit ‘Power to the People’. Let’s face it, ‘Communism is Soviet Power Plus Electrification’ just doesn’t scan in quite the same way.

The title of Lennon’s ditty subsequently become the catchphrase of Wolfie Smith, leader of a small microsect in BBC comedy series that effectively satirised the far left, at a time when it did not send itself up quite as comprehensively as it manages today.

How and why the flame thence passed from Wolfie to David Cameron is beyond me. But when the leader of the Conservative Party starts promising to implement the principle demand of a seventies sitcom revolutionary, laughter is still the only tenable immediate reaction.

Cameron was obviously in full-on Blue La Pasionaria mode a few days ago. In a speech on the stump of Milton Keynes – a town not widely considered a hotbed of quasi-Marxist fervour – he committed the next Tory government to bring about ‘real people power’.

You already know this has to be nonsense. The Conservatives exist precisely to keep power in the hands of those to whom they genuinely feel it rightly belongs, the kind of people that euphemistically refer to themselves as ‘upper middle class’ and who are more accurately described as the ruling class.

It can only be to help perpetuate their rule that the party’s Old Etonian leader can issue surreal promises to give their power away:

“I believe there is only one way out of the national crisis that we face, we need a massive, sweeping, radical redistribution of power …

"We will begin a massive redistribution of power in our country, from the powerful to the powerless, from the political elite to the man and the woman in the street."

Please, this is just embarrassing. These days, not even the most leftwing Labour politician could deliver a speech like that with a straight face. So will Cameron be bringing forth proposals for workers’ control of the Britain’s top companies, then? Not likely.

Will consumers get to elect the management of the major utility players, say? Can’t see it happening, somehow. Will football fans be able to prevent their clubs being bought and sold by Russian oligarchs and shady Middle East oil men? Will army officers suddenly find themselves accountable to squaddies, or senior judges henceforth be subject to recall by popular demand?

No, the real centres of power in Britain will remain as unaccountable – and as tightly stitched up in the hands of the ruling class – as they always have been. I’m willing to put money on the proposition that there will not be one substantial measure of even marginal detriment to those who control our lives.

If you want to compare Cameron’s speech to 1971 chartbusters, try ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep’. Whatever makes him believe that the electorate is sufficiently gullible to fall for such appalling rot?

ELECTION Night Special 2010 – or just maybe Election Night Special 2009 – is already shaping up to be anything but fun for Labour Party supporters. On all the available evidence from the opinion polls and the contests last week, we can expect to see safe seat after safe seat turn from red to blue on the television screen, as the arm of the swingometer shifts ever further to the right.

Portillo moments in reverse will see sitting cabinet ministers and half-way decent backbenchers alike ejected by the electorate, in favour of a cohort of hardline Tories substantially to the right of the party’s cuddly-feely leadership. They will, I fear, set the tone of British politics throughout the 2010s.

True, David Cameron tries to present himself as a combination of fairly traditional wealthy Old Etonian posh boy and environmentally friendly Blair-style Pretty Straight Guy, and sometimes even styles himself a ‘progressive’.

But a prime minister’s style is dictated by more than personality, and the state of British capitalism will perhaps prove the most pressing objective constraint on his actions.

On economics he is unabashedly of free market persuasion, and thus entirely dumb enough to institute austerity policies in the middle of a recession, in the mistaken belief that this will provide the fastest route to the restoration of some quasi-mythical equilibrium. Cameron will cut public spending, again and again and again, to the detriment of those least able to influence the political process.

His sidekick George Osborne was only half joking when he quipped in the Financial Times yesterday: ‘After three months in power we will be the most unpopular government since the war.’

However, what really frightens me is the rumours circulating about the likely political composition of the 2010 intake of new Conservative MPs. Many of them are reportedly unapologetic Thatcher’s children, as is only to be expected of those who got involved in Conservative politics in the 1980s.

These people are of exactly the type that Tory grandees of the duck island owning and moat cleaning classes used to dismiss disparagingly as ‘garagistes’, the barb of this somewhat obscure jibe being that they made their money through car dealerships. In other words, they were more likely to be estate agents than estate owners.

Many of them are viscerally rightwing, on economic and social issues alike. But even if this was not their instinct in any case, they will be pressured in the direction of additional robustness by forces still further to the right. After all, they are competing for the same space in the political ecosystem as UKIP and the British National Party.

It will be countered that the BNP is at the moment performing best in traditionally Labour areas. However, historically speaking, the middle classes form the mass base of fascist parties; if the BNP take off beyond the limited range of places in which it has arrived as a local level force, this is the demographic in which it has to build itself.

