Monday, October 02, 2006
Listening to "Dave" yesterday I couldn't help thinking he hit the nail squarely on the head in a couple of key areas:
1. If we are to restore the concept of "society" we need to focus on restoring discipline in the classroom (in other words handing power back to the teachers and away from unruly pupils who have more rights than those who teach them) and to curb the excesses of the entertainment industry who fool our children into believeing that mysogeny, violence, and dissorder are the way forward to earning "respect";
2. We need to hand control for managing problems over to those closest to delivery and away from centralised planners, quango-ists, and the clip-board monitors of state who's sole purpose in life is to set targets and monitor them;
3. To restore civic decision making to holders of civic office so that local issues are tackled head on by those with the local roots and knowledge.
I want to stay away from arguments on taxation for now because there are 9 years os systemic incompetance that needs to be turned around. Only once we have restored structure to Governance and order to chaos can we look at public expenditure and how to reduce it. David cameron's speech yesterday highlighted just this systematic, endemic, structural issue of waste, incompetence, and failure:
"Think of any issue - not just crime - and then think of Labour's response. This Government's way of doing things - the old way of doing things - is so familiar, and so depressing.
Ministers hold a summit.
They announce an eye-catching initiative.
A five-year plan.
Gordon Brown generously finds the money for it.
The money gets a headline, but no-one knows what to do with it.
So they create a unit in the Cabinet Office.
A task force is set up.
Regional co-ordinators are appointed.
Gordon Brown sets them targets - after all, it is his money.
Pilot schemes are launched.
The pilot schemes are rolled out across the country.
They are evaluated.
Then revised, re-organised and re-launched.
And then finally, once the reality dawns that the only people to benefit are the lawyers, accountants and consultants of Labour's quango army...
...with a pathetic whimper - but no hint of an apology - the whole thing is just abandoned.
We've seen too much of this in the past nine years.
Headline after headline but absolutely no follow-through. It is a story of ignorance, incompetence, arrogance. A story of wasted billions - and disappointed millions. Somewhere out there, there is a place where Blair and Brown will never go. It's dark. It's depressing. It's haunted by the failures of nine years of centralisation, gimmick and spin.
It is the graveyard of initiatives, where you'll find the e-University that died a death,the drugs czar that came and went...
...the Individual Learning Accounts that collapsed in fraud and waste, the tax credits that were paid and reclaimed...
...the Connexions service that flopped, the Strategic Health Authorities that were dropped...
...the marching of yobs to the hole in the wall; the night courts that never happened at all.
And still they keep coming, those hubristic monuments to big government, the living dead that walk the well-trodden path from Downing Street and the Treasury to New Labour's graveyard of initiatives.
The NHS computer: delayed, disorganised, a £20 billion shambles.
Forced police mergers: the direct opposite of the community policing we need.
And then the perfect example.
ID cards.
When a half-way competent government would be protecting our security by controlling our borders these Labour ministers are pressing ahead with their vast white elephant, their plastic poll tax, twenty Millennium Domes rolled into one giant catastrophe in the making."
At the local level again, I think he was right. We need to improve our planning laws to allow local government to ensure that our estates are not best suited to muggers, thieves, and burglars by ensuring that urban design is thought out as well as laid out. Infrastructure must come before expansion. There's little point expanding areas like Milton Keynes without the infrastructure to supoprt it. We need to invest in urban regeneration that also enforces stricter standards to ensure that our housing of the future is energy efficient to reduce the impact on the "carbon footprint". But it goes much further, our local services, our local plan, must be taylored to our needs by local politicians free from central dictat. David Cameron was right when he said that:
"And just as people will no longer accept second best in public services, we know that in their communities they are fed up with squalor and poverty and crim and they look to their leaders to sort things out.
Labour's response has been a massive expansion of central government into
local communities. The centralised Neighbourhood Renewal Unit, the insensitive Pathfinder programme, prescriptive top-down schemes for regeneration. You can see why Labour have done it. But the unintended consequence is to stifle the very spirit of community self improvementthat they are responding to.
Our response, based on our philosophy of social responsibility, is to trust local leaders, not undermine them. So we will hand power and control to local councils and local people who have
the solutions to poverty, to crime, to urban decay in their hands. We trust in your knowledge and commitment. So in a Conservative Britain, civic responsibility will provide the answer to
improving the quality of life in the communities left behind."
