Dave at large #1

Took the words out of my mouth

www.chickyog.net/2008/04/29/cameron-unwilling-to-keep-pmqs-vow/

“I will absolutely hold up my hand…this is a promise I couldn’t be bothered to deliver,” the Tory leader said."

I meant to say that bit under my breath...

A Red Light on Crime

Now listen to me boys and girls, I have had enough of all this talk about my dangerous cycling.

It is vitally important to the health of our democracy that a man can have a private life in the morning before he goes to work in Westminster. We shouldn't have to ask ourselves "shall I be leader of the Conservative Party this afternoon?" No indeed.

One-legged Lithuanian Lesbians

Of course it was not meant to come out quite like that.

My remark about one-legged lithuanian lesbians was not intended to convey and disrespect or hostility towards disabled people, lithuanians or lesbians in particular. No.

You see the modern Conservative party does not, like the Conservative party of old, represent only the interests of some able-bodied, british public school educated, heterosexual elite. We have realised that the electoral arithmetic means we must extend the boundaries of the recognised elite a little, and appear to extend it a lot.

And how do we tell these people that are only disabled, or only lithuanian, or only lesbian, that they might be considered for admission to this elite? By expressing how much better they are than anybody who has the misfortune of being all three!

I love it!

Hat tip: Cicero

You can't make it up

...apparently. Some common school is frightfully upset about this. But I will say this to them. It could have been your school. That sort of thing happens all the time among the unwashed masses, I happen to know, it says so in the Daily Mail.

And of course I know a thing or two about thuggery and vandalism myself. Perhaps this is the cause of the confusion. The boy in question was just angling for membership of the Bullingdon club. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha hoo hoo ho ho ha gasp pant.

Rehearsing the unrehearsed look

OK there has been a lot of confusion recently about my speech. When I said that I would be making it up as I go along, I was not referring to the speech itself, which was of course well prepared as usual, but to conservative policies in general.

By policies, I mean of course the positioning exercises and general mood music we use to test the water and refashion our image.

I haven’t got an autocue and I haven’t got a script, I’ve just got a few notes so it might be a bit messy; but it will be me.

I meant of course that I didn't have a script in front of me, not that the speech was unscripted. A clever bit of spin, don't you think? And it was me. I hired the speechwriter after all.

Here was another bit, did you notice? I bet you think I am proposing lower taxes for married couples with children, right? Wrong. What I am proposing "benefits only a quarter of married couples across the board and, of those, less than 40% actually have dependent children."

I am so clever it hurts, sometimes.

That conference speech in full... (again)

Two years ago I stood on this stage and gave a speech about why I wanted to lead the party. Now I want to lead the country.

[10 minutes standing ovation]

20 years ago I was inspired by a trip to Eastern Europe - the dull uniformity, the lack of freedom.

Every generation of Conservatives has to make again the arguments for freedom, free markets and limited government, because the previous generation of conservatives will always have forgotten them once in government.

Our party has campaigned on the NHS, with no sense of shame.

It is not good enough being a one nation party to open the door - we have to drag the ethnics kicking and screaming into the party. But I am proud to have a muslim woman homophobe in my shadow cabinet.

Change, real change, isn't just about the pence in your pocket. It is understanding how to repackage Conservatism - opposition to change - for the modern media. We are not going to lurch to the left or right, we are going to lurch firmly into the past.

This government is always reannouncing old policies. But you won't catch me having any policies. Brown wants to appeal to the 4% in swing seats. How awful. I'm really shocked at that sort of thing.

People want the politics of belief. And we want them to believe us. That's why we're on the same side.

I believe if you really talk about responsibility, common sense and MySpace, for long enough, people won't notice you have not actually said anything.

Please sign up to 'Am I the only person who doesn't like David Cameron' on Facebook.

[Listeners all miss the next 15 minutes of the speech while they go to facebook and invite all their friends to join the group.]

We will say to Vardy and McDonalds, come into the state sector and drive up standards in our schools. But why isn't this working? Because professional teachers are not deferring to my superior judgement on the use of synthetic phonics. Let's get politicians' micromanagement out of education and get teachers to start doing exactly what I say.

One of the aspirations people still have, and rightly so, is the aspiration to own their own home. And we are going to pretend that minor changes to stamp duty will make a noticeable difference.

Oh and hasn't Brown made a mess of the country's pensions? It must be the biggest pensions disaster since the Tory mis-selling scandal of the 80s.

While our economy is getting richer, in many ways we are not going to get far being too optimistic - no we need to hype up the breakdown of society in order to frighten people into voting for us.

There are a million young people with nothing better to do than join groups on Facebook. Why has Labour done nothing about Facebook? Every day you hear some numpty promoting some Facebook group or other.

What are we going to do? Let's look at what works. In states like Wisconsin in America, where single parents are denied benefits unless they travel hours a day for minimum wage work, and hardly ever see their children. This is how we put families first.

The best welfare system of all? The family. If you think about it, it gives us a chance to wash our hands of the problem completely. And by recognising marriage in the tax system, we can further complicate tax credits, and punish widows and the sinful with evangelical zeal.

Anyway, we've got to scrap those top-down targets and trust the professionals in education the NHS.

The other feature of this Brave New World, is the sense of insecurity we feel, the end of the New World Order. When it comes to Iraq, we all want people to forget our culpability in supporting that war. I've been to Afghanistan for photo-ops with the troops. In this world of danger, the old politics is failing, as Mr Blair said when assaulting civil liberties.

I'm very proud to have Milosovic appeaser Pauline Neville Chamberlain in my shadow cabinet.

But we face new threats like climate change. We need to say that we are the party of sensible green leadership. Then people won't notice that we are doing next to nothing.

On crime, we will not be led by the need for headlines on the six o'clock news. This party is not a PR exercise, and I am going to pretend not to be a PR man any more.

So there you have it. I have told you want I believe today. It's about me. Am I up to it? Yes I am. I had inherited wealth, a privileged upbringing and went to a fantastic public school. But am I smug? I will let you be the judge.

After 10 years of Labour, I am as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more. Everybody go to your window and shout it. So, Mr Brown, call that election. We will fight, but Britain will win.

Tories to carry on Blair reforms

As reported by the BBC, we intend to continue Blair's policy of reforming the public services, extending target culture and box-ticking to the furthest reaches of public services.

We will

• Issue all junior policy advisers with envelopes and fag packets on which to devise new targets for public services they don't understand
• Bring in new targets for the police, alongside quality payments for officers who advise at least 90% of crime victims to change their locks, lock their cars, and keep their valuables in a safe place.
• Raise standards of street sweeping with key Performance Indicators whereby street sweepers store before and after sample scrapings from each street in question so that cleaning performance can be analysed. All samples will be sent to a new Street Operations Directorate in Slough.
• Ensure satisfaction from teachers, with 5 page progress forms on each child to be sent home every week.
• Ensure that recyclable materials collected are in fact recycled with a system of asset tracking whereby each item of paper, glass, garden waste, etc, is barcoded by the householder.
• Introduce a Politeness Hotline where public servants who fail to smile and say "Have a nice day" can be reported, for re-education.
• And finally we will tackle the tendency of state grammar schools to turn out so many bloody oiks. Can't stand them. Every state grammar school child will be assessed for oikishness on a 100 point scale, with the worst offending schools top of the list for conversion to McVardy creationism academies.
  

I love it!