Neither UKIP nor the BNP are likely to secure many parliamentary seats under first past the post, but will inevitably do so if Britain introduces proportional representation. That is not a good reason to oppose PR, which I personally favour on democratic grounds. But supporters should be aware what comes with the package.

One scenario for the 2010s is the advent of a ratchet mechanism, in which the fascist and reactionary right are able to exert ideological pressure on the neogaragiste right sitting on the Conservative backbenches, who cannot knowingly be undersold if they are to maintain credibility with their activists.

Cameron may well start out intending to run Britain in a manner befitting the loved-up raver he once was. Sadly, he may find out that his party has other ideas.

FORGET insubstantial third-raters such as Nick Griffiths, Nigel Farrage and the fruitcake fringe parties that they head; for my money, the intellectually heavyweight contender to become the next figurehead of Britain's serious right is Daniel Hannan.

The Tory MEP - unusually for a politician of any party these days – is both ideologically minded and extremely well-read. His speeches are as apt to quote Dr Seuss as they are Edmund Burke, and he can even deliver a few one-liners in the process.

I am not suggesting that Hannan’s views are in some way outside the Conservative Party mainstream; indeed, they are entirely within it. But by any yardstick he stands consistently towards the muscular right of that spectrum, in something approaching a 'UKIP with brains' mode.

For instance, he openly advocates British withdrawal from the European Union, in defiance of official policy. Such is the extent of his euroscepticism that he was expelled from the centre-right grouping in Strasbourg for his opposition to the Lisbon treaty.

For Hannan, Enoch Powell was ‘wrong on immigration’, but only in the sense that the civil unrest so famously predicted in 1968 did not materialise. Despite being an immigrant himself – he was born to a British family in Peru - Hannan has made it clear that he favours tight immigration controls. And when it comes to Europe, Enoch was right, he avers.

Meanwhile, Hannan is doing the best he can to float the ridiculous notion that the BNP is in some sense a ‘leftwing’ party, on the grounds that it favours nationalisation, higher taxes, and protectionism.

But given his private school and Oxford education, he will surely know that there is nothing distinctively leftist or rightist about any of those policies. Historically, the Tories have been the protectionist current in British politics, while Ted Heath took Rolls-Royce into state ownership. The upper rate of taxation was higher for most of the Thatcher years than it has been under New Labour.

Hannan is reportedly becoming a star turn with the Tory grass roots. Once Cameron is in Number Ten, these are the very people most likely to become disillusioned with any touchy-feely attempts to govern from the centre right. If the blowhards are looking for an advocate, it strikes me that their worldview has a very persuasive star in the making.

PHILLIP Blond has been hailed as David Cameron’s ‘new favourite intellectual’. I must admit it’s news to me that Cameron actually has favourite intellectuals; British politicians usually abjure that sort of thing as some unspeakable vice, generally associated with the French.

Nevertheless, the Lancaster University theologian has secured considerable publicity for his book Red Tory, in which he reportedly makes the case for twenty-first century Disraelism.

Oddly enough, Blond wasn't always a red rightist. I am told by a friend who was a contemporary of his at Hull University in the 1980s that in those days he was simply red, so to speak. Memories fade, of course, but she seems to recall that plain old Phil, as he was known, was even sympathetic to the views of anarchist publication Class War.

I intend to get round to reading Red Tory over the summer, and obviously would not presume to comment on his ideas in depth until I have done so. But we get a taster of what he is about in the Guardian this morning, in which Mr Blond argues that ‘the new Conservatism can create a capitalism that works for the poor’.

The headline proposition alone is enough to warn the reader to expect momentous silliness ahead. Capitalism is an economic system premised on the exploitation of the working class. No variety of capitalism ‘works’ for the poor, except perhaps in the sense of funding a welfare state that can ameliorate some of its worst effects. It works for the owners of the means of production, though. But let’s take a quick run through the stall Blond sets out.

Over the last 30 years the Anglo-Saxon world has adopted the most disingenuous of economic systems. Under the guise of capitalism for all, we have produced an extraordinary amount of capital but an ever diminishing number of capitalists. Rather than trickling downwards, wealth has leveraged upwards – denying increasing numbers of people the ability to truly own, trade and prosper.

In 1976, excluding property, the bottom half of the UK population owned 12% of the marketable wealth; by 2003 that had fallen to just 1%. Economists at Société Générale recently calculated that in the United States, the income of the highest paid fifth rose by 60% after 1970, while for all others it has fallen by 10%.

From the pen of a Tory – ‘red’, true blue or pink with purple spots - that is quite an indictment of the free market. It is, moreover, spot on. The thing is, Mr Blond seems genuinely surprised by all this, as if an ever growing disparity between rich and poor is an anomaly - or ‘externality’ in the jargon - rather than a sure sign that the system is working well in its own terms.

