THE TELEGRAPH: The Tory leader has revealed his true colours – he misunderstands the market, argues Simon Heffer.
Because of the disaster Gordon Brown has made of our economy, ensuring that we (according to the International Monetary Fund) have the worst recession of any developed country, it may now be difficult for him to win an election. Therefore interest turns to what the Conservative Party might do were it in power. Let us mark one thing: that a Conservative victory some time in the next 16 months will have nothing to do with the alternative that party offers to the electorate, other than the specific alternative of its not being the Labour Party.
In case you think I am merely being beastly to Mr Cameron again, please do me one courtesy. Go to the internet and type "Cameron moral capitalism" into Google. Within moments you will read the text of a speech the putative next prime minister gave at Davos last week to an audience of people who, unlike him, must make serious and informed decisions about the use of capital every day.
I understate my case to say that it is one of the most shallow speeches by a supposedly serious politician that I have ever read. It should also terrify anyone who might feel he or she should vote Conservative at the next election, because it promises that what we should get would in most respects be little better than what we have.
My first thought was the quizzical one about Mr Cameron's speaking on this subject in the first place. In pure terms it is a tautology. Capitalism is deeply moral and hardly needs the adjective to qualify it. It is moral because it is about the exercise of free will between buyers and sellers: and few things can be more moral than allowing someone to be free.
Capitalism is about the link between effort and reward. It is about the creation of wealth according to the quality of one's enterprise. Without wealth creation there is no scope for the taxation that enables the functions society deems moral: a welfare state, the defence of the realm, the maintenance of law and order. So anybody who feels he needs to make a speech about capitalism while qualifying it in this way at once raises the suspicion that he is being in some degree specious. >>> Simon Heffer | Tuesday, February 3, 2009
THE INDEPENDENT: The Postman Who Wants to Deliver the End of Capitalism
He has the cheerful, inoffensive look of the ageing star of a boy-band. He wants to destroy the institutions of the French state but cultivates, brilliantly, the image of a concerned, plain-talking, working-class boy-next-door. He has become the second most popular political figure in France, after President Nicolas Sarkozy.
The baby-faced postman and Trotskyist idol of the young, Olivier Besancenot, 34, will launch this weekend something which has been, until now, a contradiction in terms: a mass-appeal, far-left party. The Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR) is dead. Long live the Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste (NPA).
The party, which plans to build a non-capitalist state and is looking, first of all, for a catchier name, will be founded during a three-day conference starting on Friday at Saint Denis, just north of Paris. With the world's financial system in crisis and with bankers universally loathed, with the working class restless and the French parties of the centre-left rudderless and divided, there could hardly be a better time to launch a radical new movement of the left.
M. Besancenot's old party, despite its workerist rhetoric, was mostly middle-aged and middle class. The new party to be born this weekend will be younger and will include some working-class, trade union activists but will be dominated by the "lost" generations of French middle-class youth who reject middle-class ideas – extreme ecologists, feminists and anti-globalists, people who are fiercely in favour of illegal immigrants or fiercely opposed to advertising.
The NPA already claims almost 9,000 members. This is three times as many as the outgoing LCR, the most powerful of the many French Trotskyist groups, which will "dissolve itself" tomorrow to provide the organisational structure and the leader of the new party.
Above all, the leader. The NPA – or whatever it finally calls itself – is unashamedly a vehicle for the personality and communication skills of the LCR's "spokesman" M. Besancenot. Le petit facteur (the little postman) with the clean-cut looks and jargon-free language was the political revelation of the 2002 and 2007 presidential elections. >>> By John Lichfield in Paris | Wednesday, February 4, 2009
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