Bill's Comment Page

Conservative ‘success’ in Thursday’s elections has probably consigned them to defeat at the next General Election

Shadow front bencher Crispin Blunt MP, who announced his resignation from the Shadow Cabinet just as the polls were closing on Thursday, stating that the party would never be re-elected under Iain Duncan Smith, has said he will continue to press for a change of leadership.

It is probable now that there will be no real challenge to Duncan Smith’s leadership of the Conservative Party in advance of the next General Election, which does not have to be held until May 2006. Which probably means, in my view, that any chance that the Party might win the next election has been dashed – of course, with some of the policies that the Conservative Party currently espouses, I am not in any way sorry about that. The real tragedy, though, is that we will probably have a third round of ‘New Labour’ – and in the past couple of years it has become quite clear that this Labour government is no different from previous ones in its inability to manage the economy when things get rough. The cushion provided by the last Conservative Chancellor (Ken Clarke), which allowed Gordon Brown to seem to succeed for a few years, has unfortunately been squandered by pouring additional public money into the non-productive state sector, without even the virtue of having carried out ANY sensible reform of the socialist leviathan that is the NHS. Same goes for many other sectors of the state-run economy.

And the increasing ‘nannyism’ of the state welfare system means that a growing proportion of the population receives state handouts of one kind or another. Being a state administered ‘socialist’ system, though, its administration has been shambolic and the slogan for family credit [“it’s got your name on it”], for example, shows just how grubby is the whole system.

Despite the attempts by supporters of Duncan Smith to belittle Crispin Blunt, he seems like a pretty sensible and straight-forward individual to me, and more importantly to the members of his Reigate constituency association who last evening re-affirmed their full support by re-adopting him as their candidate for the next election – and they know he is correct, too, about the Party’s prospects at the next election with Duncan Smith as Leader.