The council could become a Tory-free zone.All the pressure is on the Conservatives. They are defending all but one of the 15 seats up this time – half of them the fruits of their gains in traditional Labour territory in 1992. Four of the Tories’ most senior councillors, including the group leader, Peter Patrick, are standing down in an air of some bitterness, Mr Patrick complaining it was “galling” to be turfed out last year – leaving Labour the largest party in a hung council – after the Tories had cut Basildon’s council tax along with its budget.In addition, the party has split locally over a long-drawn out argument over whether Billericay and Wickford, traditional Tory heartlands to the north of Basildon, should move out of the borough. Mr Amess joyously pronounced “the death of socialism in Basildon”.
But next month in Basildon – where Wayne bought his council house in the 1980s and Sharon wore a gold ankle bracelet and white stilettos – the opposite may happen. Four years ago the beaming smile of David Amess as he held Basildon on the night of the 1992 general election told Labour they were not going to win. A few weeks later, the Conservatives swept the board in the local elections, taking an unprecedented 10 seat majority on the 42-seat council.

We are denying no one a place that they would be entitled to under the scheme,” he said.Parents using vouchers in private nurseries or play groups might be able to continue sending them there under Labour if the local authority funded the places, Mr Blunkett said recently.Yesterday he released figures showing that local authorities could have more than pounds 565m withdrawn from their budgets if the scheme went national next year as planned. The money, currently being spent on the under-fives by those authorities, would be used by the government to provide vouchers.. He added that the pounds 20m cost of administering vouchers would be put into providing education for four-year-olds – at present the pounds 1,100 voucher can only buy a part-time place.”Anyone who is using a voucher will be entitled to continue receiving that place on the basis that they are redeeming it with the voucher. Detailed figures on how many new teachers would need to be trained were not available.
Launching a campaign against the nursery voucher scheme, which began in four areas this week, Mr Blunkett said Labour would honour existing vouchers which had already been sent to parents but would withdraw them after that. The head is Euro-enthusiast and the body is Euro-sceptic.” An unhappy metaphor, not least because the head, however small, is where the brain resides More than that, the dinosaurs all died out It was not that they failed to adapt Rather the times changed around them.. Labour would withdraw the Government’s nursery vouchers within a year of being elected and would offer a free part-time place to every four-year-old within 18 months, the party’s education spokesman said yesterday

David Blunkett declined to say how long it would take the party to fulfil its commitment to a nursery place for every three-year-old or to full- time places for four-year-olds, however. If key conservative cultural values are to be maintained then compromises may have to be made in subsuming our Britishness into a European-ness that can fend off some of the most dire effects of unfettered competition from the Pacific Rim.

In all this there can be no plain-as-pikestaff Tory slogans any more.The Conservative Party, the Telegraph leader fulminated, “now resembles a dinosaur, having a very small head and a very large body. Economically Tories must be in favour of the new global capitalism. But its ruthless modernising of the economy – with its downsizing and contract culture – has now hit the middle classes as much as spasms in manufacturing once hurt the working classes In a globalised economy we are all working-class. The real question is: can the Telegraph translate its Europhobia from its opinion column to its news and features pages?And this is where it runs up against the paradox that paralyses the heart of modern Conservatism The days of Thatcherite simplism are over. There is a contradiction in the Conservative economic and cultural world views.

Thus the politics of the Sun rests in its world view circumscribed by fear, greed and sex; those of the Mail lie in its preoccupation with taxation, house prices and family values and public morals. If these people have a hand in shaping a post-defeat Tory party they will lead it into fantasy land.”It will, of course, be more complicated than that. Newspapers influence not through their leader columns – few people actually read them, market researchers say. But they do shape readers’ view of the world by choosing material carefully crafted to amuse and titillate readers and underpin their prejudices.

And it is written by a bunch of clever prats who have no grounding in the kind of journalism which would ever have got them out on the streets and in contact with real life. The answer to Blair’s radical centrism is not to lurch to the right like this. It is edited by an old Etonian who’s probably never been in a comprehensive in his life. “What’s important about this trumpeting clique,” said one yesterday. “The Telegraph is owned by a foreigner who may be bright but who has little understanding of British culture.