I think Cameron does lack Brown in his shadow cabinet, Gordon Brown to be precise. Sorry! Couldn’t resist that.

Don’t be fooled by the image, look at the policies.

Remember George Bush was a ‘compassionate conservative’, who surrounded himself with ethnic minorities and the young at photo shoots.

There are plenty of policies we do already know about Cameron.

He voted for the Iraq war, justifying it on the grounds that we need to maintain ‘strong ties with the US and George Bush’.

He wrote the last Tory manifesto, including all the nasty immigration stuff about quotas and ‘fantasy islands’ for asylum applications. The manifesto also included the education and health vouchers for the well off.

He supports Tuition Fees, Foundation Hospitals and Private Finance Initiatives.

He was speech writer and policy advisor to Norman Lamont in the run-up to Black Wednesday which lost the taxpayer billions of pounds in a single day.

He supports a massive road building programme while claiming to be an environmentalist. I notice he is driven to Westminster 99% of the time. What a fraud his cycling photo shoot is.

Talk of spin, this guy is ‘Turbo Blairism’.

He is passionately in favour of killing foxes with hounds and other blood sports, not surprising considering his background. (Not as if it’s his fault being born a toff, but why do they always interbreed? (He married a Baronet’s daughter).

He wants to pull out of the Centre-Right, European Peoples’s Party and join with the minor extreme right-wing fascist parties and those that want to leave the EU altogether. This is more rightwing and Euro-sceptic than IDS and David Davis put together. This is not a practical policy and the only woman Tory MEP is threatening resignation and calling Cameron ‘out of touch with reality’.

He is looking at introducing a flat tax, which will be a more regressive taxation policy than even Thatcher dared consider. Even the Tory who originally proposed it, now says it is politically suicidal and would lead to massive public spending cuts, as the burden of taxation would be moved away from the rich.

He talks of tax incentives for traditional marriage rather than for families with children. Sounds like the old Tory prejudice against single mothers dies hard.

And finally, he is a walking corruption scandal, he has registered 25 ‘personal donations’ already this year from individuals and companies like Lord Harris (evangelist carpet millionaire) and Lord Sainsbury.

None of this sounds ‘modern’ or ‘compassionate’ to me.

Anyway, I think it was a mistake that Cameron didnt mention the lack of Brown in the Tory Party.

But I am sure that due to this debate and many others that will change

I mean his Shadow Cabinet reshuffle has already caused a stir, there are more women representing! YAY!

“Foreign policy aside, they have made a real difference in health and education.”

I do accept, I did go to public school as you mention and besides I left school a few years after New Labour got in, so I don’t know a great deal. All I do know is that one of the first things they did was remove the assisted place scheme. Without that, I would’ve not been able to attend my school. In retrospect, school made me everything I am today. Some people can be very successful from state schools, but I doubt I would have been. Now my school tries to fund some poor bright students itself, but only one or two. It’s a terrible shame as public schools like mine have now become the bubbles you talk of – all posh toffs and no kids like me to bring them down to earth.

They also just re-introduced Tory policy that they had removed 8 years ago.

And health! Well that’s my area. Yes there have been some benefits, I shan’t be churlish. But the government constantly imposes the most asinine regulations on the NHS which are always completely untenable and fail within months. Health in the UK is still fucked. But I severely doubt the Tories would make anything better on this count.

I lay half the blame at bigotry and the other half at ghettoisation, which leads to suspicion and hatred.

FOB, I can’t believe no-one has deemed it necessary to correct you here. I may be prone to the odd “you Northern monkey” or worse, but I feel it my duty to big’up my friends in the north. Sure there is segregation in places like Blackburn, Burnley and so forth and I read recently a rather depressing article about Dewkesbury. But that is as much the fault of the local Asian population as it is the local white population. The fact of the matter is that the great cities of the north such as Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle can be very welcoming places. In fact, you are an infinite times more like to get a friendly “hello” up north than you will doon south. It’s shame about Asian/black tensions in Birmingham because, traditionally, that too has been a great multicultural centre.
The other thing is that if you are comparing the North to London then it is an unfair comparison. London, quite simply, is the greatest city in the world. New York, Los Angeles, Toronto don’t even begin to compare in terms of diversity and all-round buzz. (You’re going to miss us when you’re gone Vikrant — just wait until you see US chav in all its racial manifestations!!)

Cameron is going to change the Tory party; get it into the centre ground, much like Blair did with lefty old Labour and becoming mainstream with New Labour.

For once I see we might have a Conservative future prime minister in our midst.

Get a grip. BevanKieran and Vladmir. So Cameron stands for “Slavery”? OMG. Moonbat alert!

And he’s got nothing to do with the twat Jim Davidson.

You are right. I was momentarily sent into stupor by Cameron’s charm. This is the party of Ann Winterton, John Townend, the Monday Club, Slavery, Empire,
Enoch Powell, means-testing, screwing up the NHS, isolationalist foreign policy (Major and Chamberlain), stealing my milk when I was at primary school and Jim Davidson.