Through monopolisation of capital markets, deployment of unprecedented leverage capital has centralised around a model of debt-financed speculation that – without any due diligence – has been transferred wholesale to the taxpayer, more than doubling the entire national debt.

Yeah. Some German guy – who lived about the same time as Disraeli, as it happens - analysed all this in detail back in the nineteenth century. Noting a tendency towards the concentration and centralisation of capital is nothing new, and is nowadays an orthodox position, even for mainstream economists.

Note to Mr Blond; the capitalist state is not called the capitalist state for nothing. One of its functions is to defend capitalist property relations, if necessary through measures of state capitalism.

The average citizen now suffers twice over. Since ordinary incomes were too low to support desired standards of living, personal debt financed the gap. Desperate to secure an asset base against which debt could eventually be redeemed, those without capital herded en masse into debt-financed property bubbles that were always going to burst, leaving many with no equity and a hugely enhanced personal debt. That debt has returned by many multiples on the public balance sheet – leading to tax increases and service cuts. No wonder people, full of furious contempt, are willing to challenge the accepted economic orthodoxies.

No leftie could put it better. But why did this happen? Largely so that employers could increase the rate of exploitation by holding down wages, while simultaneously maintaining the consumer spending necessary to sell their products.

David Cameron recognised all of this …

A prime example of what Private Eye used to call Arslikhan, no?

… and spoke at Davos early this year of the need to recapitalise the poor and create a capitalism that works for all. The key political aim of this truly transformative conservatism must be the generation of an asset effect for the decapitalised bottom half of society.

Recapitalise? They never had any capital to begin with.

Assets must, however, come from somewhere …

You can see why he’s considered a top-notch intellectual, can’t you?

… and since redistribution and expenditure via the state has such a poor record in alleviating dependency …

Except when it comes to bankers, of course.

… a fresh approach is required. Welfare or public expenditure should move from a spending to an investment model. The aim must be to free the poor from welfare subsidy through the generation of asset independence.

Where to start? In Blond’s Disraeliworld, where everyone is an ‘asset independent capitalist’, there would be no workers. That’s why it can’t happen, Phil.

The following are some ideas as to how this might be achieved:

1 The poor become dragons …

Puke.

The overall level of the UK bank bailout depends on definition, but authorities agree that it represents some £1 trillion. At some point these assets will be broken up and sold back to the private sector. Even at a rough figure of 5% return …

There is no guarantee that the taxpayer is ever going to see that money again, let alone a 5% return. Even if the scenario does pan out, it is decades away.

… this will produce an enormous capital injection of £50 billion. The argument on the progressive right is that since the poor suffer the greatest marginal rates of taxation (the bottom fifth of households also pay a greater share of their income in overall taxation than any other group), this money should be used to repay debt and lower their tax burden.

The argument on the right is that 45% income tax is an abomination unto the Lord and that tax cuts should be directed to the rich, which will magically maximise overall tax take. Laffer Curve and all that.

But such repayment will generate no asset effect for those at the bottom. A far better idea would be to distribute a substantial proportion of the return to the poor via investment vouchers. These vouchers should only be activated in conjunction with others – creating an associative investment pool.

We’ve had a foretaste of how this might work in the shape of the giveaway privatisations of the 1980s. If the vouchers had any value, most people would cash in rapidly rather than transform overnight into a new race of Siraluns.

With appropriate advice …

Remember the pension mis-selling scandal?

… a whole new class of asset investors can be created at the bottom of society. Further, if they invest in ordinary businesses they will only get a standard return.

Everybody must get above-average returns. Not mathematically possible, I’m afraid.

If, however, they choose to invest in social enterprises, their investment will generate both an economic and a social profit. Investment in local shops, for example, will give both a monetary and social stake and return. So envisaged, the poor generate a stakeholder economy around a universalised dragons' den that provides seed capital for a new generation of businesses.

Shopkeeper capitalism vs Tescopoly. There can be only one winner.

Right. My lunch break is over. More later.

DAVID Cameron will win the next election, but the result will not be a Conservative government. That’s the proposition Simon Heffer advances in the Daily Telegraph this morning. And note how he says that like it’s a bad thing.

What he is actually trying to argue is that a Cameron administration would not be a Thatcherite administration. He’s probably right, but that’s a different matter altogether.

Heffer’s premise is analogous to those on the left who argue that what we have seen over the last 12 years has in some sense not been a Labour government. Of course it was; what else can you conceivably call a government entirely made up of Labour politicians?

