Since becoming its leader, David Cameron has changed the Conservative Party beyond almost all recognition. Focusing on so-called ’social justice’, he has embarked on a wide-ranging reform programme. In a major policy announcement, Cameron today unveiled plans for the conscription of teenagers into what he calls the ‘National Citizen Service’. This bold action marks the completion of the Conservatives’ metamorphosis: not to acceptable and laudable electability, but to irredeemable statism, socialism, and suicide.

The New Tory plan is for all 16-year olds to take part in a six-week social engineering programme at the end of compulsory education, which the Tories rightly believe should end at 16, and not 18 as Labour intends to make it. During the programme, the participants would be forced to do rather pointless things like paint community centres and mow grass verges in a vain attempt to gain ‘inspiration’ and ‘respect for others’.

Cameron hasn’t done much to mask the collectivist ideology underpinning and undermining the new policy. Its name says it all really; ‘National Citizen Service’ combins connotations of the socialism of the National Health Serice with the nationalism of national service conscription, adulterated only by submission to the state for participants, and submission to second-class citizenship for those that deign to argue.

The policy has been heavily promoted by today’s Sun, which congratulates Cameron and itself for succumbing to the populism that the Sun has long espoused. Big government, nationalism, and slave labour in the guise of preserving law and order are the Sun’s favourite cocktail.

It will mix people from different backgrounds. North and south, black and white, rich and poor. They will be putting something back into the community.

And if they want to put something back into the community, they’ll do just that, by working through charities, the Scouts, religious groups, or other similar volunteer programmes. This method intrudes on people’s lives, forcing them to do the bidding of the state, regardless of circumstances, regardless of choice. Cameron’s message is, no matter where you live, no matter what your skin colour, no matter what your parents income, you can’t hide from Big Brother.

It will be away of learning respect for our country and each other, just like national service was.

National service was about forcing people to do what the people with guns said: a way to get cheap meat for the grinder of the expected apocalyptic war with the Soviet Union. If you think that’s a fair comparison, Mr Cameron, you dig your own grave.

Whether individuals are leaving school, moving on from their GCSEs to another qualification, or have dropped out of the system altogether, our national programme would take them out of their comfort zone, provide them with a chance to mix with others away from home.

Take people of ouf the comfort zone? So the New Tories think that it’s the role and responsibility of the state to make people’s lives uncomfortable? Misery may be the currency of oppression, but it certainly shouldn’t be the raison d’etre for it.

The Sun picks up where Dave leaves off.

Bookish swots will be shown there is more to life than just exams.

The dangerous intellectuals must learn the values of national solidarity and service to the greater ideal that they can’t learn in books. Well, except in books that were banned during the Second World War. In fact, let’s just burn all the books to prevent subversive decadent ideas like ‘liberty’, ‘education’, and ‘personal betterment’ spreading.

Teenagers will not be forced by law to take part in the NCS. … Instead, it will become so attractive it will become a natural part of growing up.

So the state will force people using ’soft’ power. It’s already been implied that employers will be forced to give preference to participants. They’d probably ban all non-participants going into higher education. They might increase the tax rate for those that refuse to bow to their demands. Or they might just make it compulsory further down the line when people have stopped caring. I wonder who it was that did that…

Der Stürmer’s own editorial urges us to ‘give it a chance’.

The Boy Scouts offered this sort of community training for more than half a century. The Duke of Edinburgh scheme and Outward Bound courses have been amazingly successful.

And, despite the Sun’s ignorant use of the past tense, they continue to be. For a century, the Scouts have done all that Dave wants to accomplish. And they’ve achieved it all without the heavy hand of the state forcing them.

… not all youngsters are tearaways looking for someone to mug. The vast majority are decent, considerate, and appalled by bad behaviour.

After a two-page spread of belligerent idiocy on the part of the world’s favourite newspaper, we get some sense. Not everyone is a tearaway. Most aren’t. So why does the government think it’s its responsibility to employ this one-size-fits-all national service? By forcing teenagers to work, they do nothing but alienate and belittle them: telling them that their libery is a luxury that the state won’t afford them, and that their future will be a future of compulsion, slavery, and misery. When the outlook’s that bleak, no wonder we have so much under-age drinking.

When Cameron told the world, “There is such a thing as society. It’s not just the same thing as the state”, I rejoiced. Not that I disagreed with Thatcher’s assessment to begin with, but it was refreshing to hear that a politician whose very value comes from his centrism was espousing a fundamentally libertarian argument.