Yes, yes, and yes again!
1. If we are to restore the concept of "society" we need to focus on restoring discipline in the classroom (in other words handing power back to the teachers and away from unruly pupils who have more rights than those who teach them) and to curb the excesses of the entertainment industry who fool our children into believeing that mysogeny, violence, and dissorder are the way forward to earning "respect";
2. We need to hand control for managing problems over to those closest to delivery and away from centralised planners, quango-ists, and the clip-board monitors of state who's sole purpose in life is to set targets and monitor them;
3. To restore civic decision making to holders of civic office so that local issues are tackled head on by those with the local roots and knowledge.
I want to stay away from arguments on taxation for now because there are 9 years os systemic incompetance that needs to be turned around. Only once we have restored structure to Governance and order to chaos can we look at public expenditure and how to reduce it. David cameron's speech yesterday highlighted just this systematic, endemic, structural issue of waste, incompetence, and failure:
"Think of any issue - not just crime - and then think of Labour's response. This Government's way of doing things - the old way of doing things - is so familiar, and so depressing.
Ministers hold a summit.
They announce an eye-catching initiative.
A five-year plan.
Gordon Brown generously finds the money for it.
The money gets a headline, but no-one knows what to do with it.
So they create a unit in the Cabinet Office.
A task force is set up.
Regional co-ordinators are appointed.
Gordon Brown sets them targets - after all, it is his money.
Pilot schemes are launched.
The pilot schemes are rolled out across the country.
They are evaluated.
Then revised, re-organised and re-launched.
And then finally, once the reality dawns that the only people to benefit are the lawyers, accountants and consultants of Labour's quango army...
...with a pathetic whimper - but no hint of an apology - the whole thing is just abandoned.
We've seen too much of this in the past nine years.
Headline after headline but absolutely no follow-through. It is a story of ignorance, incompetence, arrogance. A story of wasted billions - and disappointed millions. Somewhere out there, there is a place where Blair and Brown will never go. It's dark. It's depressing. It's haunted by the failures of nine years of centralisation, gimmick and spin.
It is the graveyard of initiatives, where you'll find the e-University that died a death,the drugs czar that came and went...
...the Individual Learning Accounts that collapsed in fraud and waste, the tax credits that were paid and reclaimed...
...the Connexions service that flopped, the Strategic Health Authorities that were dropped...
...the marching of yobs to the hole in the wall; the night courts that never happened at all.
And still they keep coming, those hubristic monuments to big government, the living dead that walk the well-trodden path from Downing Street and the Treasury to New Labour's graveyard of initiatives.
The NHS computer: delayed, disorganised, a £20 billion shambles.
Forced police mergers: the direct opposite of the community policing we need.
And then the perfect example.
ID cards.
When a half-way competent government would be protecting our security by controlling our borders these Labour ministers are pressing ahead with their vast white elephant, their plastic poll tax, twenty Millennium Domes rolled into one giant catastrophe in the making."
At the local level again, I think he was right. We need to improve our planning laws to allow local government to ensure that our estates are not best suited to muggers, thieves, and burglars by ensuring that urban design is thought out as well as laid out. Infrastructure must come before expansion. There's little point expanding areas like Milton Keynes without the infrastructure to supoprt it. We need to invest in urban regeneration that also enforces stricter standards to ensure that our housing of the future is energy efficient to reduce the impact on the "carbon footprint". But it goes much further, our local services, our local plan, must be taylored to our needs by local politicians free from central dictat. David Cameron was right when he said that:
"And just as people will no longer accept second best in public services, we know that in their communities they are fed up with squalor and poverty and crim and they look to their leaders to sort things out.
Labour's response has been a massive expansion of central government into
local communities. The centralised Neighbourhood Renewal Unit, the insensitive Pathfinder programme, prescriptive top-down schemes for regeneration. You can see why Labour have done it. But the unintended consequence is to stifle the very spirit of community self improvementthat they are responding to.
Our response, based on our philosophy of social responsibility, is to trust local leaders, not undermine them. So we will hand power and control to local councils and local people who have
the solutions to poverty, to crime, to urban decay in their hands. We trust in your knowledge and commitment. So in a Conservative Britain, civic responsibility will provide the answer to
improving the quality of life in the communities left behind."
Yes, yes, and yes again!
# posted by Sherington Tory @ 10:28 AM 
