About our next Prime Minister

[Sheilbh]

The Spectator's (it's Britain's big conservative weekly magazine) running a bumper issue on David Cameron and what his big ideas are.  In the next post I'll have one terribly positive review of Cameron and one that's terribly negative.  Here's the editor or the political editor:

Cameron's big idea is simple: he doesn't need one
James Forsyth
Wednesday, 6th January 2010

The Tories have opened the new year in a blaze of speeches and promises. But what does it all add up to? Nothing, says James Forsyth — and that's deliberate. There will never be such a thing as Cameronism

Once more, search parties are being sent out to look for David Cameron's big idea. They will return empty-handed. For the truth is that there is no big idea. However much social responsibility, the post-bureaucratic age or progressive conservatism might be talked up as the 'big idea', they are not it. Rather, they are a set of classic conservative insights updated for the 21st century. Cameron is not an ideologue but rather that very English, very Tory thing: a principled pragmatist.

'It is impossible to understand David by applying any ideological spectrum test,' warns one member of the shadow Cabinet. This is not meant in a derisory way. It is just that Cameron is not a politician who worries about ideological purity. As he wrote soon after becoming Tory leader, 'I don't believe in "isms". Words like communism, socialism, capitalism and republicanism all conjure up one image in my mind: extremism.'

What David Cameron really believes is a question that intrigues even his oldest political friends. A while back, I was having a drink with two of them: one close enough to have been to his stag party, the other to play a key role in his selection as the candidate for Witney. We began to talk about what really motivated the man who is likely to be prime minister by the summer. Was it anything more than reaching the top of the cursus honorum? Both leant back in thought. Then one piped up: marriage and the family and education.

In fact, one said, Cameron believed so strongly in marriage that he had even berated his friend and strategy guru Steve Hilton for not getting married — and delivered this dressing down in front of a roomful of people at work. As for education, Cameron took that brief when Michael Howard offered him any job he wanted in the shadow Cabinet after the last election. So this, from two of the people who know him best, is what Cameron is all about.

But after four years as leader of the opposition, is there anything on either front that he can be personally associated with? All he promises on marriage is a vague commitment to recognise it in the tax system and on official forms. Earlier this week, Mr Cameron himself got into a muddle as to whether this was a pledge or an aspiration. As for education, Mr Cameron has not given a speech on it for two years. Why? Because his communications chief, Andy Coulson, thinks that the subject reminds voters that his boss went to Eton.

The obsession with winning the day-to-day political battles (a game which, it should be said, the Cameroons play well) has made them difficult to define ideologically. But this emphasis on tactics has created a new, longer-term strategic vulnerability: a perception that they don't stand for anything. That Mr Cameron is (as Labour attack dogs like to put it) nothing more than a 'slick salesman'. The irony is that their desire to dodge every attack line disguises the genuinely radical policies that are being developed.

At times, Cameron has tried to set out a credo. The party released a book of his speeches called Social Responsibility: The big idea for Britain's future in 2007. The message made sense as far it went, but it was hard to see it as a blueprint for government. The party has also enthusiastically embraced 'nudge' theory — what its authors call 'libertarian paternalism', which argues that government should steer people towards making the right choices, not try to compel them to do so. So, for example, people would be automatically enrolled in a pension scheme but have the opportunity to opt out if they wanted. Again, a clever idea that is a useful guide in several policy areas: but not one that explains, or even pretends to explain, the fundamental question of the moment — how can the government best stimulate economic growth?

This desire to shut down potential lines of attack has also led the Tories to steer clear of close association with any thinker or group. There is no Cameroon equivalent of the Centre for Policy Studies, the organisation that prepared the way for Thatcherism. The closest there has been is Policy Exchange, the think-tank where Cameron launched his leadership bid and from where he hired several staffers. But then Policy Exchange released a report that proposed abandoning economically unproductive northern cities. The story snowballed as a mischievous media treated it as Tory policy. It led BBC bulletins, was subject to editorial attack in the Mirror and overshadowed Cameron's regional tour which took in several northern cities. The lesson the leadership took from the affair was that think-tanks can be the source of unhelpful news stories, and are best kept at a distance.

As a result, Mr Cameron does not even have the equivalent of Anthony Giddens, let alone Keith Joseph, doing his intellectual bulldozing. Whenever someone has appeared close to filling that role, the Tories have grown nervous. At one point, the press was lauding the 'Red Tory' Phillip Blond as Cameron's philosopher-in-chief. This made the leadership jittery. So when Mr Cameron turned up to launch Blond's new think-tank, he was careful to say that he didn't agree with everything Blond had said — or would say in the future.

