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Being a Tory gets easier by the minute
by Ed Vaizey
Sunday August 24, 2003
The Conservative Party conference in Blackpool in early October should go some way to answer the poser... By the time conference comes around, Iain Duncan Smith will have been Tory leader for just over two years. Duncan Smith is credited by his party with reconnecting the Conservatives with the public's agenda, something that they failed to do in 2001. As one strategist puts it, 'we are now starting to have policies on the issues that keep people awake at night'. Such issues do not include Europe, a subject where Duncan Smith has succeeded in turning down the volume. They do include, though, schools, hospitals and crime... Without having to look at a crib sheet, I can tell you that the Conservatives would abolish tuition fees, make exam bodies independent, put 40,000 more policemen on the street over the next decade, fund 20,000 more drug rehabilitation places, introduce a health passport and tackle the issue of funded pensions with a long-term savings plan... Better still, Government errors are seized on with a little more alacrity. Peter Hain's recent musings on the need to impose even higher taxes on middle-income earners was like the whiff of grapeshot to old Tory dogs. The new-found enthusiasm took me back to the hunger the Tories felt in the 1992 election campaign... A million more people now pay higher rate income tax, and average income families now face the prospect for the first time of an inheritance tax bill, because of rising property prices. The Tory mantra is likely to be that real reform, not higher taxes, means better public services. And better public services can therefore exist with lower taxes.
Galloway expelled by Labour
BBC
24 October, 2003
Labour chairman Ian McCartney insisted that party had been right to expel a man who "incited foreign forces to rise up against British troops".

"He was the only Labour MP to do this and he has never taken back or apologised for these comments," he said... He faced five charges relating to a television interview during the war in which he accused Mr Blair and George Bush of acting "like wolves" in invading Iraq.

The charges faced by Mr Galloway were understood to be that:

he incited Arabs to fight British troops

he incited British troops to defy orders

he incited Plymouth voters to reject Labour MPs

he threatened to stand against Labour

he backed an anti-war candidate in Preston
He was found guilty of all but the third charge.

The law he violated has been on the books since 1934.