9 October 2012

KILL A BURGLAR, WIN A METRO

It's been back to the eighties at the Tory conference so far. The opinion polls and focus groups show middle-class swing voters angry about immigration, crime and scroungers -- so the Tories are targeting them with some extraordinarily crude messages, the most idiotic of which so far has been Chris Grayling's endorsement of the householder's right to shoot a burglar. This is utterly desperate stuff. "Kill the burglar!" might have made a line in a Smiths' song 30 years ago (it didn't, but it works very well in "Panic" instead of "Hang the DJ"), but it's so removed from everyday life as experienced by most Brits as to be ridiculous as a party policy. Boris Johnson was asinine, and if he's the Tories' best hope they should give up on general elections for 15 years. David Cameron has a big job to rescue this conference from disaster tomorrow.

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