I may be a socialist

I've been spending quite a lot of idle cycles on Facebook with the rather fun Nations game. My nation now scores very highly in social freedom, education, technology and pretty much every other meaningful statistic. This is not surprising as I've consistently gone with pro-education, pro-choice decisions and a marked reluctance to execute people who disagree with me. However my Government Wealth score is very defiantly in the red. I guess I should try and tax people a little more ;-)

I watched David Cameron's full conference speech and I have to say I'm pretty happy with it. It was fairly measured and didn't make promises he couldn't keep. The speech was pretty policy light which is understandable. However the call to abandon a third runway at Heathrow and build a high speed rail network linking north to south sounds like an eminently sensible proposal to me. We certainly need a more balanced economy across the country. A large amount of the speech was countering the current trend towards the state being everything to everybody. The concept that the state should solve every persons problems for them has an infantilising effect on the whole population, not to mention bringing out the worst tendencies of authoritarian government. The call to break the state monopoly on education is also something I think is interesting. The current system which only allows certain special interest groups to set-up semi-autonomous schools is terribly biased. It's also good to see the Conservatives fully on board with progressive employment reform and behind things like flexible working.

But in general the thing I liked most about the speech is it gave me a good impression of the values Cameron claims to have. If he's sincere I can see myself trusting him to make the right calls as Prime Minister. Certainly more so than the current incumbent.