The Daily Mail

[Alexander 'Alec' Dundas]

[Alexander 'Alec' Dundas]

PORTILLO MOMENT #2 !

Columnist Peter Hitchens has defeated Michael Portillo to be the Conservative candidate at the Kensington & Chelsea By-Election.

William Hague: 'Hitchens a worthy successor to Alan Clark'

September 1999

Michael Portillo has spectacularly failed in his bid to return to Parliament after being beaten by the right-wing columnist and author Peter Hitchens for the Tory nomination at the Kensington & Chelsea By-Election to succeed maverick MP Alan Clark who died earlier this year of brain cancer.

Peter Hitchens revealed he would stand for the nomination in opposition to Mr Portillo's "bland new creed".

The Express columnist and Talk Radio presenter hit out at the media for presuming the Kensington by-election would be a shoe-in for the former defence secretary. "The bleating flock of political journalists who now respond so readily to the whistles and barks of Downing Street's shepherds and sheepdogs, have already proclaimed Mr Portillo the anointed successor to Alan Clark," he writes in this week's Spectator magazine. "They have gone further. They have inaugurated a new Tory leadership contest, undeclared but merciless, designed to preoccupy and divide the opposition in the 18 months before the most important general election in modern British history."

But the main focus of Mr Hitchens' wrath was his opponent for the Kensington and Chelsea seat.

"There is something worrying, blurred, pliable and, let's be honest, meaningless about Mr Portillo's present position: "He is conservative enough on economic issues, and also on the pound. Yet, if the Tories lose the next election, the pound may well be scrapped soon afterwards in a rigged referendum, so making his opinions on the subject worthless, and preventing any future Tory government from having an economic or fiscal policy at all."

Hitchens told this paper that he is reclaiming the word reactionary. He says he is proud to be a reactionary. He is for marriage, ruling elites, discipline, private schools, God, the countryside, Britain for the British. He is against single mothers, drugs, homosexuality, television, Europe, talking to terrorists, nuclear disarmament.

With Mr Hitchens almost certainly set to enter Parliament as a Conservative MP, this moment marks a crucial watershed in the solidification of the party's shift to the right.

William Hague was careful not to appear to meddle in the contest for the nomination, but sources close to him are said to be breathing a 'deep sigh of relief'. With Michael Portillo humiliated and seemingly out of Parliament now until the next election at the earliest, Mr Hague's fears of Portillo swooping back in to a top Shadow Cabinet job and outshining the Leader of the Opposition can now be laid to rest.

[Corgi]

How to save Britain? - an Editorial by Cosette Beauvais-Becker MP

Election results of 2001 have certainly been a disappointing one, we have faced one of the most corrupt governments in the history of Britain, so much so that the government’s own backbenchers are admitting openly that they are corrupt and out of control. Blair got elected under a notion to clean up the government sleaze and made it much worse, this is not surprising as political establishment in this country be it Labour or else is too much focused on Westminster intrigue, promoting cronies and bootlickers and not enough on actual merit or problems ordinary Brits face in this country. I am not going to be coy about this, past Conservative governments did a lot of good for this country, we made it prosperous, provided economic edge after Labour’s Winter of Discontent and Maggie has defended our country against Eurocrats for the most part but our governments has also fostered a culture of greed, disavowed notion of community, and built in a culture of individualism. We have become too obsessed with the individual and forget about the country, duty, and community. Our best traditions, our best self do not exist as individuals, our country is not a collection of individuals living their lives as single units of human. Country, duty and community has always been strongly rooted in this country and we have tried to abandon it for short term gains. We have abdicated the notion of community, morals, and togetherness to socialists, liberals and bunch of wackos.

