At lunch time I, along with about 300 others, went to lunch at the Chancery Court Hotel in Holborn to hear the Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague give a speech to the Westminster Conservatives Two Cities Luncheon. I think it will have raised over £80,000 for Party coffers. Of course Hague spoke superbly. He always does. Part of his challenge was to convince the audience that the next General Election was not in the bag. That is a problem he would have been pleased to have to cope with when he was leader.
"We need to gain 116 constituencies in one go in order to win," he said. "That will be a Herculean effort. It is not something we take for granted." The substantial taxpayer funded Communications Allowances for incumbent MPs brought in by New Labour made the task more of a challenge. Furthermore Labour had £10 million funding a year guaranteed from the trade unions in return for the favours granted to them while the Conservatives have to start from scratch each year in their fund raising efforts.
Hague added that there were 900,000 more people employed in the public sector than 12 years ago. Yet while it was bloated it was also inefficient. He also said that the Bank of England should be given the power to "call time on debt." It had the judgment to do the job rather than leaving it to a "box ticking regulator." On state debt we are being saddled with an interest bill equivalent to the education budget for England or the UK Defence budget.
On the Lisbon Treaty he said: "Let nobody be in any doubt that if it is still unratified by a single one of the 27 nations in the EU by the time we come to power that there will be a British referendum."