Cameron does, though, come from a political tradition grounded in English history. He is a Tory pragmatist. He knows that nothing can be achieved without power and is relaxed about ideological inconsistencies. Take his differing approach to public services. On education, his party is offering a radical, supply-side revolution. But on health, the Tories boast of their acceptance of the status quo.

When he needs to, Cameron can do ideas. During the Tory leadership campaign he delivered the most neoconservative speech ever given by a British politician: it directly compared jihadism to Nazism and the present to the 1930s. But less than 18 months later, he was giving another speech explaining why he was not a neoconservative after all. The difference? In the Tory leadership contest, there were votes to be won in flirting with neoconservatism. But Cameron does not believe in it — it is far too doctrinaire for his tastes — so when that imperative went, Cameron happily discarded it.

Equally instructive is the Cameron circle — and its low ideological price of admission. Mr Cameron won the Tory leadership by assembling the broadest coalition of any candidate. His support came from social not ideological groups. He was backed by the Old Etonian bloc vote and the party's young political professionals, those who had cut their teeth as special advisers, party officials or journalists. His staff today contains people who voted Labour in 2005 and, ergo, are against the very Tory manifesto which he authored. There is no ideological enforcer in the Cameron circle, no one determining who is 'one of us' and who is not.

So what does this tell us about the kind of prime minister we might expect after the election? The next parliament is going to be dominated by the inextricably linked issues of how to get the deficit down and how to get the economy growing once more. A Thatcher-style politician would start from first principles with this question: what conditions lead to economic growth? But the Conservatives have deliberately avoided getting into that discussion. Rather, their plans are a mix of fiscal conservatism, supply-side economics and political pragmatism. As one shadow Cabinet member puts it, 'David has none of the purists' delight in policy for policy's sake. He just wants to know if it works.'

Baroness Thatcher was never as ideologically rigid a politician as legend has it. But she could still, as leader of the opposition, turn up to a meeting and slam a volume of Hayek down on the table and declare: 'This is what we believe.' Her convictions were strong enough for her to push through a radical budget in 1981 that outraged conventional opinion — so much so that 364 economists wrote to the Times to denounce it. She was at war with conventional wisdom. Cameron will have no equivalent intellectual driving force when he contemplates the emergency budget the Tories will have to deliver if they win power.

A Cameron premiership will be a test of the utility of traditional English conservatism. If its insights are not sufficient, Prime Minister Cameron, pragmatist that he is, will become more ideological. That is the paradox of his pragmatism. But if Cameron succeeds on his own terms, if he is the prime minister who guides Britain out of this new spiral of decline, there will not be a creed called 'Cameronism'. To create an 'ism', you have to believe in 'isms'.

[Sheilbh]

Then the critique:

There's little comfort to be found on Cameron's woolly centre ground
David Selbourne
06 January 2010

'It's a brand new year', Mr Cameron told his Oxford audience last Saturday as he launched his election campaign.

'It's a brand new year', Mr Cameron told his Oxford audience last Saturday as he launched his election campaign. Why, so it is. He also has a 'new politics' on offer — new, new, new — but without a coherent philosophy, Tory or any other, to underpin it; no Disraeli, or Balfour, or Thatcher he.

Indeed, at a time when many of Britain's institutions have been debauched during Labour's period in office, when the nation has largely lost its sense of moral and political direction, and when citizenship of an increasingly identity-less country signifies less than at any time in its history, the feebleness of the Tory response is astounding.

Britain is not only in poor shape economically, but politically. Its parliament is discredited in the public's eyes and has lost its authority over the polity, perhaps irrecoverably. Party organisations and memberships are in the doldrums, and the independence of the civil service has been compromised, especially by Blairism's corruptions of it. At the same time, much of the battered country's legislative and legal sovereignty has been surrendered to Europe.

The non-Conservative might therefore have expected genuinely conservative themes to be commanding the party's 'address to the people', not least because such themes have a continuing resonance with the public. Among them are the principle of nation, the valuing of its history and traditions, and the defence of established institutions — not their dispersal into private hands. These themes also include pride in citizenship and in the fulfilment of its duties (not 'responsibilities'), the upholding of the rule of law, and the belief that a common value system is necessary if civil society is to cohere.

Yet they have largely disappeared from the Conservative party's current stance, or can be glimpsed only in dilute, timid or half-baked forms. It is as if the party, in its 'modernised', pick'n'mix condition, was embarrassed by the very impulse to conserve. But this dissolution of principle has an obvious primary cause: the dominance of the vulgar 'free market' 'low-tax-and-small-state' sales pitch, which has played havoc with the moral authority of the Conservative inheritance in Britain.

