The message is: don’t let the state be your only safety net, “build your own”. It is not an attack on single mothers or a call to dismantle welfare. Life goes wrong in ways the lucky often cannot imagine. The state should always be there for those who need it. But we must be honest about what it can and cannot do.
Baldwin’s actions directly disprove the notion that a substantial reformatting of ideas or policies must occur on a timeline approaching years. Just because the next election is remote, albeit nearly two years have elapsed already, should not engender a relative passivity nor timidity around key decisions.
To understand why the Falklands matter today, one must look beyond sovereignty alone. They are not simply a territory to be defended. They are a community to be valued.
Many Prime Ministers are unpopular, but is it fair or helpful that their survival in the job, or their being shown the exit is essentially down to a few hundred MPs of their own party?
We are asked to believe that a Prime Minister can personally determine the outcome, while remaining detached from the system that delivers it. That he can shape the direction, but not own the destination. That when the machinery of Government bends around a political decision, the responsibility lies only with those who turned the gears.
Totally trustworthy, Gow was gregarious but also shrewd, relatable but also ruthless. He knew his boss’s mind, as well as her strengths and weaknesses, and, on occasion, was more than willing to speak truth to power.
As gilts yields head above 5 per cent, with welfare out of control and 30 per cent of young adults economically inactive, it is time for an innovative solution to the fiscal crisis.
A modern financial system must work for all its users, not just the majority. Older people, small business owners, people in rural, suburban and coastal communities and the digitally excluded also need access to the banking system.
Conservatives ought to be especially alert. We are meant to understand that society is made up not only of individuals and the state, but of families, communities, churches, synagogues, schools, clubs, traditions, and inherited forms of moral life.
If we are to take just one thing from this year’s Margaret Thatcher Conference it is this: that decline, much like growth, is a choice, and Britain’s leaders must be daring if they are to return Britain to a place of prosperity.
With each set-piece moment, Badenoch appears to be persuading more voters that she might just be the right person to lead her party after all.
Many black Britons, including black Conservatives, see in her a certain detachment from the mainstream black British experience, as though her own life has been positive enough to leave her less understanding to those whose experience has been harder.
Low tax policies have attracted businesses and affluent residents to the Region of Madrid from high tax regions such as Catalonia, and further afield from other countries, too. The very kind of immigration we were told our points-based system would attract to the UK.
Reform are not a unionist party. You are not a unionist party if you allow separatists to stand for election in your name. You are not a unionist party if you are relaxed about another referendum on ripping our great nation apart.
This election, then, will not simply decide who governs Wales, but whether the desire for change translates into meaningful improvement or merely a continuation of the same political culture under a different, more nationalist, banner.