What is really being maintained here is that Blair and Brown are not socialists and that they have carried out policies of which the Marxist-influenced left disapproves. By the same token, much of what Cameron does will surely seem irrelevant or just plain wrong to the Hayek and Rand-influenced right. Never mind, guys. You’ll learn to live with it, just like we had to.

Heffer’s mistake is grounded in his idealisation of Thatcherism default state Toryism, when actually it was very much an aberration. Chloe Smith Conservatism is simply a return to type.

Historically, the Conservative Party has been primarily a vehicle through which a layer of the ruling class ran the country on the basis a pragmatic platform made up as they went along. Ideology? Schmideology.

That strategy was not without success; after all, the Stupid Party governed Britain in the twentieth century for more years than the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ruled Russia.

Somewhere about three decades ago, that changed. Although the Heath administration half-heartedly flirted with Ideas-with-a-capital-I, it was only from 1979 that some aspects of the rightism then prevalent in the academy were elevated to the level of policy, in the form of a clearly identifiable Thatcher project.

The task of devising such the project was straightforward enough, because the needs of the ruling class were clear; it was imperative to deploy the free economy and the strong state against the organised working class. Today a different job is at hand.

Factor in also the impact of demographic change. Heffer and I are roughly the same age, and not sprightly young things anymore. We must both accept that in political terms, there are two generations below us, and they do not seem the least inclined to refight the battles of 30 years ago.

I don’t doubt that the reactionary, racist, homophobic, authoritarian, narrow-minded, anti-European, Gin-and-Jag Belt golf-club bigot tendency still has more clout within Tory ranks than the twentysomething comp girl wonkette set.

But Chloeified Conservatism is freshy, funky and female-friendly. It is built on the premise that there is such a thing as society, that the NHS is safe in its hands, and that WH Smith should go easy on placing those Terry’s Chocolate Oranges so close to the check-out. Hasn't Cameron himself has sworn to ‘stand up to big business’, in words that would be enough to ensure any New Labour minister instant dismissal?

Don’t get me wrong. However much the Tories try to present themselves as the human incarnation of the Care Bear Bunch, they remain as ever the political voice for the minority of wealthy people that control society and the state. It is utterly inconceivable that the Tories could reduce ties with the bourgeoisie to the same degree that New Labour has cut its links with organised workers.

But the ruling class of the 2010s will have different needs than the ruling class of the late 1970s. For a start, it doesn’t need to undermine a confident and assertive labour movement. Thatcher smashed effective trade unionism, and under New Labour, effective trade unionism has stayed smashed.

And almost everything that can be privatised, has been privatised. The game plan of liberalising the British economy, as commenced under Thatcherism, was largely completed by Blair and Brown. Ironically, it may now be that the time has come for a certain degree of re-regulation.

In short, the coming Cameron government will of course do lots of execrable and reactionary things that the left will have to oppose, and not the least of them will result from savage cuts in public spending. But let us not forget that a re-elected Brown administration would do many of the same things, anyway.

COMPREHENSIVE state subsidy for low pay bosses is about the least free market idea of which I can possibly conceive, and should surely be anathema to the likes of Simon Heffer. Yet that is just what the hard right Telegraph columnist advocates this morning in his endorsement of the Centre for Social Justice report on the benefit system.

Heffer is quite clear that the minimum wage – easily the most progressive single measure enacted by Labour over the last 12 years – has to go:

The market, and not the state, should dictate what someone is paid. A minimum wage is a feasible ideal in times of full employment: in times of unemployment it merely keeps more people on the dole than should be there.

The best that can be said about such a claim is that it is willfully simplistic. In some circumstances, at least, the minimum wage appears actually to increase net employment where there is one dominant employer in an area, and perhaps too where there are many small employers. This is what economists call the 'monopsony justification'; you can read the details here (pdf).

Heffer backs the consolidation of the existing 51 benefits into just two, to be known as Universal Work Credit, conditional on participation on welfare to work schemes, and Universal Life Credit. That might not be a bad thing in itself; there is a lot to be said for administrative simplicity.

But in conjunction with the abolition of the minimum wage, employers would then be allowed to offer as little as they liked – say, £2 per hour, or if that’s too much, 10p per hour. In the name of welfare to work, claimants could then be instructed to take such up ‘employment’, in what amounts to state direction of labour on a scale that would delight a 1930s Gosplan apparatchik. The taxpayer then bumps up the wedge into almost enough on which to subsist.

If Heffer is correct to maintain that the free market cannot deliver full employment at a living wage, than the logic of his argument leads in a socialist direction. What's so wrong with getting business to pay wages sufficiently high to make it worthwhile doing the job, preferably after negotiation with a trade union?

