Social Justice

There has been a bit of a storm on Conservative leaning websites with regards to a recent David Willetts speech. He seems to be obsessed with "Social Justice". Now I agree with quite a lot of what he says but this has got me worried

"Mr Willetts identified faith in economic freedom and personal freedom as two of the core components of Conservatism. The third was commitment to social reform"

Social reform? That's not the sort of conservatism I support. On the toryleadership blog they have a little of excerpt from an IDS article in The Sunday Times recently;

"Social mobility the life chances of the worst-off has declined over the lifetime of the welfare state. Socialism and its “new” variants are not the way to assist the marginalised and vulnerable. The poorest people have got poorer under new Labour. It is time we Conservatives began to present an alternative."

Now making VAT less regressive by giving excemptions and zero-rates for items mainly consumed by the poor sounds like a good place to start, whereas government plans as IDS pointed out have the opposite effect of what they originally intended.