The Blackpool Tories
STELZER, IRWIN M.
The Blackpool Tories by Irwin M. Stelzer Ice Cold Slush," read a large sign on a food stand directly outside Blackpool's Wintergardens auditorium, where Britain's Conservative party met for its...
...If running against your own record can work-and the British prime minister has little choice but to hope with the American president that it can-the Tories will rule Britain into the next century...
...foreign investment is pouring into Britain from Asia, America, and Germany...
...He will increase funding for programs that permit poor people to have the choice of sending their children to private schools, a program that Labour would kill if elected...
...More important, the prime minister finally put forward a coherent policy for the future, one that put "clear blue water" between his Tories and the right-ward-lurching Labour party...
...And then the prime minister rallied his troops...
...Major wants educational reform, but his education secretary's main proposals are to post grammar lessons on buses and trains and to spend more money on a failed system...
...The electorate, titillated but also repelled, sees these sexual escapades as a further sign of the arrogant disregard of public sensibilities that afflicts a party too long in power...
...Labour would surrender increasing bits of Britain's sovereignty to a federal Europe and what one speaker called "jumped-up Euro-judges...
...Perhaps...
...Labour would sign on to the European Union's "social chapter," imposing on British industry the high social costs that have made France and Germany uncompetitive in world markets...
...He will proceed with the railroad privatization program that Labour is pledged to resist...
...He will resist Labour's call for a job-destroying minimum wage...
...Crime rates are down...
...In short: private enterprise, lower taxes, smaller government, more choice...
...In his opening day speech, Dr...
...Most with whom I spoke are preparing for opposition and deciding which candidate for party leader to back when Major is replaced after the election...
...senatorial counterparts, a record number of Tory MPs have decided not to seek reelection...
...Always a crowd pleaser...
...The Blackpool Tories by Irwin M. Stelzer Ice Cold Slush," read a large sign on a food stand directly outside Blackpool's Wintergardens auditorium, where Britain's Conservative party met for its seventeenth annual conference since coming to power...
...To make matters worse, the chancellor's speech was delivered on the eve of Lady Thatcher's seventieth birthday...
...Harold Macmillan, Conservative prime minister from 1957 to 1963, once said that the only thing he feared was "events...
...Whatever their accommodation, the 5,000-6,000 delegates shared one thing: a sense of impending doom...
...On the eve of the conference, the prime minister's carefully laid plan to display the Tories' new-found unity came to nought, as Alan Howarth, an MP and former minister, defected to Labour, allegedly in protest against the Tories' inhumane swing to the right...
...The Tories are 20 to 25 points down in the polls- despite the fact that under Margaret Thatcher they transformed Britain from the sick man of Europe into a country so competitive that it now attracts more foreign direct investment than any in Europe...
...He attacked the notion that his government is a failure...
...Such was the debris that had accumulated by the time John Major took the platform for his conference-closing speech...
...A Major in Newt's clothing...
...Not all Tory wounds have been self-inflicted...
...Others are abandoning constituencies in which close-fought contests are the norm and are seeking to relocate to safer areas-"the chicken run," Labour calls it...
...The excessively lax regulatory regime established after privatization has permitted executives of private water companies to vote themselves huge bonuses during a severe drought that has forced their companies to ration water in many parts of Britain...
...But one who will first have to persuade the left wing of his party to go along...
...the Tories won't...
...the Tories won't...
...But Tory hole-diggers are endlessly inventive...
...The home secretary's hard-line proposal for longer sentences inevitably lost some of its force when it turned out that he can't even keep those crooks he has in jail from voting themselves early release...
...Then, on the evening preceding the home secretary's speech calling for longer sentences for criminals, including life sentences for those who commit two violent or sexual crimes, the press reported two spectacular jailbreaks...
...One very young speaker at the conference, supposedly on the podium to give a two-minute set speech extolling the wonders of Tory rule, suddenly turned to the ministers arrayed above him on a platform Politburo-style and urged them not to undermine the party further, shouting: "Keep your buckles buckled and your flies zipped until after the general election...
...So far, not much progress on that score...
...This dealt Clarke a double blow: Tax cuts become riskier when inflation is rising, and the September inflation rate is used to compute the increase in social benefits...
...the economy is growing more rapidly than any in Europe...
...Labour would eventually surrender control over foreign policy and the deployment of British forces to the European Union...
