After an excellent group session at CCHQ yesterday, I can thoroughly recommend Janice Lavery to candidates:
Janice combines her professional expertise as a mentor and executive coach in the corporate sector with her insight and knowledge of the Conservative Party, to help parliamentary candidates maximise their potential to secure more interviews and deliver a confident and memorable performance at every stage of the selection process.
via Janice Lavery.
As David Cameron throws open the list to more candidates from outside the political mainstream, I personally recommend these five books from my reading list plus some first-class think tanks.
See the links in the sidebar for more book recommendations.
Tansey and Jackson, “Politics: The Basics”, because you have to start somewhere. Via Amazon:
This highly successful introduction to the world of politics has been fully revised and updated in collaboration with a new co-author, Nigel Jackson of the University of Plymouth. The new edition builds on the reputation for clarity and comprehensive coverage of the previous editions. It explores the varieties of political systems, the main political movements and key issues at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Bartholomew, “The Welfare State We’re In”, because in our essentially rich society, a human tragedy is in progress: we need to know why, and what we can do about it.
See also the reports of The Centre for Social Justice, Breakdown Britain and Breakthrough Britain, where Iain Duncan Smith writes:
For the last six years, I have been visiting many of Britain’s most difficult and fractured communities. I have seen levels of social breakdown which have appalled and angered me. In the fourth largest economy in the world, too many people live in dysfunctional homes, trapped on benefits. Too many children leave school with no qualifications or skills to enable them to work and prosper. Too many communities are blighted by alcohol and drug addiction, debt and criminality and have low levels of life expectancy.
Our interim report Breakdown Britain charted the extent of the problem in extensive detail. Britain tops the ‘league tables’ when it comes to spiraling levels of drug addiction, single parenting, poor education and debt. Many people told us that the quality of their communities had deteriorated, maintaining that the crime levels were much higher than those reported to the police. The recent rise in gang warfare, which resulted in a spate of teenage stabbings and shootings in our cities, is a savage illustration ofthe deep fractures in so many of our inner city communities. A recent UNICEF Report concluded that we have the lowest levels of child well being in Europe. A further report has shown how young people in Britain are more likely to be unemployed and out of education than in almost any other country in Europe.
