Tuesday, 6th October 2009
The elephants in the room at the Tory party conference
9:17pm
At the Tory party conference in Manchester, where I currently am, there’s a whole herd of elephants in the room trumpeting forlornly for attention. One is the EU, about which I wrote in the Mailyesterday.
Another is Abroad. You would scarcely know that this country is locked in a desperate – and desperately under-resourced --war in Afghanistan. You would scarcely know that the world stands on the precipice of an Iranian terrorist state armed with nuclear weapons. These matters are presumably finally to be discussed on Thursday morning, in a conference session dealing with the whole of international relations and defence. On the one hand, you could argue that it’s a prestigious slot, just before the Leader’s speech in the afternoon. On the other, you can be pretty sure that the Leader’s speech will crowd out anything...
Wall Street Journal (Europe), 7 October 2009
At the beginning of this week’s tribal British gathering known as the Conservative Party’s annual conference, delegates were subjected to a grey, monotone video presentation which told them that everything in Britain was broken. The economy was busted. Society was busted. Politics was busted.
Just when people might be stampeding for the doors marked ‘U.K. Exit,’ the video screens burst into brilliant bloom upon the appearance of. . .the Conservatives. The Tories, it appeared, would bring blue skies where there were storm-clouds, repair what was broken, make Britain whole again.
This sounded familiar. Back in 1997, a fresh-faced young Labour leader, Tony Blair, told Britain it was a society broken by 18 years of Conservative rule. He would heal the wounds inflicted by the Tories and restore the bonds of society.
Now here is a fresh-faced young Tory leader David Cameron, promising to repair a society broken by 12 years of government under New Labour, of which Mr. Blair and the current prime minister, Gordon Brown, were the twin architects.
The similarities between Messrs. Cameron and Blair are startling and lie at the heart of the doubts that persist about the modern Conservative Party. On the face of it, the Conservatives appear all but certain to win Britain’s general election scheduled for next spring or early summer. Gordon Brown’s government is widely regarded as finished.
With unprecedented amounts of public debt, Britain is all but bankrupt. There is talk of Labour being out of power for a generation. So the Tories would seem to be on a sure path to victory. Such confidence, however, would be misplaced.
A ComRes poll at the start of the conference gave the Tories a 12-point lead over Labour. Given Labour’s disarray, they should be much further ahead than this.
The reason they are not is that while British voters are preparing to vote in droves against Labour, they are not yet voting for the Tories.
The evidence suggests that they don’t dislike David Cameron himself, but, as a Populus poll revealed during the conference, they don’t think the Tories in general have changed.
This charge has the Tory high command chewing the carpet, since David Cameron has ruthlessly subordinated everything to demonstrating that the Conservatives are radically different from the party of supposedly heartless, mercenary oddballs that he inherited.
Hence the party’s rebranding around the ‘caring,’ ‘cool’ and ‘compassionate’ agendas of green activism, anti-racism, ‘equality’ and gay rights.
That, though, is surely the problem. For Mr. Cameron appears to be driven not by principle but by positioning. Just like Tony Blair, his every move is geared to how the public will react — and the need to re-brand the Tories as ‘changed.’
But he cannot afford to lose his core Conservative vote while rebranding the Tories as in tune with fashionable nostrums and playing to the public’s deep attachment to the welfare state. The result has been radical incoherence.
Thus he proposes cutting public expenditure, but claims implausibly that there will be no corresponding rise in unemployment. He will decentralize public services, but still retain state control over health. He will give parents the freedom to start up new schools — but not if they are academically selective or make a profit.
His principles seem remarkably adaptable as shown by his switch from the much derided ‘hug a hoodie’ approach to young offenders, which presented them as victims of society, to this week’s ‘mug a hoodie’ proposal to lock up 100,000 of them.
Desperate to avoid taunts of ‘racism’ or ‘xenophobia,’ he avoids talking about issues that deeply concern the public, such as Britain’s uncontrolled immigration or the threat of Islamization. This week, he has been similarly dodging awkward questions about how he will prevent Britain’s loss of independence under the European Union’s new constitution, better known as the Lisbon Treaty.
Not surprisingly, the result is that many people — including, according to the ComRes poll, one third of Conservative voters — say they don’t know what David Cameron stands for.
Those close to him say he has solid conservative instincts on issues such as family or nation and is a natural skeptic about EU integration. But no one knows whether, once ensconced in 10 Downing Street, these will trump his instinct for opportunism.
These ambiguities about Cameron reflect a far deeper crisis for conservatism. Quite simply, it no longer understands its own purpose. After communism collapsed, conservatives failed to grasp that the radical battleground had merely shifted from economics to cultural issues such as family, sexuality and ethnic or national identity.
When conservatively minded Middle Britain woke up to the fact that New Labour was bent on destroying these norms, it found to its intense dismay that the Tories — believing wrongly that Mr. Blair had come to power by going with the flow of social change — had jumped on the same ‘progressive’ bandwagons, thus leaving these natural conservatives totally disenfranchised.
After all, if British Tories can’t even bring themselves to say unequivocally that they will guarantee against the EU the right of the British people to govern themselves, then it might reasonably be asked what is the point of having a Conservative Party at all.
Into this stew of philosophical confusion, serial opportunism and political funk has erupted this week a challenger to Mr. Cameron’s position in the form of the maverick Tory politician and Mayor of London, Boris Johnson.
Boris, as he is universally known, is adored because he is funny, untidy, shambolic and always putting his foot in it. He thus seems more ‘real’ than the carefully manufactured Tory high command.
Exploiting his rock-star status among the party faithful, Boris laid down challenges to Mr. Cameron over both the EU and the party’s refusal to rule out Labour’s punitive taxes on the wealthy.
He has thus positioned himself for a run at the party leadership at the head of those conservatives who believe they have to fight both the loss of national independence and the deadening hand of ‘equality.’
Yet Boris is also the man who said Tony Blair should be impeached over Iraq and who used a platform at the radical East London Mosque to call for greater understanding and tolerance of Islam.
Beneath Boris’s clowning, therefore, lies a political frivolity which could be lethal to Britain. But his party’s leadership has arguably shown scarcely less frivolity over the greatest issues of the day. Remarkably, with international affairs and defence shoehorned into one late session at the conference, neither the fact that Britain is at war in Afghanistan nor the imminent crisis over Iran was deemed to be in the forefront of the challenges facing the country.
The Tories may well form the next British government. But in failing to acknowledge the existential and civilisational threats to their country, it would appear that British Conservatives no longer understand what conservatism is for.
Posts