Heffer proceeds to resurrect the ‘Victorian distinction’ – his words – between the deserving and the undeserving poor. Let me put this to him; anyone does an hour’s graft deserves £5.73 for his or her pains. Anyone who genuinely believes they do not is advocating a return to Victorian-style poverty.

DAVID Cameron this morning asks us to believe that an entity he notably refers to as ‘the new Conservative Party’ is now ‘the party of jobs and opportunity’. Either the overnight transformation took several tonnes of fairy dust, or it is a hallucination caused by some other magical powdery substance reputedly once much favoured by opposition frontbenchers.

Nobody who is historically literate will forget that it was the Tories that ruled Britain through most of the 1930s and all of the 1980s, the only two decades in which the dole queues topped three million.

And didn’t Cameron once work as special adviser to Norman ‘Black Wednesday’ Lamont, the Conservative chancellor who famously argued that joblessness on a massive scale is ‘a price well worth paying’ to control inflation?

The truth is that the brand of free market economics to which all good Tories subscribe clearly maintains that involuntary unemployment can only arise in a limited range of special cases. Until Cameron explicitly disavows this doctrine, the suspicion has to be that he agrees with his former boss.

In this view of the world, the labour market would naturally achieve equilibrium, if it were not for such distortions as trade unions, welfare benefits and the minimum wage.

So it wasn’t just sheer class hatred that made Thatcher and Tebbit so hostile to the labour movement, although that will have played a part as well. Dogma was also a factor.

Sadly for the Conservative right, the minimum wage is now established, and is too popular to be abolished immediately, although some highly remunerated Tory journalists are openly calling for just that. Expect instead a freeze on annual increases, and maybe further restrictions on its applicability to young people.

What is already plain is that huge cuts in benefits are on their way, masterminded by former City banker Sir David Freud, who is tipped for a peerage and a cabinet post. Not too long ago, Freud used to work for New Labour; in 2007, he was commissioned to draw up a long-term review of the government’s ‘welfare to work’ efforts.

Famously, he boasted of spending just three weeks on the task, from start to finish, despite having no previous knowledge of social policy. Some of us would be hard pushed to put up a garden shed on that timescale; obviously this is a bloke who likes to do things thoroughly.

The crop of stories planted by the spindoctors this morning credit Freud with the suggestion that around 500,000 people currently on incapacity benefit will be switched to jobseekers’ allowance, a move that will lower their existing income of £89.90 a week to just £63.40.

This contradicts earlier statements. Freud is on record as suggesting that only 700,000 of Britain’s 2.7m IB claimants should be getting a weekly sum of money that doesn’t pick up a lunch tab for two in the City. I presume that the backpedalling is so much soft soap ahead of a general election.

The irony here is that the surge in IB claims came in the 1980s, when the Tories deliberately reclassified many long-term unemployed people as disabled, simply in order to massage down politically sensitive joblessness figures.

What neoclassical economics forget is the structural dimension. High densities of long-term unemployment are regionally concentrated, because the industries that once sustained entire communities no longer exist. Many towns across Britain still have not recovered from the disaster visited upon them in the Thatcher years.

The good jobs aren’t there any more; if claimants are forced into the labour market, it will be at the expense of existing badly paid workers, who will find their wages yet further undercut.
So don’t be fooled by the ‘jobs and opportunity’ rhetoric. The ‘new’ Conservative Party will prove every bit as disastrous for the poor as the old one. It’s in the Tories’ DNA.

COULD Polly Toynbee secretly be moonlighting as David Cameron’s speechwriter these days? Or maybe the Conservative Party leader had a quick butcher’s at the latest edition of Socialist Worker prior to mounting the podium in Manchester last week?

I only ask because, as a socialist, I hate having to agree with even one sentence any top Tory ever utters. It makes me feel ... dirty, and not in a good way. Trouble is, it was hard to argue against some of the soundbites on offer on Thursday.

Excuse me? Who made the poorest poorer? Who left youth unemployment higher? Who made inequality greater? No, not the wicked Tories ... you, Labour: you're the ones who did this to our society.

Well, up to a point. The Tories are no slouches themselves at making the poorest poorer and presiding over three million long dole queues. Anyone who was around the 1980s will recall that Thatcherism did not exactly work wonders for the UK Gini Coefficient. But yeah, Cameron has New Labour bang to rights. Cheeky little so and so.

In Gordon Brown’s Britain if you’re a single mother with two kids earning £150 a week the withdrawal of benefits and the additional taxes mean that for every extra pound you earn, you keep just four pence.

What kind of incentive is that? Thirty years ago this party won an election fighting against 98 per cent tax rates on the richest. Today I want us to show even more anger about 96 per cent tax rates on the poorest.

