There is no such thing as compassionate conservativism

[the_future_modernes]

or the fact that rich white ableblodied cis, het MEN get away telling poor disabled homeless and otherwise disadvantaged people that they are privileged, without at least being tarred and feathered ...WOW. Johann Hari: Welcome to Cameron land

David Cameron cites Hammersmith and Fulham council as a 'model' of compassionate conservatism. So what can the actions of Tory councillors here tell us about how the party would behave in government?

This is a dispatch from David Cameron's Britain, the country that could be waiting for us at the other end of the polling booths and the soundbites and the spin. I didn't have to take a time machine to get there; I just had to take the District Line. In 2006, a group of rebranded "compassionate Conservatives" beat Labour for control of Hammersmith and Fulham Council, a long stretch of west London. George Osborne says the work they have done since then will be a "model" for a new Conservative government, while Cameron has singled them out as a council he is especially "proud" of. So squeezed between the brownish dapple of the Thames and the smoggy chug of the Westway, you can find the Ghost of Cameron Future. What is it whispering to us?

Hammersmith and Fulham is a sprawling concrete sandwich of London's rich and London's poor. It starts at the million-pound apartments on the marina at Chelsea Harbour – white and glistening and perfect – and runs past giant brownish housing estates and Victorian mansions, until it staggers to a stop on Shepherd's Bush Green, where homeless people sit on the yellow-green grass drinking and watching the SUVs hurtle past. Here, high incomes squat next to high-rises in one big urban screech of noise. In such a mixed area, the Conservatives had to run for power as a reconstructed party "at home with modern Britain". They promised to move beyond Thatcherism and make the poor better off. They were the first to hum the tune that David Cameron has been singing a capella in this election.

People who took this at face value were startled by the first act of the Conservatives on assuming power – a crackdown on the homeless. They immediately sold off 12 homeless shelters, handing them to large property developers. The horrified charity Crisis was offered premises by the BBC to house the abandoned in a shelter over the Christmas period at least. The council refused permission. They said the homeless were a "law and order issue", and a shelter would attract undesirables to the area. With this in mind, they changed the rules so that the homeless had to "prove" to a sceptical bureaucracy that they had nowhere else to go – and if they failed, they were turned away. Andthen they went for the disabled. And the children. And you wouldn't guess the reasons why

This article made my stomach turn. And these people have a good chance of winning??!?

Comments

[brewsternorth]

And these people have a good chance of winning??!?

I presume because they're, as the journalist points out, good at "branding" this in terms that sound agreeable to the well-meaning well-off person, in the full knowledge that the people who are going to be shortchanged by them *won't vote for them*.

The Bullshit Overflows

[willow]

The US Conservatives do that too (maybe all do?). The rebranding of 'From Welfare to Volunteer'. Apparently it's NOT ok to empower people to have means to measures of independence. It IS OK to make them perpetually dependent upon the kindness and moods of someone else; from getting bathed to having a safety net. And if no one volunteers, then they're not good fringe society - they're bad cripples - no one loves them enough to care for them, therefore it's not society's fault.