This monstrosity of a policy undermines that. It is a concession by Cameron that individualism is dead, and that liberty has lost. It is a surrender of the big citizen to big government. It’s sad that this leaves no major party’s leadership willing to stand up for rights. Fortunately, it matters not one jot to the friends of freedom that Cameron has thrown in the towel. To us, it only proves that we can’t rely on others to make the case for so long as we have voices ourselves.

The Conservative policy group set up by David Cameron has recommended that the next Tory manifesto support the abolition of the death tax. The tax, officially known as the ‘inheritance tax’, places a crippling burden upon many individuals and families, and is rightly despised as one of the most unfair, unprincipled, and unpractical taxes currently pushed upon the people of this country.

That it’s taken so long for a major party to propose ridding us of this relic is astounding. Although the forebear of the tax dates back to the French Revolutionary Wars, the modern death tax was introduced in 1894. Back then, the government called it what it was: Death duty. It underwent some rebranding, under both Labour and Conservative governments (although the Tories, to their credit, slashed the rate).

There are many lists of criteria of what makes a supposedly ‘good’ tax. However, one criterion is so obvious that it is never even mentioned: no individual ought to be taxed due to his or her own loss. If a man loses his watch, he shouldn’t be ‘punished’ by receiving a bill from HMRC for his neighbours’ kids school fees. But that’s exactly what happens with death tax; if a man dies, he is made to pay for all the extravagances of other people. As if death weren’t enough of a deterrent to popping one’s clogs…

The death tax is the arch-statist devise, entrenching the socialist belief that the state has a right on everything, and that nothing is the realm of the individual. It ranks alongside expropriation - like the death tax, known under euphemism (as ‘compulsory purchase’ or ‘eminent domain’) - as one of the grossest abuses of state power, and therefore the grossest embarrassment to state authority.

Tax at the best of times is a bad thing. Even those most enamoured to it consider it a ‘necessary evil’ (although how ‘necessary’ it is is open to debate), which is hardly the greatest compliment.  Death tax is the most unnecessary and most evil methods of extracting it.  The fact that the Conservative policy group is bold enough to propose its abolition it is a good sign. We can only wait to see if David Cameron is bold enough to finally make the death tax an ex-tax.

After weeks of waiting, Polish President Lech Kaczyński has finally dismissed four ministers from the two smaller partners in the three-party governing coalition. It leaves the larger Law and Justice Party - led by Kaczyński’s brother Jaroslaw - governing on its own, and, without the support of a majority of the national legislature, the Sejm, requires them to go back to the polls.

All very uninteresting so far. However, Law and Justice (PiS) has long been mooted as a potential partner for David Cameron’s new European endeavour outside the European People’s Party (EPP), and, as such, their fortunes matter an awful lot to the New Tories’ approach to European issues.

Unlike the Czech Civic Democrats, who have already signed up to the new grouping, the PiS are not liberal in any sense, and their social attitudes are highly authoritarian: hardening Poland’s already strictly anti-choice abortion laws, prohibiting all recognition of homosexual relationships, banning trading on Sundays, and reintroducing the death penalty.

However, this streak was not enough to appease its coalition partners, who are even more authoritarian: the homophobic Catholic nationalists of the League of Polish Families and the back-to-the-Earth agrarian revanchist socialists of Self-Defense of the Republic of Poland (who, indicative of the unifying ideology of oppression practised by both left and right, are merging!). The PiS itself lost seven MPs earlier this year that thought the government’s position on abortion was too soft on rape victims. Charming.

There are a range of palatable options, though. The largest is the Civic Platform (the sister party of the Czech Civic Democrats), who are encouragingly liberal on both economic and a number of social issues. Their support is concentrated in the less agrarian west of Poland, and amongst the wealthier and better-educated, which, with the Polish economy booming, puts it in a strong position. Another classically liberally-inclined group is the Real Politics Union, which sometimes describes itself as ‘libertarian’. Sadly, it is a damning indictment of Polish political bias that even these ‘libertarians’ deny women their right to an abortion.

If David Cameron is interested in even trying to reform the Conservatives, he has to stay well clear of the rabidly vitriolic fascists that he has threatened to jump into bed with. Moreover, when Poland goes to the poll to elect the new Sejm and its government, the people will determine not just the course taken by their own country, but by the rest of central Europe, which is dominated by Poland. If freedom is to flourish in that part of the world, it is essential that Law and Justice be defeated. For the Tories to give them the time of day is indefensible.

