Amid fanfare, David Cameron took part in the unveiling on Thursday of ResPublica, a new think tank devoted to “Red Toryism”, an idea conceived by Phillip Blond, a garrulous former lecturer in theology. To left-wing and right-wing critics alike, Red Toryism has echoes of “fried snowballs”, the late philosopher Leszek Kolakowski’s acid description of democratic communism. What is the Tory leader doing in such interesting company?
Cameron is no intellectual slouch but the Conservatives — once the home of radical ideas in the late 1970s and early 1980s — have seemed a bit quiet of late. Enter Blond, who argues that “the welfare state disempowered working-class people by taking away their ability to self-organise”. So far, so Tory. Anyone who wants to find out more should get hold of a decades old Institute of Economic Affairs book of essays, The Long Debate on Poverty, which extolled the work of friendly societies, co-operatives and mutuals abolished by the state.
On the other hand, Blond also argues that free market economics are dangerous. In his view, the danger is of monopoly capitalism and a soulless, materialistic culture that degrades civic society. Blond bears a striking physical resemblance to the socialist firebrand Aneurin Bevan, so perhaps inspiration was close at hand in the mirror.
Cameron curiously spent only five minutes at the launch of ResPublica before leaving. His appearance had echoes of Gordon Brown’s belated arrival in Lisbon to sign the European constitreaty after his fellow leaders had concluded their celebrations at lunch. Cameron salutes Red Toryism but does not embrace it.
The Conservative leader is an Anglican who speaks of his God as if he were an ageing relative that he really ought to visit more often, but he is genuinely anxious to counter Labour’s charge that he leads “the same old Tories”, a gang of hard-faced Thatcherites who will cut spending and gleefully grind the faces of the poor into the dust. The old successful Tories were “right but repulsive”. The modern breed must be compassionate Conservatives. But what does that mean?
“Dave needs to make sure there is substance there; to put flesh on the skeletal image of compassionate conservatism,” said an intimate. “George [Osborne] sees it as electoral tactics.” Strategic imperatives and ideals, as is so often the case in politics, meet in the middle.
Cameron’s popularity with the electorate surpasses that of his party. They know his devotion to the NHS — for its care of his son Ivan before he died — is genuine. But voters are less convinced by his shadow cabinet’s credentials. It is important that the tough talk — Philip Hammond, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, was advocating £60 billion of savings on Friday — is balanced by social responsibility.
Steve Hilton, the leader’s policy guru, is a long-term advocate of Toryism with a human face. He it was who first pushed a green and localist agenda to the forefront of Cameron’s policy plank. He is forever trying to tie up the strands of Conservative policy into a coherent narrative. If the problems of the broken society — spiralling divorce rates, delinquency and welfare dependency — can be addressed, then the state will eventually save billions now wasted on locking up offenders and paying benefits to demoralised people to do nothing. Godliness is next to fiscal goodliness.
Yet there are other calculations at work, namely pride. Party leaders, no less than young urban males, are desperate for “respect.” Like Tony Blair before him, Cameron has no desire to concede to Brown the title of un homme sérieux. The prime minister’s Presbyterian roots are watered by the works of modern Catholic social philosophers such as Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, who provide moral, communitarian uplift. He also shares the revisionist view that Adam Smith, the 18th-century prophet of free enterprise, was a bit of a welfare-state softie at heart — as written by Emma Rothschild.
Before he came to power, Blair, conscious of his intellectual shortcomings, took up with progressive thinkers. He once rather desperately asked academics at the London School of Economics to come up with theoretical underpinnings for his politics. But new Labour’s love affair with eggheads was fleeting: I recall Peter Mandelson rolling his eyes at the ceiling and jabbing his finger to his head when the stakeholding advocate Will Hutton took the floor at a Labour party conference fringe meeting. The first secretary, as his recent attendance at a shoot at Waddesdon Manor reveals, prefers seriously rich Rothschilds to serious Rothschilds.
Will Cameron’s flirtation with Red Toryism last? Some compare Blond’s emergence from provincial northern obscurity to metropolitan fame with that of Susan Boyle’s overnight stardom on Britain’s Got Talent. Will PhilBlo melt under the spotlight like SuBo?
Others have more staying power. Iain Duncan Smith, a former Tory leader and a staunch Roman Catholic, leads the Centre for Social Justice, a highly influential think tank that studies worklessness and family breakdown. While Brown has shown an antiquarian interest in Victorian social reformers, Duncan Smith and his allies want to adapt their thinking to modern times. Cameron appears to agree. The trouble is Duncan Smith’s welfare-to-work programme comes with a price tag, as does recognition of marriage in the tax system. In an age of austerity, how will Osborne find the loot?
In a keynote speech a few weeks ago, Cameron advocated a “big society” that will replace Labour’s “big state”, which is no longer fit for purpose. Small and local is beautiful. He threw in such a confetti of liberal American social theorists and behaviourists that few in the audience could keep up. Perhaps he had even read some of them. It is only fair to say he answered some of the objections I have made in the past to his radical rhetoric. He accepted there were limits to what a Conservative government could do to accentuate social mobility within one or even two terms of office. He would “focus on the causes of poverty ... and closing the gap between the bottom and the middle”, not abolishing relative inequality.
There are practical problems. George W Bush’s phase of compassionate conservatism foundered in big-state spending that swamped the ability of charities and local government agencies to keep up. In Britain, the national lottery has already effectively nationalised many of our charities; they receive more than half their income from the state. Initiatives that are successful on a local scale don’t translate to the national stage.
But Cameron’s ambitions are not just hot air. His shadow education minister, Michael Gove, really does promise a radical shift in power away from the educational establishment down towards parents and schools. In a powerful speech earlier this month, Gove set out a comprehensive programme for state education that has drawn applause — in private — from more than one Blairite figure. Schools would be allowed to run their own affairs, parents to set up their own schools and “the amount the state would pay for a poorer child would be increased, a pupil premium, so that schools will work particularly hard to attract them”.
The trouble is that Gove’s work on education needs to be replicated across the board. True, until Labour reveals a little of its hand in the pre-budget report in December, there is not much the Tories can, or should, do to reveal their own plans. But if Cameron wants to promote caring conservatism, he will have to advance colleagues of sufficient stature to deliver workable policies. Cameron is a lone star. On any reckoning, in a five-week general election campaign, exposure will do him no end of good and the unpopular Brown less good. But in government, he will need men and women to ground his idealism in law and sell it in the market place.
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