This phenomenon – the so-called ‘benefits trap’ – has been around for decades. It was just as much a feature of Blair’s Britain, Major’s Britain, Thatcher’s Britain and Callaghan’s Britain as it is of Britain under the current prime minister.

Yet Cameron fails to explain how he intends to do away with the benefit’s trap once we see the views from the top of the hill in Cameron’s Britain. The silence gives grounds for the suspicion that any concern for single mums on £150 a week is rhetorical alone.

Still, even lip service here is preferable to a call for them to be banged up in what have inevitably been dubbed ‘gulags for slags’, as Brown demanded should happen to 16 and 17 year old single mothers in his equivalent peroration.

It is not entirely ahistorical for Cameron to present the Tories as willing to enact measures that help those in poverty. You have to go some way back into the history books, but there are such precedents as the work of Tory Radical Richard Oastler, whose agitation led to the Ten Hour in 1847, or the many social reforms introduced by Disraeli in the 1870s.

Maybe the Red Tory clique will evolve into a latter day Young England, and push for mild improvements in the lot of ordinary people, so long as the super-rich are not in any way inconvenienced.

So bankers will continue to incentivise themselves with stratospheric bonuses, even as public services are squeezed until the pips squeak, while remuneration committees will still find excuses to authorise packages that allow British companies to recruit and retain the world class management talent that alone promotes wealth creation. Or something like that.

But that’s OK, because Tracy Towerblocks will get to keep 20p in every additional pound she makes. Can’t say fairer than that, can we, love?

EXTRAMARITAL legovers remain an activity of longstanding popularity, even if they do try to hush it up in places Norfolk. I can illustrate this by an anecdote from my own family history.

As far as I can work out from amateur genealogical research, the village of Hilgay – just four miles from Downham Market – is the ancestral home of Oslerdom. I’ve managed to get back six generations, and for two centuries at least, my ancestors happily farmed the local land and kept the village inn, pausing only to interbreed with the Porters and the Bells.

But in a spurt of initiative, my grandfather Willis Albert Marmaduke Osler decided to widen the gene pool, and how, apparently after picking up a taste for continental totty as a result of his service in world war one.

I never knew him personally, but as a slightly shocked old Norfolk auntie once confided in a conspiratorial whisper, ‘he loiked the ladies an’ that kinda loife.’

According to census records, Willis had four children by three wives, one of them German and one of them French. Then, in the 1980s, I was introduced to a middle-aged man I had never before heard of, and told that he was actually my half uncle, courtesy of a liaison between granddad and the barmaid at his pub. Yet such is the stigma of illegitimacy in that part of the world that, much to his personal pain, he was never acknowledged by the family. This story is sad but true.

Conservative Central Office knows full well that Norfolk has yet to come to terms with the permissive society. That much is evident from the fate of superstar blogger Iain Dale, who was Tory ppc in Norfolk North in 2005.

Theoretically, the ultramarginal seat should have been his for the taking; the Lib Dem majority was just 483. But instead, incumbent Norman Lamb increased his majority to 10,000-plus. The most obvious explanation for this is that Iain is, of course, gay.

It must surely have dawned on the Cameroons that efforts to strong-arm the local troops into the twenty-first century are doomed to fail. Activists of all parties should back the right of the local Conservative Association to endorse only the kind of candidate with which it feels comfortable.

So I hope that the splendidly-named Sir Jeremy Bagge and his mates in South West Norfolk – so condescendingly dubbed ‘the Turnip Taliban’ – resist pressure from the party machine and proceed with the deselection of Elizabeth Truss, after her failure to ‘fess up an extramarital affair with a Tory MP some years ago.

Her status as a Scarlet Woman is neither here nor there. When it comes to fidelity, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Or at least I have, anyway. A parliament free of adulterers would be scantily populated indeed.

But look at the scandalous way Labour selections have occurred since circa 1994. The wishes of constituency parties have routinely been brushed aside in safe seats such as St Helens South, Blaenau Gwent and Calder Valley to ensure that New Labourites prevail. Expect more of this nonsense in the next few months, with reports that Harriet Harman’s hubby Jack Dromey is being lined up for Leyton & Wanstead.

Ms Truss would surely make a model candidate in the many, many places where getting a bit on the side is not an issue, and I devoutly hope Iain will find somewhere a little bit more open-minded in time for the next general election. But I suspect Norfolk is not the ideal location for either of them.

But doesn’t democracy dictate that those prepared to keep the show running on the ground - year in, year out – should be free to choose who they want to put in all that unpaid work for? Victory to the Turnip Taliban against the forces of metrosexual imperialism.

