socialmedian: No defence cuts, say New Tories

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No defence cuts, say New Tories

Source: guardian.co.uk Politics

Jul 03, 2009

Summary

ConservativeHome's survey of Tory candidates in winnable seats shows them to be localists, pro-nuclear and in favour of ringfencing the defence budget

Do take a look at the ConservativeHome survey of 144 Tory candidates in winnable seats, which you can also see as a PDF). Patrick Wintour has already written up the key findings in today's Guardian – "New generation of Tories is isolationist and Eurosceptic" – but there is some other good material in the survey which the paper did not have space for.

The new Tories are genuine localists: 92% of them believe that local councils should be given more power. Perhaps that's not surprising, because that's party policy. But 38% of them are also in favour of replacing VAT with a local sales tax and moving towards making local councils self-financing (with 36% against). This goes way beyond party policy (although it is a proposal in Daniel Hannan and Douglas Carswell's book The Plan).

They want the number of MPs cut: 74% say there are too many MPs. Again, this is party policy, but there's always been some doubt as to wheth

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