Britannia Unchained: the rise of the new Tory right (UK)
'The talented and hard-working have nothing to fear," says Dominic Raab, Conservative MP for Esher and Walton, with just the faintest hint of menace. It is an airless, lazy day in mid-August. The House of Commons cafe is half-deserted. But Raab, firm-jawed, slightly gaunt and a rising star of the Tory right, is spending the parliamentary recess in the traditional manner of ambitious politicians: using the Westminster news vacuum to attract attention to himself and his ideas.
Wearing jeans, the 38-year-old backbencher is talking –warily –about transforming the British workplace. He thinks current employment law offers "excessive protections" to workers. "People who are coasting –it should be easier to let them go, to give the unemployed a chance. It is a delicate balancing act, but it should be decided in favour of the latter."
Last Friday, a leaked fragment from a book co-written by Raab and four other Conservative MPs, Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity, due to be published next month, appeared in the London Evening Standard. The passage, red meat for phone-ins and columnists ever since, argued less politely for an improvement in our national work ethic: "The British are among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor. Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music."
Further detailed revelations about the book remain forbidden by a pre-publication embargo. But having read it, I can safely say that Britannia Unchained has a brevity, pace and scope that elevates it a little above the usual pre-party-conference polemics. "Britain is at a crossroads which will define our place in the world for generations," begins one of its publisher's sales pitches. "From our economy, to our education system, to social mobility and social justice, we must learn the rules of the 21st century, or we face an inevitable slide into mediocrity."
...
"The European economic and welfare model –I think it's over," says Mark Littlewood, director of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), like the CPS a veteran British free-market thinktank reinvigorated by current possibilities. He favours cutting state spending in Britain by over a third, and leaving citizens with a "basic safety net". Yet he finds the coalition far too cautious. "There has been an incredibly modest reduction in public spending. It's as if the coalition have arrived at the scene of a road accident: they've urgently applied a tourniquet to the bleeding patient, but that's it. There's no rehabilitation programme to make the patient leaner, meaner, fitter." In part, he blames Tory fears about their party becoming "retoxified": "I've argued at the top levels of government, 'Scrap the minimum wage.' But then there's a sharp intake of breath. Anything that looks like a return to the Dickensian workhouse raises hackles. But I don't want people working in sweatshops at 5p an hour. You should sell abolishing the minimum wage in positive terms, as providing young people with a first step on the jobs ladder, as a 'jobs for all' scheme."
Full: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/aug/22/britannia-unchained-rise-of-new-tory-right
Social justice? Social mobility? That can't be conservative! Glenn Beck said they mean COMMUNISM!!! 
Mark Littlewood sounds like a British Frank Luntz, by suggesting more positive language "jobs for all" to disguise a lower minimum wage.
And if the guardian wants to see REAL crazy right, its reporters should attend the upcoming Republican convention.
= new reply since forum marked as read
