Onward in Unfluffiness

There is, it appears, a think-tank called Bright Blue, which seeks to persuade people that not all Conservatives are so intellectually retarded as to be foiled by goalpost-moving badgers and the like. I am not sure if Bright Blue's motto is "We aren't all Michael Green", but that seems to be the spirit of the enterprise. The head of Bright Blue is one Ryan Shorthouse, who has worked for such refined intellects as the university salesman David Willetts and the culture secretary, Maria "Show us yer price tag" Miller. In the present political climate, this apparently qualifies him as a moderniser; and Shorthouse has been wagging the finger at Britain's Head Boy over the anti-immigrant witch-hunt. "We didn't come into politics to clamp down on vulnerable people and benefit claimants," Shorthouse proclaimed; which, given the present policy of welfare reform through assisted suicide, certainly speaks volumes about the hard-headed realism that prevails at Bright Blue. Even if Britain's Head Boy did feel inclined to go back to hugging huskies and waving his dead child around for the next seventeen months, why would anyone believe him?

Indeed, Shorthouse and his colleagues appear to have taken quite literally all those sweet nothings which Daveybloke burbled at the electorate in the run-up to May 2010, even including the Big Society thingy which, according to Shorthouse, isn't all fluffy or liberal after all: "it actually means a lot to people and it is of incredibly deep concern to people - things around the safety of their children, the opportunities for their children". Things around - well, how unfluffy can you get? Anyway, Bright Blue will be publishing a "liberal Conservative manifesto" in April, to demonstrate things around the sort of rhetoric Bright Blue thinks the party needs to adopt. It will call for an increase in the minimum wage, and there will be a non-fluffy focus on things around schools, childcare and dementia. As for things around food banks, housing bubbles, workfare and the green crap, they just need to be advertised a bit better.