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Re-branding the Tories
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
Tim thought that the revived party should be "libertarian, hedonistic and individualistic".
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/conservatives/story/0,9061,944827,00.html
Is it a mission impossible?
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/conservatives/story/0,9061,944827,00.html
Is it a mission impossible?
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Comments
The Conservatives always claim they are the 'party of freedom' yet (certainly in a social sense) their governments have not increased liberty in Britain.
What the Tories need to do in simply stick by their principles.
To expand, The Guardian's panel of experts suggested the following policies to make the Tories electable:
1 Cut income tax
2 Tax consumption and environmental damage
3 Introduce education vouchers
4 Fund the NHS through health insurance schemes.
5 Cut bureaucracy (perhaps listing the 52 most unwanted bureaucrats in the form of a pack of cards, Pentagon-style.)
Other policies would include all-women shortlists, scrapping the licence fee, establishing a wholly elected second chamber and the introduction of proportional representation for local councils.
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/conservatives/story/0,9061,944827,00.html
Numbers 3 and 4 will never be accepted by the British public - schools vouchers would just mean the same education for the vast majority of people, a minority would just use their schools voucher to reduce the cost of private education. How many private schools would seriously charge at the level of the voucher without some kind of additional top-up? Number 4 will never be accepted by the public, if Thatcher could never break the NHS even in her hey day (no matter how much she tried) she failed and I can't see Duncan-Smith succeeding where she failed. All women shortlists are sexist in my opinion. We need the licence fee to maintain a decent BBC if it was abolished the quality of BBC programming would plummet, also there would be less advertising revenue to go around the 5 major channels causing cutbacks not only on the BBC but also on ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5...
...although the "My dog died under a Labour government" was funny!
Read it this morning @ college! Funny as fuck!
Now with a weak leader and no new ideas to challenge the government they cannot be taken seriously and are in the same situation as Labour under Maggie.
Until they have a new leader and re-branding there isn't much hope.
Personally I think the only one that can do that is Oliver Letwin.
New Labour
Lib Dems
Greens
Taxes are already too high. Good move.
How is consumption defined?
Another good move.
The NHS needs more private investment.
Makes sense. Positive discrimination is unethical.
The BBC could easily survive as a private organisation. Get rid of this tax.
No. The House of Commons should retain its legitimacy.
No need for it.
So you keep saying, but you still haven't justified it...
It's not that high, really.
The bottom line is simple. Unless we significantly cut car use the whole country will in a permanent gridlock within 10 years. Billions of Pounds are already lost each year in lost working hours and productivity due to the traffic jams we get invariably twice a day in most places. By 2015 it will be meltdown unless we get more people off their cars. You can only do that by dramatically improving our cash-starved public transport and discouraging car use.
Indirect taxes are used to try and the 'correct' the negative externalities produced by the overconsumption of de-merit goods.
Advantages and disadvantages to the government in using taxes to improve the quality of the environment
One of the main problems with applying taxes to improve the quality of the environment is that almost all of the major polluters tend to be demerit goods and, demerit goods with inelastic PED values at that, take transport and petrol as an example, often cited as one of, if not the main contributor to greenhouse gases. Yet, seemingly no matter how much the government puts up the level of taxes the consumer still continues to demand a similar or even an increasing amount of the good.
It is argued that the most effective way to protect the environment is to tax the polluter. Indirect taxation is the most commonly used method of taxation used to try and ‘fix’ the negative externalities produced by the consumption of these goods. When using indirect taxes the producer/consumer is charged the full social cost (factoring in external costs such as cleaning polluted rivers etc) and demand will respond accordingly this will lead to an increase prices, decrease in consumption and hence reduce the effects of negative externalities such as damage to the environment. However this causes problems for industry, for example the high rate of taxation on alcohol sold in the UK, as opposed to continental Europe, has badly affected our drinks industry. A huge trade in importing alcohol has grown up, resulting in many jobs being lost in the UK.
Whilst I agree that there is a need for taxation to try and correct the over consumption of demerit goods and the negative externalities produced by this, there is clearly a conflict between the environment and business competitiveness with the desire to control pollution conflicting with the need for domestic producers to remain competitive in international markets.
There is a wider social issue at large; will people continue to ignore the damage they are doing to the environment in return for extra profits? If money makes the world go round then money is destroying the world.
However as the use of taxation is not very popular with the general public it is unpopular and therefore the government can sometimes not be willing to tax businesses even when perhaps it is needed
Yes. Because it is difficult to quantify environmental damage, let alone go about preventing or fixing it, it is very easy to ignore environmental damage. Couple this with the lack of clearly defined property rights over the environment in general and it becomes very, very easy to ignore said damage.