Show Us The Money

Two events, a couple of thousand miles apart, will go some way to showing the EU electorate which way centre right and far right politics will be going in the next few years.

Every Conservative Party conference since 1997 has been a bit of a bun fight, either recovering from a defeat at a General Election, deciding on whether or not to elect a new leader or praising a leader who has all the political virility of a neutered cat. The Conservative lead in the polls is dropping as people slowly get over the latest horrors of the credit-crunch/financial meltdown - and begin to believe in fairies and that Gordon Brown's 11 year stint as Chancellor didn't result in a calamitous state of affairs at home.

The Conservative party have a snappy new policy website, here - (I know Span will have it bookmarked) but for any non-believers out there (like me) it really is worth a visit to read and ponder over the policies. They have snappy new policies (well actually some of them are very old policies put in a political microwave and warmed through for the post Blair generation). What they have to do over the next two years is turn poll leads into election victories. They have to address the big issues: health, education, immigration - the issues that will shape this country over the next decade any beyond.

Some of their policies are common sense and you wonder why nobody has nicked them, the funny thing is that some of them are already being enacted at grass roots level - particularly their views of house building. I have to say here that David Cameron has been very active at local level and whilst it hasn't found it's way into the national news that he is supporting campaigns against building on green belt he is certainly backing his local MP's in this cause. On the immigration issue that old chestnut the Border Police rears its head and again the immigration policy is sound but who defines the phrase 'economic value' - I would suggest that anybody who is earning below the national minimum wage and responsible for contributing to remittances to countries outside the U.K is of no economic value at all. Training and apprenticeships bob up and down in policy documents like a dead body from a torpedoed U-Boat - they are worthy and important and up to now small businesses have been reluctant to engage apprentices because it actually costs them money and too often in this country staff are seen as a cost and not a long term investable asset. I know from personal experience that small businesses have been reluctant to take on apprenticeship schemes because of the cost to them, the carrot of a £2,000 award per apprentice will help in a lot of cases.

Too often Party Political Conferences are conducted for the benefit of those 'in the hall,' this week the Conservative Party has the chance to open up the debate beyond the television studios of the BBC and ITN, to give airtime to more people than just George Osborne, somebody who I have a lot of political time for, and show what their vision is. The 2010 General Election won't be won or lost this week but the foundations of a victory could be laid.

In Austria it is immigration that will dominate the General Election. The anti-Jewish faction of Austrian politics has never gone away and now the right wing are openly hostile not only to Jews but also to Romas, Muslims and anybody it would seem who doesn't posses the Aryan good looks demanded by such an insular country. The loss of jobs to 'ouslanders' and the gradual diminution of Austrian values to people from outside the country are key to this election. With recent riots in Italy, France and Germany - caused by the hard right it has to be said - the world's eyes will be on Austria to see which way the election goes. Too often the rise of the far right in Europe has been put down to the work of a few influencing the many, it's just possible that this week we will witness the rise of the many turning against the few.