From Felix Bungay: The 2010 General Election was a great result for the Conservative Party: A response to @AndrewLilico

Felix Bungay is student at University of Cambridge where he is reading an MPhil in Intellectual History and Political Thought. 

I’m usually a fan of what Andrew Lilico has to say on Conservative Home, so it is with regret that I have to say his latest piece, ‘A true Conservative should believe Conservatism can win’ offers nothing but a vapid and skin- deep analysis of the Conservatives’ 2010 election performance.

In his piece, Dr Lilico argued that certain Conservatives should stop apologising for David Cameron’s performance at the 2010 general election, and that in order to be a ‘true’ Conservative (or indeed a Conservative at all) you must consider the performance of the 2010 Conservative party to be a failure. Dr Lilico says arguments to the contrary are “wrong and enraging.” They may well be enraging because they say something a lot of Conservatives are unwilling to hear, but they are certainly not wrong.

Firstly, Dr Lilico’s doctrinal shrillness is immensely unbecoming. Quite frankly, it is embarrassing for anyone to make claims about what constitutes ‘true’ Conservatism in the way Dr Lilico does in his article. Such arguments are best left to Marxists rather than serious political organisations. The last thing the Conservative Party needs is the sort of infighting over ‘true’ Conservatism that Dr Lilico’s article seeks to engender.

However, the crux of Dr Lilico’s argument is that the 2010 election was a failure. The Conservative Party failed to get a majority when it should have got a very large one. The circumstances were such that the party’s failure to win an overall majority constitutes a disaster. This is a superficially appealing argument, but one which doesn’t stand up to scrutiny and a fair comparison to other recent elections.

Felix Bungay: Abolishing the 50p tax rate doesn’t have to be politically toxic

Felix Bungay is Head of Research at the Trade Policy Research Centre. Until recently, Felix was chairman of the Conservative Association at the University of York.

Various Conservative and Lib Dem MP’s have rowed into the debate, either claiming the tax should be scrapped (Eric Pickles) or that getting rid of it would put us in ‘cloud cuckoo-land’ (Danny Alexander). Most recently, Nick Clegg has said he won’t let Osborne remove the 50p tax rate, at least until it is replaced with another ‘rich bashing’ tax and the tax free threshold has been increased significantly.

The second half of his proposal shouldn’t prove hard to reconcile with Conservative views; the idea of increasing the tax free threshold was considered by Michael Howard, and Lord Saatchi had spoken in favour of it long before it made it into the Lib Dem manifesto. However, a ‘mansion tax’ or another policy dreamt up to sow division and attack the wealthy should be decidedly rejected. The tax system is there to raise money, not to engage in posturing to enable the Lib Dems to salvage a few points in the opinion polls.

But whilst there has been disagreement over whether the tax should stay or go,everyone, including those who argue for the abolition of the 50p rate, points to the implicit political toxicity of doing so.

Felix Bungay: Radical constitutional reform should include an elected second chamber, a federal UK, a directly-elected Prime Minister and a separation of the executive from the legislature

Felix Bungay was until recently chairman of the Conservative Association at the University of York, where he is in his final year of studying History and Politics.

When it comes to the constitution, Conservatives have to ask themselves a simple question; is it broken? Conservatives will be reluctant to embrace change, but whether it be the West Lothian question, reform of the House of Lords or the leeching of Parliamentary sovereignty to the EU, it is clear our current constitution is in a bit of a mess.

It is also quite clear that our current system vests far too much power in the government, power which has been continually used to ignore the people’s wishes on issues like the EU, immigration and has allowed the unimpinged growth and expansion of government. Quite simply our current constitution has failed to uphold conservative values or provide sufficient checks on the government’s agenda.

For all these reasons I feel our constitution needs radical reform if we are to having a working constitution which upholds parliamentary sovereignty and freedom of the individual.

With the subsequent erosion of the power of the House of Lords, we have essentially been left with a unicameral parliament in which there are no checks on the government’s power to pass legislation. For this reason, it is essential we have an elected second chamber, elected on different terms and possibly a different electoral system to the commons in order that we can have a chamber which can effectively block or reform government legislation.

This idea seems to horrify both Mr Oborne and Mr Isaby, who say this would challenge the Commons' supremacy. Absolutely it would, but why should any Conservative stick up for the right of government to simply ram through legislation without it being challenged? It is precisely because there is no check on the government’s power to legislate that we have had a huge expansion of government power and the size and scope of government.