We have seen reflections of this in 1997 and we are still suffering for it. John Major has capitulated to Eurocrats, be it European Exchange Mechanism or be it Maastricht, we have lost touch with ordinary people, we have battled out the good fight to save Britain from hordes of people who arrive to this country without any control or checks but we have not been providing any solutions problems already existing in this country. We have abandoned morals and sleaze, such a dirty word, has become associated with Conservative Party, this may have been the most heartbreaking thing for me. We have abdicated our moral duties and become too invested in the individual. We have to rebuild the movement for duty, morality and community. We can not allow ideals of the individual to corrupt our country and our youth. We have to fight for it and it is under the biggest assault it can ever face right now. Labour and Liberals have repealed Section 28 in Scotland and want to do that in the rest of the country. Labour and Liberals want to open up our country to hordes of people coming from anywhere without any sort of check, without any sort of assurance that values of this horde would fit our country, our communities or without any sort of assurance on to ensure that our capacity can take it. We have already so many problems of our own and we do not need to add more to it

The real problem we are facing right now in this country is overregulation, overpopulation and strain in our public services. Let’s start with overregulation, we, as a country do not overregulate, our past Conservative governments ensured that and even Blair government so far had not have the chance to add much more onto it, although they clearly want to but if we, as a country, do not overregulate, how come overregulation can become an issue, the answer is simple, the damned European Community, Union or whatever they choose to call themselves this week. Europe is publishing so many ridiculous regulations and adding to it, to this day I still recall a particularly ridiculous one, that is actually reported by one of our own in the Conservative Party, Boris Johnson, I still remember the EU plan for regulating the shape of bananas, well clearly the bananas who are in actual need of get a gripe certainly not the actual ones. We have to stand up to Europe to actually deregulate and simplify the rules and if not withdraw from it. So far, we have been only talking about how to slow down Europe rolling out new regulations, instead of actually how to get them to reverse the damage they have caused, William Hague, himself has a bit of a hit and miss record on this, yes he has stood up strongly against the EU in Britain and fought well to stop Labour shoving Euro down our throats but in Brussels, we still sit together with the Eurocrats, sure we have a different name, European Democrats, irony of the name has not escaped me but ultimately we are sitting together with the European People’s Party, a party of Europhiles, advocates for a federal United Europe and multiculturalism with a flavour of an indistinct assimilated single European culture under the blue flag with the yellow stars. They want a European constitution, European army and eventually a federal united Europe which Britain must not be a part of.


Strain in our public services suffer in this country has been long going and this is not a surprise, we have tried the classical Tory approach to make them more efficient, which has worked up to a point but it has not addressed the real issue nor has Labour’s cash flush solved the problem. Because the real problem our public services face, our communities experience has not been just because of inefficient bureaucracy or lack of funding, if we take a scientific approach to it we can clearly see it. We have tried both and neither has worked properly, we need to identify the source of this ill and respond to it accordingly. Which brings us to the third problem; Overpopulation, our country is full and frankly we can not take it anymore, in fact we haven’t been able to take it anymore for quite a while. Housing stock is fastly melting down and it certainly will not get any better soon, the NHS is overcrowded more than ever, class sizes are soaring, our welfare programs have more funding than ever but it is clearly not reaching to people who actually need it and getting squandered by others. Our roads are congested, our trains, buses are overcrowded and do not function properly and we need to think about why. The answer is simple, our services and our population do not fit. Our capacity has been reached and passed over. We have to provide a radical solution for it, the first answer comes to mind is let’s provide more money to it, Labour has been trying it for 4 years now and not much has changed frankly and they say we need even more funding which I believe won’t do much at all. We need to take a look at the other side of the equation in my humble opinion, population side of things. For decades, this country took people all around the world, no matter their background, ability to fit Britain, level of English or criminal past. I know this all too well because I have been locking criminals for a living just till 4 years ago. Crime is skyrocketing, our streets are not safe and people are scared and the reason for this is very simple, many people are facing the brunt of our overcrowdedness, not just people who have been here all along but also people who have arrived here. They come here with hopes of a better future and many can not find it because frankly our country has a capacity to provide a better future and they have been lied to by cowards and made believe that if they come here, work under horrible conditions with so little pay, they can eventually make it but they couldn’t and this is creating tensions. I believe we have to solve these problems immediately. We need to help our people and we have to help these people who have been lied to, because right now the current situation is clearly not working and we can not take it anymore. That is why I believe we need a voluntary repatriation scheme for anyone who wants to take it with a generous one time funding attached to it, a resettlement fee and an understanding that these people have been victimised by our own corrupt politicians and greedy people for profit without a care for what happens to our communities and for these people themselves as well.