...If not, all those ministerial cars and perks will be snatched away, turned over to a Labour party eager to take Britain in a new, more European, more "communitarian" direction...
...But the Tories seem to take their cue from New York's Con Edison, which once proudly claimed responsibility for every traffic-disrupting excavation with the slogan "Dig we must...
...The party's top pols claim the former...
...Then came the chancellor's speech...
...No Churchill or Thatcher, Major nevertheless succeeded in setting out a program that might just enable him to pull a Truman...
...The smell of defeat was everywhere...
...And dig the Conservatives have, providing Labour with enough ammunition for their charge of "greed and sleaze" to mow down one Tory candidate after another...
...It matters little that Howarth is a disappointed job-seeker, or that his shift was reported to be part of a reappraisal of several aspects of his life including his marriage of some 30 years...
...Major wants lower taxes and smaller government, but his chancellor's projections show government's share of GDP rising from 36 percent to 40 percent...
...Or, as one of his close friends wryly noted, that Howarth had pulled off a great political coup: He switched to Labour immediately after its party conference, and from the Tories on the eve of theirs, thereby avoiding both of these often-tedious affairs...
...The former prime minister, still the idol of the party's rank and file, decided to visit the conference, to a standing ovation from the delegates, who remembered her tax cuts and election victories...
...Once the preferred vacation spot of Britain's successful Victorian manufacturers and its coal miners, Blackpool boasts both glorious old hotels and thousands of inexpensive bed-and-breakfasts...
...If Major can control his lieutenants, he then faces an even higher hurdle: He must persuade the voters that this time he really means it...
...Brian Mawhinney, MP and chairman of the Conservative party, decided to attack wasteful spending by "loony left" Labour councils...
...The gloom that attended the opening of the meeting was palpable...
...the Tories won't...
...Tory after Tory has been caught in some compromising position, generally after a rousing speech in favor of family values...
...This will be no easy chore after raising taxes, backing away from a promise to privatize the post office, failing to push educational reform, and presiding over a government that for too long crippled British exports by adhering to the ludicrous fixed-exchange rate policy of the Franco-German monetary unionists...
...Irwin M. Stelzer is director of regulatory policy at the American Enterprise Institute...
...its grass-roots workers, paying their own way, find the B&Bs more consistent with their means...
...Most important, Major rediscovered Thatcherism...
...Surveying the party's wreckage brought to mind an old political saw: When in a hole, stop digging...
...the Tories will oppose "the siren voices of separatism" that threaten Scotland's prosperity and eventually its union with England, Wales, and Northern Ireland...
...Hours before Kenneth Clarke addressed the delegates, who were clamoring for a tax cut, the government announced that the inflation rate had hit 3.9 percent in September, its highest rate in over three years and well above the chancellor's 2.5 percent target...
...This, despite the atypically warm and sunny weather that greeted the Tory conferees as they gathered in this resort town on the Irish Sea...
...the unemployment rate is falling...
...Nothing better described the speeches inside the hall...
...John Major now knows that SuperMac, as Macmillan was called, had it right...
...inflation is more or less under control...
...But prevent them from watering their gardens, and expect retribution at the polls...
...So he will be out of pocket some ?700 million, about one-third of the money that he might otherwise have used to cut taxes...
...And he will shrink the share of national income now claimed by the government, permitting him to cut income taxes and eliminate capital gains and inheritance taxes...
...The group derives its name from the building in which it is housed, not the children's street game...
...Major, Clarke, and the other relative pygmies on the platform rose, forced the bloodless smiles of which practiced politicians are capable, and joined the applause for the leader they had discarded but never really replaced...
...But the unfortunate Mawhinney chose as his target the Camden Hopscotch Asian Women's Group, only to learn the next day that it is a quite respectable charity, under the sponsorship of the Princess Royal, dedicated to teaching Bangladeshi women basic language skills...
...Labour would set up a separate parliament in Scotland, with the power to levy taxes...
...The British will tolerate a great deal without a quiver of their stiff upper lips...
...The voters are attracted by Labour's new moderate, almost-social-democratic instead of socialist image and by Tony Blair, Labour's reassuringly non-revolutionary leader, a church-going barrister educated at Oxford and private schools...
...To greed add sleaze...
...Like their U.S...
Vol. 1 • October 1995 • No. 7
