The Full Spectrum

Labour has published an alternative Coalition Agreement, detailing the failures of those who signed the original one.

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• Front-loaded cuts to the police are leading to the loss of over 16,000 police officers and police forces being driven to the “cliff-edge”. 5,000 police officers have been taken out of 999 response teams, neighbourhood teams and traffic units.

• The Government is weakening the powers of the police to tackle crime and anti-social behaviour.

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• The Government’s Strategic Defence and Security Review was widely criticised and has been unravelling fast since its unveiling. Vital military resources that the SDSR said should be scrapped had to be extended for use in Libya and senior military figures have warned that operations would have been more reactive, and cheaper, if our Armed Forces had kept some capabilities that were already scrapped in the SDSR.

• Cuts in the Strategic Defence and Security Review have resulted in the heads of the Army, the Navy and RAF saying that the UK could no longer aspire to the “full spectrum” of military capabilities in its wake.

• The most recent embarrassment for the Government’s unravelling SDSR is their chaotic aircraft carrier programme. The Government has left Britain with no aircraft to fly from aircraft carriers for a decade after scrapping the Harrier fleet and now Ministers cannot tell us how or when they will close this capability gap. A u-turn, reverting back to Labour’s preferred policy, is rumoured and would be a personal humiliation for David Cameron since he denounced Labour’s choice as an “error”.

• At the same time the Government has treated our Armed Forces and their families with insensitivity during their SDSR redundancy plans, sending redundancy emails to 38 soldiers, one on duty in Afghanistan, and sacking pilots just as they come to the end of their training. This comes as cuts are being made to housing, pensions and allowances for those on the front line.

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• The Government are weakening action on illegal immigration, abandoning checks at our border last summer, stopping the routine fingerprinting of illegal immigrants trying to enter the UK through the Channel Tunnel, and seeing the number of people removed for breaking the rules going down not up.

• Cuts to the Border Agency that go too far, too fast are undermining our border security and giving a chaotic first impression of the UK in Olympic year as some passengers are forced to queue for hours to enter the UK.

• The latest statistics on net migration revealed an increase of 15,000 people on the year, up to 250,000, showing the Government are yet to set out workable and deliverable policies to meet their pledge to cut migration to the tens of thousands.

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• The Government’s shambolic handling of the deportation of Abu Qatada has led to warnings that he could be re-released on bail within days as a result of the Government not knowing what day it was.

• Border chaos last summer means that, according to Home Secretary Theresa May, we “will never know” how many people entered the country without the proper checks.

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• It is clear there is a gap between David Cameron’s Big Society rhetoric and the reality of his Government’s policies. The Tory-led Government’s cuts, which go too far, too fast, are having a devastating impact on the voluntary sector. According to research by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, employment in the voluntary sector has fallen by nearly nine per cent in just one year.

• In the Budget, George Osborne announced a new cap on income tax reliefs for those who give more than £50,000 to charity. Charities have warned that this “charity tax” will have a serious impact on their ability to raise funds through philanthropic giving.

It is unfortunate, though understandable in tribal terms, that the word “Tory” is used throughout this document.

The above conservative, patriotic, classically Tory critique of this Government by the Labour Party is factual, devastating, and wholly in line with the rise of Labour as the party of Tory Britain from Thurrock, to Edinburgh, to Aberdeen, to Chipping Norton. That’s right. Chipping Norton.

Now Labour just needs the wit to stand aside, though in return for union funding and the obligations thus created, in favour of one of those Independents who wiped the floor with the Conservatives in Montgomeryshire, and in favour of similar figures who could storm the Lib Dem bastions of the West Country and the North of Scotland.