Right now, our country is facing a lot of problems but we have yet to face a fighter who will fight for Britain and who will actually make people believe in the good fight, the honourable fight. I believe that William Hague is an honourable man and a fellow Yorkshireman, he gave it a good go but he clearly has failed and we need a bolder, stronger alternative. As a former criminal prosecutor, I have had my fair share of battles with murderers, rapists and other assortments of worst in our society. I am bold and strong enough to face these people in their faces and jail them. I can handle media scrutiny, I have done it as the lead prosecutor of one of this country’s most publicised murder trial. After decades of experience as a prosecutor, I can handle a bunch of New Labour cronies and Oxbridge educated wimps. That is why, in the next leadership election, which I believe shall come very soon, I will be standing for the Leader of the Conservative Party.

[Blakesley]

Thanks to cost-cutting measures, private prisons aren’t measuring up

By Andy Edwards, Home Secretary

When the government started to turn to private businesses to run and build prisons to address overcrowding concerns, there was plenty of reason to cheer: the argument was that the private businesses can do the job better than HM’s Prisons and cheaper too. All the better for the ratepayer.

The experience, though, has shown us the results aren’t worth the savings to the ratepayer. In these private prisons, there are fewer staff, with less experience, and being paid far less. Prison staff have higher levels of stress and there’s less confidence that private prison managers will make the right decisions for safety- and all the confidence they’ll make the wrong decisions to make some money.

It wouldn’t be as large a concern if these prisons were small local affairs, maybe holding those who need a night to sleep something off. But of 12 privately-run prisons, 7 of them are Category B prisons, which hold those which have been deemed as among the most dangerous. These are prisoners serving long sentences and whose crimes include violent acts, including sexual assault and rape… or those who might have escaped from prison before.

The Home Office released a report in 1997 that looked at the operation of the UK’s first private prison, HMP Wolds. The study looked at the prison after five years of operation- and just as other private prisons were being planned. The first thing they found was the extreme cost-cutting measures. 95% of the staff that had been hired to work at HMP Wolds when it opened had absolutely no experience in working in a prison environment or providing security, and they were hired at rates far below that you would find in public prisons.

At first, the staff were nice to the new prisoners, to the point where a majority of prisoners at HMP Wolds said they had a better time than any of the state-run prisons and thought more prisons should be privatised. I’ll let you decide if that’s a positive result or not.

For those who are tasked with keeping prisoners from escaping, things were less rosy. Nine in ten staffers at HMP Wolds reported at least some measure of work-induced stress or anxiety. Only 5% of staffers- just 5 in 100!- said that morale among the staff was positive.

I don’t want to speak ill of the staff who work in our prisons; they have a hard job keeping order. Having guards in prisons is what keeps those who shouldn’t be in our communities behind walls and bars and fences.

But, in a Category B prison- with those who may have been violent and prone to reoffending given our criminal justice system- we cannot afford to have staff that don’t feel confident in our management. We cannot afford to have 90% of the staff suffering from work-related anxiety or stress, because if there is violence or an uprising, we’re at risk of losing total control over a prison population.

And it’s an accident waiting to happen. That study that looked at HMP Wolds, the first private prison? There were almost four times as many violent attacks among prisoners as there were at a public prison. Those violent attacks could just as easily be against overworked, underpaid staff… and then some time later in our communities as well.

As Home Secretary, I have many responsibilities. Chief among them is ensuring that I do everything in my power to keep Britain and its communities safe, whether it be from crime or acts of terrorism at home and abroad. It’s a responsibility that I take seriously.

So when I see reports that violent criminals are in a position where they can become more violent in our prisons, when I see that the staff of those prisons are more overworked and stressed than they should be, I take that seriously.

This is not something where I can just order standards to be put in place; the whole rationale behind private prisons is that they save money by cutting corners on labour costs. There isn’t the money in private prisons to meet the kind of standards and requirements that we place on public prisons.

The companies that run private prisons are governed by the profit motive, as they should be. That’s why they work on cutting costs. But there’s also the concern about reoffending. We know that there are a significant number of prisoners that, when released, go on to offend again, and we’re taking a serious view on how to address that. For a private company, though, reoffending means more revenue, another bed that is filled in a private prison. It turns prisons from a place where justice is served and where debts to the public are paid to a training facility for more violence, for more crime in our communities, in order to turn a better profit.