David Davies, the Conservative MP for Monmouth, has argued for an expansion of the prison system in a post on the blog of the deplorably authoritarian Cornerstone Group. So he claims, prison helps society [sic.] by keeping known criminals off the street, with massive economic ramifications. It’s a rare frosty day in hell when any but the most intransigent statist agrees with the Cornerstone Group, but today is just such a day.

The Cornerstone Group represents just about everything that’s wrong with the Conservative Party. They’re Kinder, Küche, Kirche sort of authoritarians, keen on protecting the privileges of the elite, be they the Church of England or the aristocracy, while oppressing the rights of the masses, be they women or ethnic and religious minorities.

However, in advocating prison, they’re not the ones doing the oppressing. They’re the ones defending the oppressed: the victims of crime. By the back-of-an-envelope calculations performed by the Cornerstone Group on the government’s crime statistics, Davies believes that, by doubling the number of prison places in order to house ‘career criminals’ the country can cut the cost of crime in half. That is, for an outlay of £3bn a year, the country can recoup between £30bn and £45bn.

Unquestionably, one of the great problems of recent times has been the deliberate blurring of the lines between the innocent and the guilty: those whose rights are infringed, and those that infringe upon others rights. We’ve seen the innocent punished through ASBOs, the Terrorism Act, detention without trial, ID cards, trial without jury, and so on. At the same time, victimless crimes, that involve no infringement of others’ rights and are thusly not a matter of state concern, such as drug consumption, are outlawed by the Taliban tendency represented by the Cornerstone Group.

The other side is the one with which David Davies agrees: that the guilty get off without serious punishment, or even punishment at all. Most thieves and burglars escape custodial sentences altogether, while even murderers are released after a few years. If this can be fixed by £3bn, to protect the rights of the people so let down by the current system, it’s worth every penny.

Alternatively, of course, one can free up spaces by decriminalising those current activities that are illegal, but not immoral. Take just one area in particular. 12,567 individuals are held at Her Majesty’s pleasure in England and Wales for ‘drug offences’ [sic.], none of which offend the basic liberties of other people. That’s more than are held for robbery and fraud put together, and comes to 16% of the total prison population. Free these innocents, and the state can keep more murderers, rapists, and robbers incarcerated.

The key is to begin to discriminate between what is moral and what is immoral, and decide whether a given action harms the natural rights - to life, liberty, and property - of other individuals. If it doesn’t, it is completely inexcusable for the state to criminalise such an action, which is the mechanism by which it force its own morality upon other people. At the same time, it is the duty of the state to protect its citizens’ natural rights by preventing criminal abuse. If this quest is harmed by insufficient prison places, then that must be resolved, lest the state lose its raison d’être altogether.

Today, Conservative Shadow Chancellor George Osborne announced his party’s plans for reforming state economic governance. In a wide-ranging speech, he called for, amongst other changes, a dramatic shake-up of how the Bank of England’s hierarchy, including limiting the Governor to one term, and making Monetary Policy Committee member selection a transparent process.

There are very good arguments for the state to have no say in monetary issues whatsoever. A central bank is a monopoly supplier of fiat money, forcing upon the people (à la Kublai Khan) a financial regime that may, or may not, be in their interests; in particular, a state that is indebted may force the people to accept a monetary regime that devalues money (à la the Weimar Republic), hurting the individual’s interests. However, if one assumes that it should control the supply of money, it is of paramount importance for the process to be an open and fair one, incorporating the best economic minds the world has to offer.

In that respect, the reforms that the Tories propose are a mixed bag. The idea that the state has any right to operate behind a cloak of secrecy, whilst forcing its will upon the people, is an absurd idea, and, hence, Osborne is right to support open MPC selection. However, there is absolutely no reason to limit the Governor to a single non-renewable term, except for political reasons.

Alan Greenspan (who is, incidentally, now an unpaid advisor to the Bank of England) did a fantastic job at the USA’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, over a period of nineteen years. However, had he been limited to a single term, rather than been allowed to be reappointed by three successive Presidents, the United States economy would be in far worse shape than it is today.

In effect, term limits work in the opposite direction, to transparency; they force upon the citizens a sub-premium choice by limiting their options. At least, if we are to be governed by a statist monetary regime, let it be transparent. But, above all, let it maximise its efficacy by not forcing itself to choose an second-rate greenhorn over a first-rate Greenspan. One of the Shadow Chancellor’s proposals is in that vein, but the other, sadly, is not.