Many of those public figures who you interviewed for last week’s In Focus special on the Conservative conference were right to be sceptical about David Cameron’s claims to be a centrist one-nation Conservative. (“Did David Cameron’s conference speech manage to capture the centre ground?”.)
First, since becoming prime minister in May 2010, Cameron has presided (or is currently presiding) over pay freezes for millions of workers; welfare cuts for the unemployed, disabled and now low-paid workers; the expansion of food banks; the continued payment of obscene salaries and bonuses in Britain’s boardrooms and banks (and thus a widening gulf between the top 1% and the rest); an increase in zero-hours contracts and chronic job insecurity; repeated denigration of the public sector; a tripling of student fees (with further increases in the pipeline); a generation of young people who can no longer afford to become homeowners; further attacks on trade unions and the BBC; the continued take-over of British industries and public services by foreign firms.
If this is “one-nation” Conservatism, then former Conservative leaders of this ilk, like the decent and humane Harold Macmillan, must be turning in their graves.
Second, many, if not, most Conservative MPs today are still slavishly wedded to Thatcherism. They are convinced that the solutions to any problems are yet more privatisation, more individualism, more cut-throat competition, more welfare cuts, even larger salaries and tax cuts for those at the top, even less employment protection or workers’ rights for ordinary people, and the nation’s increasing subservience to big business and corporate interests. Cameron should be judged by his actual policies, not his warm words, and also by the company he keeps.
Pete Dorey
Bath
Your leading article on the many faces of David Cameron could have added “mendacity” (“Cameron’s vision poses a challenge to Labour”, Comment.) If a lie is repeated often enough it becomes believed and constantly blaming Labour for the world banking crisis, precipitated by American sub-prime corruption in connivance with banks given free rein to act like casinos, eventually frightened the horses. Contrary to inheriting economic collapse from Labour in 2010, growth rate was 1.9% and not exceeded until 2014, even after bailing out the banks.
Cameron’s conference speech sounded like the messiah returning to build the promised land where the meek shall inherit the Earth. The hubris of “we are all in this together”and “compassionate Conservatism” simply adds to the mendacity when the wealth of the top 1% is doubling. Apart from excluding the low paid from owning a home, feeding a housing bubble with vast national debt while our own medium and small businesses are starved of liquidity is the economics of the madhouse.
Bill Newham
Manchester
Yet again in the second term of a Tory government, teacher recruitment is in dire straits (“School heads trawl the world for recruits as UK teachers quit in record numbers”). If the government really believes that Labour is scaremongering, why is it that many schools have advertised teaching posts and received no applications at all? And respected head teachers have been warning for months about the possibility of having to double classes in some specialist subjects?
In addition to the issue of attracting sufficient recruits is the number of unqualified and underqualified people standing in for members of the teaching staff who are unavailable through illness, on courses, on trips, attending interviews or meetings, etc. Some estimates indicate that, nationally, thousands of lessons are covered in this way every day. More worryingly, as things stand, this situation would still exist if every teacher recruitment place and every teaching post was filled tomorrow.
Jim Reddy
Retired teacher
South Manchester