That’s not to say we haven’t learned from private prison companies when it comes to efficient management. Indeed, in recent years, we’ve seen that when we do put prison management out to competitive bidding that it’s Her Majesty’s Prison Service- the same public servants who valiantly work to keep our communities safe from those who are in prison- putting forward the best possible bids. And as Home Secretary I intend to take what has worked and ensure that it continues to do so.

But no one wants to wake up and see a headline where we lose control of a prison because we’ve tried to be spendthrift when it comes to guards and officers to save pennies. No one wants to know that they might be near a prison where overworked, underpaid, stressed staff are doing their best to hold back violence that might overwhelm them. No one wants to see reoffending rates stay high just because it’s a valuable source of revenue to a handful of companies.

That’s why this Government has taken action to pull back private prisons, and to put their operation back under the transparent and accountable Prison Service. We answer to the ratepayer, but most importantly we make sure that staff are given the tools they need to maintain order. That might be more expensive when it comes to an annual budget… but no cost is too great when it means we’re keeping those who would threaten our communities locked up and locked away.

[Marty]

THINK OF THE CHILDREN

The loony left is at it again - as if it's not enough to attempt to undermine our sovereignty by continued flirtation with taking the Queen off the currency, they have now chosen a different target: Britain's moral fibre. They insist that Section 28, the long-standing enactment protecting our children's innocence against the overly-sexual content, should go because of their obsession with the rights of homosexuals. We have no problem with homosexuals - but we have a problem with politically-correct left-wing politicos prioritizing their lifestyle over a healthy curriculum for our children.

As if that weren't enough, there were rumours awash in Westminster recently that would be our children's worst nightmare: the staunch defense of Section 28 by the Conservative Party abandoned in favour of a politically-correct choice for a free vote. If the last bastion of decency and common sense fails, we might as well start dressing up our boys in pink and our girls in blue next in pursuit of our Labour overlords' vaunted sense of "equality".

We won't take this - and luckily, we are not alone. A usually reliable source has called the whip on Section 28 a "test of loyalty for the Tory party (...) to our members and volunteers." The source didn't beat around the bush, predicting revolt should the party abandon its commitment to the innocence of our children. "If leadership deviates from it one bit, there will be hell to pay."

Amidst this pressure to stick to the party line, a spokesperson for the Leader of the Opposition has confirmed that he'll be meeting with his Shadow Cabinet when he arrives back in London this evening to discuss the Government's proposal. He confirmed that he has serious concerns about the legislation's impact on the rights of British parents to determine the material their children are exposed to in schools.

Let us hope he keeps thinking of the children.

[Blakesley]

THE TORY TAX AXE!


Mr Mountstuart, in blue, prepares to take an axe to some trees...and some taxes...while hill walking

A leaked draft of the Conservative’s economic proposals should leave many excited: we’d all benefit from the TORY TAX AXE that Nicholas Mountstuart plans to wield as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

In particular, Mr Mountstuart is promising to roll back three key changes made by Gordon Brown: the pensions tax grab, the abolition of the Married Couple’s Allowance, and restricting mortgage relief. These will be combined with a 3p reduction in the fuel duty – providing real help for rural Britain and everyone with a car. Together, these changes could amount to well over £8 BILLION in tax relief that Britain desperately NEEDS.

However, the Tory Tax Axe doesn’t just focus on bespoke benefits: it will slash income tax for every person in this country. Mr Mountstuart is set to axe the 10p starting rate of income tax and make significant changes to tax thresholds and “significantly reducing” the basic income tax (20p) rate to ensure that everyone can take home a little more money at the end of a long work week. These reforms to income tax will be matched with planned cuts to the capital gains tax and corporation tax that Mr Mountstuart previously previewed in a lesser paper.

The Tory economic plans also hint at radical shifts in the provision of public services. It’s said that, as they outline their economic proposals, they will cut straight to the heart of public services and providing real reform and restructuring, not just spending more money. The proposal is one to “park [their] tanks on Labour’s lawn” as it relates to health, education, crime, and welfare. We’re keen to see big ideas from the Tories that shake up services and reinforce Mrs T’s legacy regarding the power of markets and boundaries of the state in service delivery.

