BritCons Challenge Labour on "Fairness"

Every conservative knows about “fairness.” That’s the line that our liberal friends use when they are ready to increase our taxes and give more money to their supporters, er, no, make that “the poor.”

But now the British Conservative Party has issued a dossier on the Labour Party’s record called “Unfair Britain”.

It takes the present Labour government to task for making Britain more unfair. On the Conservative Party website, the Tories accuse Labour of the following:

• The number of people in severe poverty has increased by 900,000 since 1997
• Mr. Brown’s stealth taxes mean the poorest now pay more of their income in tax than the richest
• The gap in life expectancy between rich and poor is now at its widest since the Victorian era
• Educational inequality is getting worse

The same thing is happening in the US, of course, but perhaps not as badly.

The purpose of this political flank attack is to twofold.

First of all, it promises that a Conservative government will seek “progressive” ends by Conservative means. That is, Conservatives will stop the folly of believing that only the government can guarantee fairness.

The other purpose is to continue the policy of “love-bombing” the fashionables who like to consider themselve progressive and sophisticated, certainly not one of your retired colonels writing grumpy letters to the conservative press.

It’s an important new initiative, and it continues the center-right strategy of insisting that you can’t get to progressive goals using government programs.

In his Sources of the Self philosopher Charles Taylor asserts that the objectives of the progressives are equality, dignity, and creativity. Progressives thought that they way to achieve their goals was to acquire political power to demolish the old order of privilege and superstition.

But they were wrong. Equality, dignity, and creativity need a government with a light hand. Until we get it, our modern society is going to get more and more unfair—for the very people that the “progressives” claim to represent.