After the dissection of the Tory manifesto by Sir Humphrey Appleby (courtesy of BBC Newsnight, now it is the LibDems turn.

See it here.

And this is how the civil service would have dealt with the Sky News feed …..

BBC’s Newsnight, demonstrating that their editors can still take what Sir Humphrey himself might have called “a brave – if not career-limiting – decision”, have produced (in the style of  “Yes Minister“) a brilliant dissection of the Tory manifesto.

See it here.

In fact, senior mandarins have already put the finishing touches on their memos for incoming Ministers.  As one proudly told me a few days ago: 

“New Ministers in my Department are going to be faced with three really urgent and unbelievably difficult decisions as soon as they arrive and they’ll have to deal with those before we can even start to consider their manifesto commitments.”

This is a story of two Old Etonians: one is Mayor of London and was the year above the other at Eton; the other is Leader of the Conservative Party, wants to be Prime Minister, and is nervously watching his back because the first Old Etonian makes no secret of being after his job.

This might be amusing to watch, if the consequences were not to serious.

But now the rivalry is jeopardising London’s future (and as London is the engine of the UK economy is in consequence undermining the national interest).

We have already learned about how luke-warm the response has been to the Mayor of London’s repeated pleas about the depth of the Conservative commitment to Crossrail, the vital London rail link which is the minimum necessary to keep London moving during the next decade.  A recent campaigning event degenerated into farce as Mayor Boris Johnson tried to get Conservative Leader to give an unequivocal commitment to the Crossrail scheme.  David Cameron kept avoiding the question (although this is a fairly common response from him to almost every issue that is raised with him).

Now, however, the Tory’s Shadow London Minister, Justine Greening, has let the cat out of the bag.  In an interview on LBC this morning, she did give a straight answer to the question and it was not good news.

Here is the transcript:

> Thursday, April 15th 2010 09.25
>
> Speakers        Nick Ferrari
>                 Justine Greening
>
>
>
> NF:     Let’s go the Conservatives first.  Your stance on Crossrail?
> Justine Greening.
>
> JG:     We’ve always been very supportive of Crossrail.   We recognise how
> important it is for London as well but what we can’t do before the
> election is finished is write a budget when we’re not in government.  And
> so we, we can, we’ve said that we know it’s important, we know that the
> tube infrastructure and investing in, that’s important, but we can’t do a
> line by line budget because we are in such a parlous state with public
> finances.
>
> NF:     So Crossrail will continue but you don’t know how?
>
> JG:     What, all I….
>
> NF:     So it won’t continue?
>
> JG:     We, we can’t, we can’t give a line by line budget on projects
> across government, including Crossrail.  Everything’s up for review but we
> think it’s important.
>
> NF:     I’m sure this is my stupidity.  Will it continue or won’t it
> continue?
>
> JG:     I can’t give a guarantee that it will continue.
>
> NF:     So it might not, it can go the other way?  The Conservatives could
> scrap Crossrail?
>
> JG:     It’s possible but at the end of the day we’ve always said that we
> think it’s important project and, and actually the reason this is
> important is we, we want to be responsible so we can’t pretend that we can
> write an entire budget outside of government. We’ve said we’ll do one
> within 50 days of getting into government if we get elected and we will
> then provide some clarity and certainty.
>

So now we know.

The future of London is not a priority for the Conservatives.

They are even prepared to jeopardise the national economy to perpetuate a playground squabble between two Old Etonians who seem never to have resolved their playground issues  from 20 years ago.

I know that I am biased but I have to admit to being highly impressed by Labour’s new Party Political Broadcast, “The Road Ahead”.

Watch it here.

And then send it to all your friends.

I am sometimes a bit unfair to the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson.  Although I like him personally and enjoy his broadcasting style, I sometimes find it difficult when watching him to forget his Young Conservative past.

However, in his blog today he manages to sum up the nonsense that masquerades as Tory economic policy so succinctly that I will even forgive his history.  He explains that the Tory offer is to “say they can head off one tax rise (national insurance) whilst cutting other taxes (inheritance tax, council tax and some, as yet unspecified, marriage tax breaks) whilst also cutting the deficit faster than Labour and protecting spending on health and international development.”  And if it is like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland explaining that sometimes she believed “six impossible things before breakfast”, that is because it is.

There are a number of parallels between this General Election and the one in 1992.  However, in that Election the Party with the wackiest ideas was the Natural Law Party which fielded 310 candidates and garnered 0.19% of the vote on a platform that promoted “yogic flying” to solve the country’s problems.  Listening to Nick Robinson’s summary of the six impossible things before breakfast that make up the Conservative Party’s economic policy it is clear that the Tories are the natural successors of the Natural Law Party and that George Osborne is promoting the equivalent of yogic flying without, of course, any use of hallucinogenic substances.

