I had the impression that European conservatives were considerably more compassionate than the hate-mongers that form the bulk of the US right. Johann Hari has proven me mistaken:
In the US there has been a fuzzy sense of admiration for the new British Conservative-Liberal coalition government, but over here the sweet liberal-scented haze has now parted and we are Camer-on. The Prime Minister and his finance spokesman George Osborne this week showed the first flick of their knife, marking out the areas they intend to cut much more deeply into over the next five years. Who have they decided can afford to take the pain first? Not rich people like them: they will continue to enjoy big state subsidies to build up their savings and maintain their estates. No. Step forward instead the unemployed, poor kids who are falling behind in their reading, children in care, the elderly, the disabled, and any feeble little steps we were making towards building a low-carbon economy.
Very few people in Britain would say our first move during a recession should be to shut down programmes that get the growing number of young people with no qualifications or training into their first job. Yet that is what the Conservatives have done. I’ve seen in my own part of east London how the Future Jobs scheme takes demotivated and lost kids and gets them into paid, on-the-job training for six months. It was too small, for sure – but now the programme has been abolished altogether, along with the £1,000 subsidy for employers who take on anyone who has been on benefits for more than six months. The Tories say they are not making cuts to "the front line" – but don’t the long-term unemployed, stuck on £60 a week, live on the front line of British life?
The next set of cuts is well disguised. When you hear that the Communities Department has taken a 27 per cent cut, it sounds anodyne: what is it anyway? It’s the money that goes to local authorities to pay for home help for the elderly and disabled, for monitoring children at risk, and children in care. Osborne has said he doesn’t want councils to make up the difference by increasing council tax. So, very soon, there will be a big increase in the number of confused old people left unwashed and untended, and abused kids we never find in time.
Many of these cuts will end up costing us money in the long term. Over the past few years, children – mainly in poor areas – who have not been able to learn to read have been given special one-on-one tuition to get them up to a decent standard, rather than tumbling through their school years getting more confused and angry. Literate people are far less likely to commit crime and much more likely to pay taxes later in life. Cameron just closed the programme. The same child who loses her reading tutor now also won’t get a small Child Trust Fund of £2,000 when she turns 18 – thanks to a Chancellor of the Exchequer who lives on an £4.2m trust fund of his own.
David Cameron’s claims to care about global warming also just drowned. The subsidy to build wind turbines, the encouragement to buy electric cars – all gone. His massive cuts in the transport budget will make the trains and buses worse, pushing more people into their cars. They have even cut our low spending on flood defences – a bad idea on a stormy island as we go into a century where sea levels will rise… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <Huffington Post>
It appears that Cameron is following the example of Crawford Caligula and the GOP, implementing No Millionaire Left Behind on the backs of the most needy segment in society. At least in the UK, European conservatives seem quite similar to our own.
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