Events | 2010.04.19
Cameronism: a wholly new conservatism | Tim Montgomerie
Cameron\'s manifesto avoids electric policy in favour of theory. He is gambling that the party core is ready for it
The launch of a party\'s manifesto is 24 hours of guaranteed publicity. With the election as close as it is, today\'s Tory day in the limelight was an opportunity for David Cameron to set out some electric policies. He didn\'t take that opportunity. His manifesto event wasn\'t so much the unveiling of a policy programme as a political seminar.
The vote-changing pledges were there: stopping Alistair Darling\'s national insurance increase; freezing council tax for two years; protecting benefits for pensioners; more cancer care drugs. Some, like reducing immigration from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands, were hidden.
But this manifesto was not, fundamentally, a shopping list of policies. Its message is that the Cameron project deserves to be taken seriously. Cameronism, we are meant to conclude, is not a PR exercise but a whole new conservatism, built up over four-and-a-half years. Cameronism is neither a politics of individualism, nor of state collectivism. Britain, goes the argument, is an unbalanced nation. We import too much. We save too little. We consume too much today and don\'t guard the environment for tomorrow. We rely too much on the financial services, the housing sector and state employment. But, more fundamentally, we are too ready to look to the state and to the market for solutions to our nation\'s problems and not to the diverse social architecture that lies between the individual and the state.Conservatives worry that a large state and an untrammeled free market both damage society. A heavy tax burden and unenlightened employers work together to force parents to work longer hours than they would wish. A hyper-mobile capitalism does not invest in community life. An arrogant, we-know-best state denies parents any choice in their child\'s schooling.
In the past the Conservatives wanted to cut the supply of government, and a secondary consideration was the hope that something better might spring up in its place – that something better emerging from a libertarian utopia. Cameron has repeatedly rejected laissez-faire. He believes in a smaller state but he wants to reduce the demand for government before tampering with the supply of critical welfare and other state services.
Only, he says, if Britain builds up the family, local schools and the not-for-profit charity sector can the deficit be reduced in a sustainable way. For him, a badly educated, welfare-dependent individual, who has never had the support of a strong family, is one of the most expensive sources of Britain\'s problems. Where a libertarian party would simply decree that it is for the individual to build a strong family, get their children into a good school and find work, Cameron\'s conservatism wants to actively help people secure those three fundamental building blocks of the good life. There is, for instance, a pledge to progressively eliminate the penalty in the benefits system that discourages low-income parents from living together. Schools serving poor neighbourhoods will receive extra funding. And, on work-to-welfare, George Osborne is chairing a commission to ensure that work always pays more than dependency.Incentives to voluntary and private sector organisations to set up new schools, run innovative apprenticeship programmes and deliver new models of prisoner rehabilitation are at the heart of this bigger society agenda. The new suppliers won\'t be paid according to their adherence to strict methodology but by results.
Will the British people buy all of this? Not yet. This election will be won or lost on voters\' perceptions of the party leaders\' character and by their assessment of the parties\' economic policies. The manifesto is much more the latest instalment of Cameron\'s simultaneous attempt to persuade the left that he is different from Thatcher, and to persuade the right that he remains rooted in historic, Burkean conservatism.
In doing this Cameron is taking a risk with core Tory supporters and floating voters. But the course he chose underlines the ambition of his project. He is crafting a new governing philosophy. It is a work reminiscent of George W Bush\'s 1999 compassionate conservatism but, largely because of the work of the Centre for Social Justice , much more developed. If Cameron succeeds in building a conservatism of society, twinned with traditional conservative beliefs, he could be not just Britain\'s leader, but a leader of global conservatism.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]vid-cameron-change-instalments
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