"Double Ham and Eggs from the Tories"

9.17.58pm GMT Tue 8th Mar 2005

An American pundit once observed that politicians often read the wrong thing from election results - when the people reject "ham and eggs" the tendency of politicians is to offer "double" ham and eggs.

So when the Tories in 2001 suffered one of their largest electoral defeats ever on a menu of "tough on immigration", "tax cuts" and "save the pound" and when in 2002 their Party Chairman, Theresa May MP, said that the Tories have been seen as the "Nasty Party", sitting critically behind twitching net curtains without a positive agenda for modern society - one might have thought the Tories were about to change.

However the pre-election campaign this year shows that the lesson learned was that actually in 2001 the Tories were too soft - so now we have quotas on refugees - breaking our obligations under UN agreements set up after WWII - immigration has been made a focal issue including emphasis on perceived health risks posed by immigrants - we have tax cuts of £4billion with talk now of £12billion and at the same time Michael Howard is going on a spending spree promising more investment in schools, hospitals and in the police and immigration service and big cuts in council tax for pensioners - the sums just don't add up.

Tory policies were not only tested in the last General Election - they have also been road-tested in 4 parliamentary by-elections this Parliament - in all cases the Tories lost their position in second place to trail in 3rd or even 4th place well behind the Liberal Democrats who won 2 of the by-elections and came a close second in the other 2.

In Parliament itself, the Tories have flip-flopped on every major issue. On the Iraq War they initially supported the war but then at the end of 2004 Michael Howard said he would not have supported the war if he had know the true story about the absence of any Weapons of Mass Destruction. On Identity Cards, Michael Howard's Conservatives initially supported ID cards and then just a few months later "abstained" on the issue. And on the key issue of Top Up Fees for university students the Tories originally opposed them together with the Lib Dems but now they have proposed a much more extreme policy of making students pay commercial rates of interest on loans.

In short the Tories have not learned the lessons from the past - they have failed in their duty as the official Opposition and with the exception of some extreme Tory policies, Tory and Labour are increasingly difficult to separate on the key issues facing us today.

It has been left to the Liberal Democrats to provide the REAL alternative to Tory-Labour politics.

Reject the ham and eggs.

Please join us.

Lee Glendon