Peter Oborne (London, Daily Mail): Anthony Barnett asks in his generous assessment yesterday of David Cameron’s speech: ‘What is the big problem to which David Cameron is the answer?” I think that the answer is much clearer than Barnett allows, and that Cameron’s speech does go a long way to setting out a coherent Tory analysis of British problems.
The Gordon Brown vision of British government is top-down, centralising and technocratic. It is very precisely in the Fabian tradition that that state knows best how to run people’s lives.
Cameron in his speech yesterday showed real signs that he has begun to evolve a distinctive and philosophically coherent vision of the role of the state, entirely consistent with the Conservative tradition. He sees clearly how the state is often a deadening influence: bureaucratic, incomprehensible and hostile to individual aspiration and achievement. I think that this came through especially strongly in Cameron’s very passionate and moving analysis of the NHS, and how freedom should be given back to doctors and nurses. There were almost equally powerful passages on granting independence to schools, freeing the police from bureaucratic demands, and giving real power to local government. These were not arguments for 'rolling it back' but for pushing responsibility outwards to those on the spot where it matters.
To return to Anthony’s question – Cameron's Tory political philosophy offers the solution to the systemic failures of New Labour in government (think NHS reform), which has been caused by a disastrous obsession with government from the centre. This doctrine is, of course, true to the Fabian tradition, and it is no wonder that Sunder Katwala of the Fabian society found David Cameron’s speech so unsatisfactory. But the Tories do have an alternative philosophical tradition. It stretches all the way back to Burke. It would be mad and wrong to abandon it for Scandanavian practices. This is the thesis that Cameron was striving towards yesterday.
It should also be noted that the structures of Labour and Tory conference reflected this philosophical divergence. Labour’s conference was about Gordon Brown alone, with discussion squashed and even cabinet ministers constrained to seven minutes each. The Tory conference, by contrast, gave scope to a number of other powerful voices: William Hague, David Davis, George Osborne, Michael Gove and (in a wonderful speech) Iain Duncan Smith all made powerful, original and diverse contributions of a kind that were unthinkable at Labour. There is a Tory team of capable, independent minded players capable of the "Cabinet government" Brown has called for, whereas Brown's people are often placemen and women and are all under harness.
This difference was also true on the fringe, so often the pointer to a party's future. As Georgina Henry of CommentisFree at the Guardian remarked to me, the Tory fringe was very open and stimulating. To say Labour's was was muted would be generous. I turned up to one Tribune event, entitled I think ‘The Labour left: alive and well’ only to find it cancelled.
Comments
Peter Oborne states that Cameron is developing "a distinctive and philosophically coherent vision of the role of the state, entirely consistent with the Conservative tradition". Yes, Cameron's speech was classic conservatism: not especially original and, to some extent, more question-begging than providing the answers. The vision is based on a quasi-Christian Tory belief / hope that if you give people the freedom to choose how to run their lives and organisations, they'll tend to make the right choices: morally and practically, in terms of fulfilling their needs and aspirations, and those of their dependants.
In other words, this is the antidote to the nanny state, or to Gordon Brown's centralism, as you say. But there's no guarantee - philosophical or practical - that this will necessarily produce better results. It all depends whether people are prepared to take on the (moral) responsibility for improving their lives and those of others that underpins the optimism of the vision. If people aren't prepared to embrace responsibility as well as freedom, what you could get is a licence for selfish individualism and ideological partisanship at the local level such as characterised the Thatcher years.
Plus, in some respects, hospitals, GP surgeries, schools, etc. have been given more autonomy under Labour (building on reforms started by the previous Tory government). How is a new wave of Tory reforms going to perform any better? And what reason for optimism other than Cameron's 'belief' in the innate goodness of the individual is there that giving schools and hospitals much greater administrative and financial autonomy won't just result in increasingly market-driven, two-tier services, with the wealthy being able to access better-quality services than the less wealthy? And what does zero tolerance towards crime, anti-social behaviour and drug abuse mean in practice? Need some more detail on his carrot and stick approach to our 'broken' society, I feel.
Cameron's vision about empowering people by bringing democracy back down to the local level sounds good in principle. But how will abuses be dealt with: city mayors elected on a minority vote with powers, for instance, to override other councils' planning decisions; unrepresentative local council majorities, elected on a low-turnout, first-past-the-post basis, playing fast and loose with budgets and Council Tax rates? Are we going to have more Thatcher-style confrontations between a (centralising) Tory government a la Thatcher and, say, Labour- and Lib Dem-controlled urban councils? And we can't really trust Cameron's democratic credentials so long as he's unwilling to even acknowledge the West Lothian question and carries on the pretence that he's talking about Britain, whereas any power the Tories might gain and exercise is almost entirely limited to England. If he wants Britain to be able to vote on the EU constitution, will he also allow a vote on, say, an English parliament, or will he press for English votes on English matters in the existing parliament? To say nothing of PR: well, he did say nothing of PR, because he's still aiming for an unrepresentative absolute majority.
Same old one-nation, one-party Toryism under a new guise. (See my take on his speech at http://britologywatch.wordpress.com.)
Post new comment