It looks like our big hopes for Mr Mountstuart’s takeover of Tory economic policy are paying off (or will pay off when we get the Tory government that this nation needs). With these plans, we can all be relieved that William Croft saw fit to keep Dylan Macmillan far away from Tory economic policy – or else these proposals may have been delivered in euros.

Keep it up, Nicky! We have high hopes for you.

[Clarice Ashbridge]

A matter of life and death: we must tighten the law to protect our children.

An editorial by Clarice Ashbridge, Scottish Conservative MP for Eastwood and Shadow Home Secretary.

When I was around eleven or twelve years old, my sister Katherine went missing from the farm where we lived. My brother, mother, grandfather and I began the search, desperately looking everywhere for her. Eventually, we found her, cold and shaken, by the side of the road just half a mile from home. It could only have been a few hours in total but for my mother, it felt a lifetime. Watching the month-long search for Sarah Payne in July last year, I couldn’t help but thinking of those terrifying hours again, and of the young children in my family. Despite the dedication of the dozens of police officers who ran the search and the tens of thousands, the ultimate, nightmarish outcome was devastating for her family, and one that struck

Protecting the vulnerable, those who cannot protect themselves, must be the first and foremost goal for any government in this country. That starts with protecting with our children. In the past few decades, successive governments have taken action to protect our children, from the establishment of our current system of child protection in 1989, to the Sex Offenders Act 1997 which established the sex offender’s register, covering the whole United Kingdom. But not only can we go further to protect our children, in the face of ever increasing news stories about vile crimes against children, we have an urgent and pressing moral duty to do so.

Sara and Michael Payne last year, whilst still mourning the loss of their daughter, bravely and powerfully begun the “Sarah’s Law” campaign, which argues that parents or guardians of children should have a legal right to obtain information on those they suspect of being child sex offenders if they live in the same community or somehow have access to the concerned person in question’s children. I fully support this campaign, and commend the Payne’s on their bravery and courage in leading this campaign front and centre, despite the living hell they must still be experiencing.

My commitment to them, and to you, is simple: if I become Home Secretary, the first priority I will have will be urgently strengthening child protection laws, starting on my first day in office.

I know that some people, although strongly supportive. Scenes of vigilante violence like those in Paulsgrove last year, sparked by people irresponsibly stoking the flames of rightful anger, cannot be allowed to happen again. Not only are they illegal acts of violence that can result in innocent people being caught in the crossfire, they also drive the risk of driving paedophiles even further underground, evading police and endangering our children even more. That is why any decision that we make must be measured, and based on evidence. Whilst this is of vital importance: it is even more important that we get it right.

On my first day in office, I will order an urgent review by an expert panel, to review the proposal of Sarah’s Law and other policy proposals in the area of child protection. These experts will have one year to examine these proposals and make policy suggestions of their own. We’ll look at countries like the USA, where Megan’s Law allows states to publicly release the names, likeness and address of sex offenders, as well as what their offences against children are. And, once that process is over, we will immediately put these proposals into law.

But the election is likely to be four years or more away. Without exaggeration, this is a matter of life or death: and we cannot wait for the Conservatives to come to power. I will be putting forward a motion in Parliament in a few days from now, calling for the government to adopt our proposals. I am hopeful that this will gain support from my colleagues from all parties across both sides of the chamber, and will lead to constructive debate. If it passes, the government will have a clear instruction from the House to order this review and do the right thing.

One child lost is one too many, and nothing we do now will ever fully heal the damage that the Paynes’, or any of the countless families who have lost a child to a violent sex offender, have gone through. But what we can do now is firmly say “no more.” We need not accept that these offences are unavoidable: we must take action and we will take action. The death of Sarah Payne was an unquestionably tragedy, one that should have never been allowed to occur in this country. It is incumbent upon all of us in Parliament, no matter our political affiliation, to ensure that Sarah, and all the others who have lost their lives, did not die in vain. Her family, and indeed the whole of our country, deserves nothing less than robust action and reform of our laws to ensure something like this never happens again. Empowering parents and communities with potentially life saving information is a powerful start, and marks a clear move in the right direction.