Kaletsky on Cameron's speech

In today's Times:

If Michael Foot’s 1983 election manifesto is now remembered as “the longest suicide note in history”, then Mr Cameron’s speech yesterday could be described as the “longest shopping list in history”. And what would inevitably follow if Mr Cameron became prime minister would be the biggest tax demands in history.

Consider just a few of the spending pledges made yesterday by Mr Cameron in a single speech: to lavish on the National Health Service whatever funding is needed and an absolute moratorium on spending cuts or hospital closures; more border controls and policemen; more support for faith schools; more prison building; more drug rehabilitation services; more defence spending, not just on body armour but also on military salaries, pensions and schools; more subsidies for childcare; more money for social workers and occupational therapists; more special schools. My list of the spending commitments in that one speech could go on and on — and I haven’t even started on the previous day’s promises from Mr Osborne, such as subsidising pensions with even more generous tax relief.

It may be objected, of course, that I am taking Mr Cameron too literally. He was not, after all, delivering a budget speech, with concrete policy decisions, but presenting a prospectus, designed to offer the country a broad sense of the Tories’ new aspirations. Yet this was exactly what made the speech — and this week’s entire conference — so alarming. Nowhere was there any sense of priorities, of the limits to government resources. Never did Mr Cameron hint, for example, that somebody would have to pay for such charming notions as a new childcare subsidy that would be paid not only to professional carers but also to grandparents.

There's a lot more - unfortunately I can't excerpt it all! Click the link and read for yourself.