Controlling Conservatives

The present crop of Tory leaders seem to have turned their collective back on their party's traditional reliance on the idea of individual liberty. This is particularly the case with their apparent growing willingness to tell the media, and country at large, what language they don't want to be used. First off, we had IDS and his acolytes bashing the Beeb over the bedroom tax, on the spurious grounds that he and Cameron preferred 'spare room subsidy'. Post Tory general election win, the rot has spread, with Gove telling his Ministry of Justice civil servants how to write (as a former journalist himself, he should know better...). Then we had Cameron lecturing the media about his dislike of the IS tag, on the grounds that the group is neither 'Islamic' nor a 'state'. As with the bedroom tax name debacle, the BBC (Charter renewal in the offing) cravenly capitulated to this bollocks. And now, suitably emboldened, IDS is back with his stated intention of changing the definition of 'child poverty' because he doesn't like the way it is covered in news reports and social media. This thought/news controlling tendency, which you'd have thought Tories would have run a mile from, due to its Soviet-style origins (and Orwellian overtones) also manifests itself in the ridiculous way some Tory politicians try to dispose of an argument by stating blithely that they 'don't recognise' some fact or set of statistics contrary to their own world-view (good examples of this dark art of thought-spin tend to fall most readily from the lips of Theresa May, when asked to comment on an opposing view). The supposed party of liberty has turned into a modern-manifestation of the stupid party, but mainstream media is dangerously accepting, when it should be ridiculing from the rooftops - it's the only way to drag Cameron and his cabinet of blinkered fantasist neo-cons back to anything that remotely resembles reality.