EVER seen those fridge magnet poetry sets? I refer, of course, to the tasteful novelty items widely available in kitsch gift shops nationwide, where they typically sit alongside the double entendre coasters designed to appeal to camp sensibilities and endless racks of ‘world’s greatest dad’ mugs.

Well, I’ve just worked out who actually buys them. I defy you to look at David Cameron’s Conservative general election campaign launch speech yesterday and then tell me that his speechwriter does not own a SMEG adorned with hundreds of the damn things.

Oh, and for the benefit of working class readers with incorrigibly dirty minds, SMEG in this context refers to a range of posh retro style domestic appliances that are currently de rigueur in W11. OK?

Then again, maybe I am being unfair in singling out the Tory leader here. Political speeches in Britain have since the 1980s largely constituted content-free zones, and have instead taken on an alarming identikit quality that readily lends itself to parody.

Speak in short sentences. Often verbless ones. Substitute buzzwords for ideology, and then make sure they get at least two dozen mentions.

Thus it was that in the course of a short oration of little more than 1,600 words, Cameron managed to use the word ‘change’ 24 times. There were four references to getting the country ‘back on its feet’.

Most of the rest of it was the kind of twaddle that could have been delivered by any leader of any mainstream party anywhere in Europe. Let me pick a few phrases at random to illustrate the point.

Cameron stands for ‘the values of responsibility and aspiration’. He wants to ‘build an enterprise economy’ and to ‘create opportunity’ in a ‘fairer, safer, greener’ manner. This will enable him to ‘forge a new direction’ by the provision of ‘leadership that is modern, strong, decisive, united’, basing itself on its ‘track record of delivering change’, not to mention ‘confidence, optimism and hope’.

Well, that differentiates him, doesn’t it? Because we all know that Brown and Clegg advocate untrustworthiness, unfairness, pollution, pessimism, hopelessness, devil worship, mucking about with cigarette lighters on petrol station forecourts and the deliberate release of a synthetic ebola virus in Scotland.

In a final masterstroke, Cameron unveiled the poster campaign, which will be based on a large mugshot of his good self over the slogan ‘we can’t go on like this’, which will stare down on the punters from 1000 billboards across the nation. Many voters will be pig sick of those six words come next May.

Sure, the combined vote of clever clogs types who think about politics is nowhere near large enough to be decisive. I’m certainly not arguing that the Labour Party rejoinder will pack any more intellectual substance.

But I cannot be alone in finding the level of debate surrounding the formation of the next government thoroughly depressing. Some policies really don’t easily reduce to no brainer soundbites.

I’M NOT exactly certain when advocacy of workers’ self-management along the lines of 1950s Yugoslavia became official Conservative Party policy. But deliberate emulation of Josip Broz Tito is surely taking the notion of Red Toryism one step too far.

Little wonder, then, that yesterday’s commitment to John Lewis-style co-operatives and social enterprise across the public sector left Labour thoroughly flummoxed.

Shadow chancellor George Osborne bigged up the move as a “a transfer of power to working people” on a scale not seen since the introduction of the right to buy council houses during the hey-day of Thatcherism.

Consciously or otherwise, the very language smacks of the Labour’s 1973 programmatic commitment to “bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families”.

Only once you read the small print is it evident that we are not witnessing a desperate Tory ploy to cheat the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition out of the hardcore Trot vote.

In the current political context, the Conservatives’ sudden conversion to workers’ control has to be read as part of the continued drive on the part of all major parties to privatise public services.

After they are ostensibly mutualised, social enterprises will be subjected to competitive tendering, internal markets and divisive incentive structures. The economies of scale and low cost finance available to large public sector organisations will also be lost. As an added bonus to the right, a serious wedge will be driven into national pay bargaining and public sector trade unionism further weakened.

In other words, forget all Cameron’s talk about ‘Conservative means to progressive ends’. The big idea here is to open up Jobcentres, schools and NHS trust to marketisation. Those guys remain as high on Hayek as they ever were.

‘CONSERVATIVES champion gay equality,’ according to the title of a speech Tory frontbencher Nick Herbert will deliver in Washington today. If he was being entirely honest, he would add the words ‘but only after Labour actually delivered it and didn’t leave us any choice in the matter’.

Of course nobody can credibly argue that David Cameron and his Notting Hill Set coterie personally harbour the type of crude homophobia that was dominant during the hey-day of Thatcherism.

But it remains a fact that the Tories are the party of Section 28 and Labour are the party of equalised age of consent, civil partnership, gay adoption rights and a prohibition on anti-gay discrimination in the provision of goods and services. And don’t forget that it was Labour that decriminalised homosexual acts between consenting adults in private in the first place.