It has left a void which today's Tory leadership has attempted to fill by waffle: about aspiration, opportunity and change — and last weekend about 'building the big society'. There has, historically, been no Toryism as meaningless as this. Yet the nature of our times, as well as the needs of a democracy, make demands upon a Conservative party which are plain enough, or so one would think.

They are demands to defend the principle of the independent nation-state from usurpation of its powers, and to rise to the challenges of accelerating social disintegration, the implosion of the parliamentary system, and intensifying external threat. It might have been expected that the Conservative party would demonstrate qualities of command and vision which past crises — some of them of lesser dimension than those of today — have evoked in its predecessors.

Instead, the crass Tory prospectus has over the last couple of years offered to 'repair the broken society' while simultaneously 'leaving people to live their own lives'. Never mind the contradiction. Make poverty history and create a more egalitarian society, just like Labour aimed (and failed) to do? No problem. 'Strong public infrastructure' and improved NHS, together with cuts in public spending? Of course. 'Free business from over-regulation' but also 'stand up to big business'? That's us. Wear a red tie one day and a blue one the next? On the 'centre ground', why not?

Why not? Because liberal democracies are more fragile than they look, and ours is in deep enough trouble without further dissolution of its moral and political orders. And when words, principles, parties and institutions lose their meanings, and a free-for-all takes their place in the name of 'modernisation', a weak Conservative party can only unhinge society further. Britain cannot afford its alternative party of government to be in such intellectual disarray.

Moreover, for the Tories to have lost their moorings and to be ineffectively led leaves a historic vacuum. The party has traditionally possessed an authority and even a style, which — for its foes too — helped anchor the political system as a whole. No longer.

David Selbourne is a political philosopher and theorist. The Principle of Duty is published by Faber.

And the fulsome praise:

Cameron is our Disraeli
Peter Oborne
9 January 2010

There is a certain type of bovine political intelligence which hates David Cameron.

There is a certain type of bovine political intelligence which hates David Cameron. It cannot forgive the Tory leader his popularity, his beautiful wife, his upper-middle-class ease —  and above all his astonishing success in rebuilding the Conservative party. The core criticism works like this: David Cameron is an empty and opportunistic former PR executive, interested only in power for its own sake, utterly devoid of ideas let alone principles, morally indistinguishable from Tony Blair, and in the pocket of Rupert Murdoch.

And it must be acknowledged that this portrait contains some truth. He also lacks that visceral connection with ordinary voters that marked out Margaret Thatcher. But it is partly for these very reasons that Cameron has been able to rescue Conservatism from the angry factionalism and relentless search for ideological purity of ten years ago. Cameron recognises that great political parties tend to be coalitions.

So he has created an environment where Kenneth Clarke and William Hague can both occupy major positions in the same shadow Cabinet, and where social liberals like Michael Gove can rub shoulders with social conservatives like Iain Duncan Smith. Of course, this kind of co-existence involves compromise and, sometimes, lack of clarity.

David Cameron has also substantially repudiated the legacy of Margaret Thatcher. He calls himself a 'one-nation Tory' —  the label chosen by her opponents. It is worth recalling, however, that circumstances obliged Thatcher to be a centraliser, who worked against the grain of the traditional British state. It should also be recalled that it was only late in her brilliant career that she abandoned pragmatism for the radical ideology that has defined — and to some extent obscured — her legacy.

Cameron's own political philosophy predates Thatcher and, for that matter, Heath. It can be traced back to a purer school of Conservatism which was first articulated by Burke, reached its apotheosis with Disraeli and Baldwin, and appeared to have died out when Macmillan left office in 1963. This kind of Conservatism sees itself as above class or faction and profoundly believes that it acts only in the national interest. This is why Cameron says again and again that he feels as profound a sense of responsibility for the poor and the unprivileged as New Labour claims to do. It's just that he believes that New Labour's target-setting, centralised edicts, and top-down government have failed miserably.

So a Cameron Tory party will seek to restore the local structures of the British state that have been wiped out over the last 50 years, and rebuild our great institutions, above all the family, which have been undermined by New Labour. He believes that only society, and emphatically not the state, can solve Britain's most wicked problems of crime, poverty and so on.

