eurealist.co.uk

In his speech today, David Cameron gave two undertakings that interest me:

A future Conservative government will scrap unelected regional assemblies and give power back to local people.

and ID cards of which he said:

Labour’s plastic poll tax has no place in modern Britain. It’s an ugly monument to the waste, chaos and vanity of intrusive, over-mighty government. I promise you this….in office, we will pull it down.

Without meaning to be churlish I have learned that we should be very cautious about accepting what the leaders of our political parties say at face value. So I will wait to see if he actually means that a future Conservative government will scrap and reverse the regionalisation process. Or is this code for elected regional government?

If they do mean to scrap the regional level, then what mechanism will be put in place to receive the return of our money from the EU. After all it was this imperative which has driven the regionalisation process from the start. So we would need to see the other side of the coin before making a decision on whether to trust Cameron’s undertaking.

On ID cards, I can see that on the face of it Cameron seems to have promised to stop the implementation of ID cards, does that include the database? He did not say. He could also have meant that he will pull down “over-mighty government” and not pull down ID cards. Nit picking, I know but then I am old enough to remember another Conservative leader telling the country that there would be no loss of essential sovereignty when he took us into the common Market.

As both of these promises have ramifications with regard to Britain’s relationship with the EU, David Cameron will need to address and find solutions to the likely aggravation from that quarter if a future Conservative government were to fulfil these assurances.

Technorati Tags: regional assemblies, David Cameron, ID cards, local-government, Tory-party
Add to: | Technorati | Digg | del.icio.us | Yahoo | BlinkList | Spurl | reddit | Furl |