According the Beeb, the recently deceased Pope’s last will and testement stated that he left no material property, asked for his private notes to be burned and ran to all of 15 pages…

…which begs the question just what it was he needed to get off his chest that took more than 14 pages having dealt so succinctly with the mundane stuff?

Out goes Howard Flight who made the mistake of talking about the Tory’s ‘hidden’ agenda on public services - cut, cuts and more cuts - and in comes Nick Herbert as Tory candidate for Arundel and South Downs, yet another parachutee from an ‘independent’ think-tank called, without a trace of irony, Reform and who, writing in the Spectator in 2002, made this comment:

‘The whisper is that there is a top secret, extremely clever strategy afoot: go along with spending rises now, but return to a tax cutting agenda when - if - the party is re-elected.’

Right, so no change there.

I say ‘yet another’ as down the road in Hove & Portslade, Nicholas Boles, Director of another think-tank called PolicyExchange - independent, naturally - will be standing from the Tories, having been parachuted in last year in circumstances which carry more than a hint of Tory Central Office interference.

Isn’t it remarkable how so many of those who head up independent political think-tanks suddenly turn up as Tory candidates come election time. Hmm… after the “Blair Babes” comes the ‘Starbucks Cuckoos’ this time around”

I suppose the saving grace that comes with the Tory’s packing their lists of candidates with escapees from the realm of policy punditry is that most of these think-tanks have web sites which make it pretty clear what their real agenda is, whatever the official line that has actually been adopted by the Tory leadership. So it comes as no real surprise at all to find that Reform describes itself as being;

“not conservative, either with a small or capital ‘c’.

We can live with the description free-market but we are in fact liberal with a small ‘l’.”

Liberal not as in ‘Liberal Democrat’ or even as in the political liberalism of someone like Mike Oborski down in Wyre Forest (sorry Mike, I would link to you but the software refuses to accept your URL???) but liberal as in the neoliberalism of the free, unfettered and thoroughly deregulated marketplace. Make no mistake this is back to basics stuff, so long as your idea of basic happens to be Reaganomics and Thatcherism - what Michael Howard would no doubt see as being ‘just like old times’.

With Gordon Brown’s handling of the economy being Labour’s strongest electoral suit - nice line from PoliticalHack on this, by the way (see ‘Brownian non-motion‘) - his comments in the Spectator have naturally been picked up quickly by the party and used to good effect, even if it would have been better if the Chancellor had been the one to stick the knife in, figuratively speaking, on this occasion.

The real mileage in Nick Herbert, however, is to be found on his think-tank’s website from which its obvious where he stands on public services, especially the NHS, and that’s at the controls of the wrecking ball of internal markets, health insurance and, ultimately, privatisation of as much of the NHS as he and his Tory friends think they can get away with.

It’s all very much ‘back to the 80’s’ stuff over there, so much so that it’s a wonder that you don’t get crappy midi-renditions of the Stock, Aitken and Waterman back catalogue on visiting the place. Markets, we’re told, are a more efficient means of delivering health care because private companies know that efficiency mean profits…

…except that between 1979 and 1994, with the Tory in power and introducing internal markets into the NHS, management costs in the health service rose from a mere 6% of total NHS expenditure in 1979 to 11% in 1994. The more ‘efficient’ markets of the Tory NHS resulted in expenditure on management almost doubling as a proportion of overall NHS expenditure, taking that money away from direct expenditure on trivial little matters such as doctors and nurses and, especially, patients.

Unsurprisingly this was also a time in which cost of salaries for senior managers in the NHS rocketed by 1800%, as well.

According to the Tory’s own (pre)election poster campaign, if you’re think what they’re thinking then it’s not difficult to keep a hospital clean…

…unless you’re the party who turned the little matter of cleaning hospitals over to the private sector for whom ‘efficiency’ meant sacking cleaners to keep their profit margins up, irrespective of the impact this would inevitably have on rates of infections contracted by patient’s while in hospital.

Even the Victorians managed to work that one out which is why nothing has had a bigger impact on life expectancy than the massive programme of public works carried out by municipal authorities (AKA local council) which gave our town and cities such insignificant things as clean drinking water and sewage systems - which the Tories managed to sell of as well back in the 1980’s.

Did I really see proposals put forward to take hospital cleaning back into ‘public ownership’ the other day? If I did then its about fucking time.

When the Tories put up people like Nick Herbert - however much he might claim to support their official line on public spending - then you know for sure that not only do they have only one real agenda but you also know exactly what that agenda is and it’s not just ’spending a bit less’ on public services, it’s not even making cuts in public services - as unpalatable as they know that to be - its handing public services over to the private sector where profits come before people and healthcare is dispensed according to the size of your insurance cover and not according to need.