David Cameron and the Conservative Party are still fudging their economic policies and being deliberately misleading over their so-called public sector efficiency savings.  Peter Gershon, who is advising the Tories on their policies, has told the Financial Times that 40,000 jobs would be cut over the next year by a public sector recruitment freeze.  (This is the same Peter Gershon whose firm will benefit from NHS cutbacks.)  This was reiterated by Cameron in the BBC Radio 4′s Today Programme this morning.

But a recruitment freeze is NOT an efficiency saving.  Quite the opposite: it makes services less efficient.  Job vacancies occur all the time – staff move on or retire – and most of them are doing work on which others depend.  Some will be front-line and some will be providing support services that are vital for front-line workers.  When a post is frozen, either the work of that post is not done or others have to cover that role to the detriment of their own work.  You end up with a Swiss cheese effect and services are delivered less efficiently or there are random gaps in the service.

So just imagine what it would mean to a local community where the local health visitor has retired and the neighbourhood police officer has been promoted, the dustbins cannot be emptied because the person who maintains the refuse collection vehicles has gone on long-term sick and cannot be replaced ……

Welcome to a Tory Britain.

First, Grayling now Lansley.

How many Shadow Cabinet members will the Cameron machine have to brief against this week?

The weekend gave us Chris Grayling demonstrating that it’s the same-old-Tories after all and that their commitment to equalities is skin-deep opportunism.  So the briefing machine has to hint that Grayling may not be “up to the job”.

Now Andrew Lansley has started shooting from the hip with numbers (and a policy) that don’t add up, reinforcing the Tory insiders’ view that he too is dispensible as “he has gone native”.

The Shadow Health Secretary’s plan to allow more cancer drugs to be available to NHS patients at first sounds nice and caring – until you look at it more closely.

The problem is – as the respected independent think-tank, the Kings Fund, has pointed out – the numbers don’t add up.  The money just is not there.  It is typical George Osborne-style double-counting: it is to be funded from the “savings” from the National Insurance increase that Osborne wants to “cancel” (rather than getting on with reducing the budget deficit that is allegedly the Tories’ top priority).

In practice therefore Lansley is offering up the rest of the NHS for a double budget hit: first to fund the cancer drugs and second to cut the deficit (made larger by not proceeding with the National Insurance increase).

And that’s not all.

The cancer drugs that he wants to fund are those that the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence has ruled are either ineffective or far too expensive for the benefits they bring – so they are hardly a good efficient use of resources.

The key need in the treatment of cancer is early diagnosis – something that the Labour Government has prioritised.  By contrast, the Tories have opposed  giving people a guaranteed right to see a cancer specialist within two weeks if the GP suspects cancer.  And presumably it is those primary care and diagnostic services that will now be threatened by Lansley’s double budget hit.  And, of course, if patients are not diagnosed early they have a greater likelihood of needing more expensive drugs and treatment.

Opportunism, the desire for quick headlines and economic illiteracy are not a sound basis for policy formulation.

So which member of the Shadow Cabinet will be next?

So what have the last seven day’s taught us?

First, the Tories remain obsessed by tax cuts, even if this means ditching their whole economic policy about starting to tackle the budget deficit now.  Cutting the tax paid by the better-off is for them far more important than protecting the vital public services used by the many – so cutting the inheritance tax for a few thousand of their richest supporters remains the corner-stone of their economic policy.  And now George Osborne has told us that, rather than make a start on reducing the deficit now (economic madness though that was, given the fragility of the recovery), their allegedly paramount core principle of policy will take second place to cutting National Insurance.

Second, the Tories are backed by powerful business interests – 23 business leaders (many of whom turned out to be Tory donors, or in one case a Tory peer) wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph backing George Osborne.

Third, the Tories say one thing in public and another in private – Chris Grayling was happy to undermine the Tories’ supposedly gay-friendly new image when he thought he was amongst friends (speaking at a Conservative think tank).

Yes, same old Tories ……

• Since 1997 overall crime is down 36%; domestic burglary is down 54%; vehicle related crime is down by 57%; and violent crime is down 41%
• a new flexible points-based system to ensure only those economic migrants who have the skills our economy needs can come to work in the UK
• Police numbers up by 16,000 since 1997, alongside more than 16,000 Police Community Support Officers
• Every community now has its own dedicated neighbourhood police team, easily contactable by the people who live in that community and working with them to agree local priorities and deal with people’s concerns
• Equalised the age of consent and repealed Section 28

• 900,000 pensioners lifted out of poverty
• 500,000 children lifted out of relative poverty and measures already in train will lift a further 500,000 children out of poverty
• free TV licences for over-75s
• the New Deal has helped over 2 million people into work
• over 3 million Child Trust Funds have been started