He has come into politics out of a sense of personal service and duty. He believes in self-reliance, patriotism and personal independence. He will not, as Tony Blair did, abuse his office for personal enrichment. He will not be intoxicated, as Blair was, by power for its own sake. He will not go weak at the knees when he meets an American president or international tycoon. He may very well fail, but he is rooted in a very clear and purely British set of values. I can think of no Conservative leader who stands so squarely in the Tory intellectual, social, moral and political tradition.

Peter Oborne is political columnist on the Daily Mail and associate editor of The Spectator.

[crazy canuck]

Asking what a leader's politics are these days seems a mug's game.   The world is a completely different place from the time when the Iron Lady stood against socialism.

It would be interesting to know what the political philosophers are saying about the modern version of the politics of pragmatism which appears to have taken hold all over the Western world.

[Razgovory]

What is a "mugs game"?  I have many mugs but they never do much but hold coffee.  Do they play games at night when they are in the cupboard? 

[crazy canuck]

What is a "mugs game"?  I have many mugs but they never do much but hold coffee.  Do they play games at night when they are in the cupboard?

Its times like this when I use a reference that it seemed everyone understood just yesterday that I begin to feel my age.

[The Brain]

Is that the game Cal plays at his house?

[grumbler]

Its times like this when I use a reference that it seemed everyone understood just yesterday that I begin to feel my age.

Remember where you are.  You are not dealing with rocket scientists here.  I knew exactly what you were saying, but then I get out more than the Languish average.

[Sheilbh]

It would be interesting to know what the political philosophers are saying about the modern version of the politics of pragmatism which appears to have taken hold all over the Western world.

Is the current pragmatism different to the 90s managerialism?  I think we're on our way back into a more ideological age because, for the first time in several decades, I think the role of the state is really up for debate again.

[Razgovory]

Its times like this when I use a reference that it seemed everyone understood just yesterday that I begin to feel my age.

Remember where you are.  You are not dealing with rocket scientists here.  I knew exactly what you were saying, but then I get out more than the Languish average.

The fact that you it was you who understood him probably doesn't make him feel better.  You are older then God.

[Josquius]

What is a "mugs game"?  I have many mugs but they never do much but hold coffee.  Do they play games at night when they are in the cupboard?

Its times like this when I use a reference that it seemed everyone understood just yesterday that I begin to feel my age.

Its a perfectly understandable phrase.
Raz is just being a silly yank.

[crazy canuck]

The fact that you it was you who understood him probably doesn't make him feel better.  You are older then God.

From what I have gleaned about Grumbler over the years I suspect we are similar in age.  If that makes us Godlike in your view then that is just one more benefit of being older and wiser then you.

[crazy canuck]

It would be interesting to know what the political philosophers are saying about the modern version of the politics of pragmatism which appears to have taken hold all over the Western world.

Is the current pragmatism different to the 90s managerialism?  I think we're on our way back into a more ideological age because, for the first time in several decades, I think the role of the state is really up for debate again.

I dont think there is any difference between the two.  The 90s was a time when all things were possible.  The Cold War had just ended.  The Battle over what form the State should take ended and we could concentrate on how a Capitalist Democracy should best be governed.  With the ideological arguments out of the way politicians could no longer rely on the old slogans (particularly on the Left and Right).  Blair had to create the new left (which looked a lot like centre right) and the Right could no longer rely on being tough on the commies to get votes.   Instead politicians had to become pragmatic managers of the business of government.  And they still do.

I dont see ideology coming back any time soon.  As I said in another thread, I see wide spread agreement still on basic social issues (democracy is good, trade is generally good, reasonable regulation is good etc.).  The only places you see much disagreement is on the edges.  We are even further removed from the old ideological battles.  The real fight now is on the details of government (eg, what policies are better then others regarding health care, global warming, dealing with terrorists etc.) That is where the battle should be waged.

One of the differences between us may be that I lived through the 70s and 80s when there was a real Communist Party in Canada and I met real Socialists who wanted to change the very structure of the way we are governed.  To me the debates that are occuring now are only over the details of how a to govern which is something far more tame then the ideologues I once had to contend with.

[Razgovory]

The fact that you it was you who understood him probably doesn't make him feel better.  You are older then God.

From what I have gleaned about Grumbler over the years I suspect we are similar in age.  If that makes us Godlike in your view then that is just one more benefit of being older and wiser then you.

You fought at Actium too?

[crazy canuck]

The fact that you it was you who understood him probably doesn't make him feel better.  You are older then God.

From what I have gleaned about Grumbler over the years I suspect we are similar in age.  If that makes us Godlike in your view then that is just one more benefit of being older and wiser then you.

You fought at Actium too?

Bow down to your God.