Fair-minded Osborne seeks attack on Brown
Tuesday, 19 August 2008 12:00 AM
Shadow chancellor George Osborne is planning an autumn campaign to ensure Gordon Brown's "obsession" with survival does not do "long-term damage" to Britain.
Mr Osborne has launched a dossier outlining the ways in which the Conservatives believe the prime minister's policies have made Britain more unfair.
The Tories argue rising numbers of people in deep poverty, a decade of "stealth taxes" and a lack of schools reform are among the factors contributing to the problem.
"The truth is Gordon Brown's old-fashioned leftist idea that 'only the state can guarantee fairness' has led to a decade of top-down state control policies that have made our country less fair. Brown's Labour means an unfair Britain," he says in the foreword to the dossier.
Mr Osborne will give a speech at the Demos thinktank tomorrow on notions of fairness in society.
He says the speech will lay out how the Tories will use Conservative means to achieve "fair and progressive goals".
"Our emphasis on opportunity and responsibility will succeed where their top-down state control has failed," Mr Osborne adds.
Tory intellectual thinking is focusing on the rejection of state-based solutions. While accepting progressive goals, the Conservatives now believe their philosophies of implementation will prove more successful than Labour's.
Labour is unconvinced. Later this week chief secretary to the Treasury Yvette Cooper will outline her party's argument that "Cameronomics" disguises the Tories' "risky and destructive ideological agenda".
Mr Osborne hopes his party's attack on the government's record will prove more resonant with the electorate. He writes: "First it was 'change', then it was 'aspiration' and earlier this year it was all about government being 'on your side'. Now we're told, before it's even started, that the next Gordon Brown relaunch will about 'fairness'.
"But this latest desperate relaunch will sink, just like the others have, because under Labour Britain has become more unfair."
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