The dance of politics often looks silly, ungainly and downright improper. Compared with the antics in parliament this year, the Tory conference is mild stuff, but still …<\/p>\n
Yesterday, I was told that the minimum wage would remain alive and well under the Tories. Today, I learn that the Tories will make 3 years in jail mean 2 years in jail instead of, as it previously had, 18 months in jail.<\/p>\n
I’d rather 3 years meant 2 years than 18 months. As a major reform of bluLabour into a true Tory party, this strikes me as short-weight, but half-a-loaf is better than no bread. It does seem to offer scope for being outbid by the Brexit party in the law and order area with those likely to vote for either, but at least it’s a step in the right direction.<\/p>\n
The kindest guess I can make at why tendresse is shown to the minimum wage is inspired by this paragraph in a Dominic Cumming’s Spectator article<\/a>:<\/p>\n This was brought home to me very starkly one day. I was conducting focus groups of Conservative voters. I talked with them about immigration for 20 minutes (all focus groups now start with immigration and tend to revert to it within two minutes unless you stop them). We then moved onto the economy. After two minutes of listening I was puzzled and said \u2013 who did you vote for? Labour they all said. An admin error by the company meant that I had been talking to core Labour voters, not core Tory voters. On the subject of immigration, these working class \/ lower middle class people were practically indistinguishable from all the Tories and UKIP people I had been talking to.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What was it, I wonder, that caused Dominic to wonder who they voted for when these core Labour voters, who could so easily have been core Tory voters while the subject was the PC speech police or immigration or Brexit (or law and order), began talking about the economy? Could it have been the minimum wage? I fear it was.<\/p>\n Less than a year ago, I posted my astonishment<\/a> that May’s Tory party seemed more attached to the deep state and the SW1 faction than to professing whatever it took to win the next election. I suppose it’s a step in the right direction if the Tories have now reverted to type \ud83d\ude42 – but I see scope for further realignment yet. The internal and external purge of the Tory party is not over, I hope – thought it may for now be running in channels constrained by Dominic’s insight above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The dance of politics often looks silly, ungainly and downright improper. Compared with the antics in parliament this year, the Tory conference is mild stuff, but still … Yesterday, I was told that the minimum wage would remain alive and well under the Tories. Today, I learn that the Tories will make 3 years in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,25,28],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatrealignment.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatrealignment.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatrealignment.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatrealignment.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatrealignment.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=514"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/greatrealignment.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":542,"href":"https:\/\/greatrealignment.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514\/revisions\/542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatrealignment.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatrealignment.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatrealignment.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}