In short, every single advance for gay rights in this country has occurred under a Labour government. Labour has set the agenda for decade after decade, often in the face of concerted opposition from the Tory right.

Conservative motivation for catching up is rooted as much in opportunism as conviction. It is easy to ‘champion’ something now there is nothing of substance left to achieve.

There is also the question of whether the gin and Jag belt golf club bigot tendency has truly been converted. Consider this revealing comment from rightwing columnist Simon Heffer in the Daily Telegraph this morning:

We hear of constituency activists' anger that safe seats are given shortlists comprising ethnic minorities, women and homosexual men, as happened in a Surrey constituency last weekend.

What’s with the white het blokes only stricture, Simon? Don’t they have queers in the Home Counties or something? And last time I checked, women made up about half the population of Guildford and Leatherhead. They even have black people living there now, I gather.

Oh, and one last question for Mr Herbert. Given that Conservatives ‘champion’ gay equality, can we take it that your party will terminate its alliances with assorted east European homophobes in the European parliament? Sorry, speak up. Didn’t quite hear you.

WHAT sort of newspaper runs with headlines such as ‘We must arm ourselves for a class war’? I mean, not even publications of the kind that get flogged outside Dalston Kingsland shopping centre of a Saturday routinely urge the comrades to break out the Kalashnikovs. That sort of juvenile ultraleftism is just embarrassing.

If you were just about to say Socialist Worker in response to my opening question, you may be surprised to learn that the correct answer is the Daily Telegraph this morning. No kid.

In fairness to economics editor Edmund Conway, I suspect the subs were getting a little carried away. The piece at no point actively incites the bourgeoisie to stockpile automatic weaponry in anticipation of the need to gun down hordes of Jobseekers’ Allowance claimants on the rampage through the leafier parts of Richmond upon Thames.

But the article does offer an insight into what sections of the right are thinking right now. Maybe that headline was more of a Freudian slip than a genuine gaffe?

Conway buys into the double dip recession scenario. While the credit crunch and the banking collapse are more or less over, stage two will essentially be driven by a crisis of sovereign debt.

Whoever wins the next election, unprecedented spending cuts will be introduced, although the Tories have more relish for the task. Conway – who heard Tory economics spokesman George Osborne deliver the Mais lecture earlier this week – implicitly predicts that there will be resistance:

Osborne is terrified of imposing such deep and painful cuts. He privately despairs that he will end up as the most unpopular politician in modern history.

Probably not while Thatch is still alive. But I digress.

Which helps explain his plan, spelt out last night, to set up a three-man Office for Budget Responsibility to advise him on how far to cut spending. The hope is that the OBR will attract the opprobrium when state-sector workers are laid off or given pay cuts, when VAT is raised, when the retirement age is increased, and when public-sector pensions are finally tackled.

But the question that Osborne largely ducked was the issue of inequality. The gap between rich and poor is the widest since the 1930s, and is getting bigger, not smaller. After nervous acknowledgement of the current rioting in Greece, Conway reaches his conclusion:

Ed Balls's plan to pitch this election as a class war is, I'm afraid, on the button. Class, money and privilege will be unavoidable issues during the next parliamentary term. Rather than ignoring them, the Tories must take action. Better to start thinking about free-market reforms that share the wealth more equitably than to leave it to the Left to suggest that taxes on the wealthy are the only solution.

Mmmm. Not sure about Conway’s attempt to paint the Tories as the unwilling victims of some kind of recidivist New Labour reversion to neo-Marxist type. On, and the idea that the Tories have ever, at any point in their long existence, ignored class, money or privilege is risible.

Sure, the have rhetorically downplayed the defence of privilege when that has suited their purposes. But how many Old Etonians can you squeeze into one shadow cabinet before it becomes obvious which class dominates the Conservative front bench?

I’m also not quite sure what is meant by ‘free market reforms that share the wealth more equitably’. Off hand, I can think of few free market mechanisms that tend to redistribute towards the poor, and most have quite the reverse effect.

And of course, the left will be in opposition. It can suggest whatever tax hikes it likes; it won’t be able to implement them.

Yet it is noticeable that Conway’s concern is not to introduce egalitarian policies because they are desirable, or because they benefit the majority of the population. His chief interest is to shield the ultra-rich from unwanted attentions of the Inland Revenue.

Obviously, this column is Bleeding Heart Liberalism lite compared to the nasty Hayek porn purveyed by some of the Daily Telegraph’s other contributors, who would probably have few qualms about arming themselves for class war.

But the contradiction here is that no government – either Conservative or Labour – can mount the sort of full-frontal assault on state spending that all mainstream parties contemplate without making the current level of inequality look like the living embodiment of Acts 2:44. This is a circle that Osborne cannot possibly square.