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.
