Sunday 29th October 2006

7.45pm ToryDiary exclusive: How David Cameron sparked Labour's faith schools muddle

BLOGS

ToryDiary: The new high taxation consensus (otherwise known as 'saving the planet')

Thomas Bridge on YourPlatform: It’s time to aspire to better standards in Public Life

CAMERON TO ATTACK 'WALK-ON-BY SOCIETY'

"David Cameron will tomorrow accuse Britain of becoming a "walk on by society", with people too quick to ignore the suffering of strangers." - Independent on Sunday

'RETURN OF THE TOFFS'

"Is class dead in modern Britain? Tory leader David Cameron and his Old Etonians hope so." - Newsweek

TORIES REACH OUT TO THE ARTS ESTABLISHMENT

"Earlier this month 15 diners, including Cameron, Osborne, the shadow chancellor, and a group of the most powerful people in entertainment, sat down together inside one of the restaurant's private rooms for a meal marking the next stage in Cameron's campaign to convert the liberal glitterati who were claimed by New Labour during its Cool Britannia period.  At the table were Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of the National Theatre; Sally Greene of the Old Vic theatre; newsreader Sir Trevor McDonald; Jane Tranter, head of drama at the BBC; Tim Bevan of Working Title films; Nick Elliot of ITV drama; Greg Dyke, former director-general of the BBC; and Alan Yentob, senior BBC broadcaster and director of entertainment and drama at the corporation." - Observer

SUNDAY COMMENT

Minette Marrin in The Sunday Times: "Only recently the Cameroons were quick to dissociate themselves from the party’s own policy review document on tax because it used the C-word. Yet if one is honest, cuts must be conservative — cuts if not necessarily in tax, then certainly cuts in state intrusion, cuts in statist bureaucracy and cuts in politically correct agenda. That does not mean cuts in the money available for frontline public services and the relief of hardship — rather the reverse."

Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer: "a Brown premiership now looks as certain as anything ever is certain in politics. He would like, but he does not need, Tony Blair's endorsement to become Prime Minister. Gordon Brown looks to be where he has always planned to be: invincible and inevitable.  After all those years of planning and plotting, striving and straining, all those years of waiting for the prize and worrying that someone might steal up on him from behind, the long distance runner of British politics looks over his shoulder to find that there is no one there at all."

COUNTDOWN TO AMERICA'S MID-TERMS

“I’m campaigning like mad and I’m looking at people in the eye and saying, you better have a government that does everything in its power to protect you from attack. You’re right here in the office where I get briefed every morning and I’m telling you, it’s on my mind.  I was affected deeply by the attacks of September 11 . . . I know we’re at war.”

- President George W Bush speaking to conservative commentators in the White House and quoted in The Sunday Times

Andrew Sullivan in The Sunday Times: "In many ways the Bush administration and Republican Congress have abandoned principled conservatism and deserve to be punished by conservatives more than liberals. When they took over in 2000, the long-term fiscal liability of the federal government was $20 trillion. It now stands at $43 trillion. They have increased government spending at a faster rate than any Democratic Congress since the 1930s. They have generated deficits after four years of strong growth.  This kind of spending has made sleaze and de facto bribery inevitable. The number of lobbyists in Washington has doubled in five years. As for pork barrel spending, a simple comparison tells the tale. In 1985, Ronald Reagan vetoed a motorway-construction bill because lawmakers had stuffed into it 150 pet projects for their constituencies. Reagan thought that was unconservative. Last year George W Bush eagerly signed a similar bill with 6,000 such projects. In plain English, they are bribing the voters with the public purse."

The Democrats' secret agenda - Wall Street Journal

Obama Fever - RealClearPolitics.com

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