Technology | 2009.10.19
Cameron needs to read the one about the birthday cake and the feral abacus | Julian Glover
The shock conservative loss in 1993 Australia is a cautionary tale: it is very, very risky to avoid explaining your plans
There\'s a new book the Tories should read, telling the story of a birthday cake that lost a conservative party an unloseable election. Actually it wasn\'t the cake but what it came to symbolise: confusion and mistrust about an opposition\'s plans to take power in the depth of recession.
David Cameron is being misunderstood, too, and it\'s partly his fault. He should think about the lessons baked into that cake.
The story dates back to 1993, and the conservatives who lost so unexpectedly were the Australian Liberals. What happened is explained in The March of the Patriots , by the Australian columnist Paul Kelly. Miles ahead in every poll, the right assumed it would beat Paul Keating \'s ailing Labor government. Instead it got the shock of its life. Voters panicked days before polling day when John Hewson, the party leader, couldn\'t explain to an interviewer how his plan to impose a sales tax would affect the cost of an iced birthday cake in a bakers\' shop.
Keating\'s brilliant response was to paint conservatives as budget-obsessed, inhuman ideologues – he called Hewson "a feral abacus" – who could not relate the impact of their plans to real lives. Labor\'s fightback exposed every anxiety Australians had about leaping into the unknown. It didn\'t matter that a sales tax made sense. (It was finally brought it in seven years later.) Lulled by the polls, Hewson\'s team did not trouble to find the language to explain it.
There was a whiff of the feral abacus about last week\'s Conservative conference. Cameron and George Osborne are far more adept politicians than Hewson, and these days it is the Australian right that flies to London for advice. But Cameron\'s skill in defining the tough part of his message – the anti-big government philosophy running through his speech – cast into shadow the society the modern Conservatives want instead.
Cameron told us what he is against – the failed, Brownite social democratic experiment. He was weaker when it came to explaining what comes next. No wonder some reeled away from Manchester shocked, as if Cameron had revealed himself to be Oxfordshire\'s very own Ronald Reagan, a state-hating individualist who wants to bring a version of the Minutemen to the shires. He isn\'t, but the fact that people thought so is partly his fault, not theirs.
The truth is that Cameron Conservatives (for the moment they are the only Conservatives who matter) do not want to end collective, tax-funded services, but they do want to fragment them and open them up. Last week they fell short of the challenge of spelling out the difference between no state and a new state. In doing so they have given Labour a chance. Nobody expects from Cameron a full prospectus, but it is fair to demand a solid set of instances illustrative of his approach.
The world he wants involves the dispersal of power; self-management; the liquidation of the controlling bureaucracy that eats resources. If this worked (there are plenty of reasons to fear it will not), it would produce autonomy and variation, one of the underpromoted moments of conference week being the recruitment of Tom Steinberg from MySociety.org as an adviser. He should matter to the Tories a whole lot more than General Dannatt.
To centralists who run the state as it now exists, such plans may sound like the end of everything. But to people who use services, they could be a new beginning. If people aren\'t told about them, though, they may reasonably come to fear Cameron\'s intentions.
There was, among his friends last weekend, some perplexity at the way his speech was reported. No one took an interest in passages about the importance of doing things collectively, only hearing his much louder language about a war on the state. But the passages were there and they matter. The Cameron agenda is not just a replay of 1980s me and mine-ism.
Why did he not spell this out? At one point, it is said, there was going to be more in the speech about state reinvention. If that is true, he should have stuck to this earlier draft. In the sunny plaza outside the Manchester Central Hall, a shadow minister preparing for power buttonholed me about devolution: "We mean it," he said. "We really do." When told that neither Tory delegates nor the media – let alone voters – knew anything about these plans, he agreed, but did not seem to think this a problem.
There are several responses to such insouciance. Perhaps the glinty-eyed Cameroons are just dreaming dreams and don\'t mean any of it. But they are so fixated, and so powerful, that this does not ring true.
Or perhaps – less improbably – their plans are genuine but very vague, in which case they will never happen. Or perhaps they think that if they do explain their plans, no one will believe them – since Tories, even after Cameron, are pigeonholed as market-obsessed, individualist centralists (with some justification, given their past).
Or – most probable of all – a decision has been taken not to talk about them. If the election is in the bag, why take risks?
True, even Zaphod Beeblebrox would struggle to get his heads around the fact that the Tories\' secret big idea is to win power in order to give it away. But in education, the area of policy that is most developed – and of which Cameron is most proud – this is exactly what is supposed to happen. Michael Gove does not want to be the man in charge of Britain\'s schools. He wants to be the man who sets broad standards, finds the money, and then leaves others to determine what sort of schools Britain gets.
There are obvious dangers. One is that airy-fairy ideas about self-help, non-state collectivism may wilt in power, to be replaced by a crude plan to hand state services over to private providers. There is pressure on Gove, for instance, to allow companies to bid for the free schools he plans to set up.
Another is that the Tory agenda is too thin to work – hand power to what, and to whom? Cameron cannot promise universal standards if what he wants is variety. Does he really want to strengthen local councils which, in opposition, Labour will start to control?
In reply he is entitled to point out that Britain does not have universal standards now, nor good and productive public services, for all the money poured into them. He is right to criticise the way things have been done up to now – his criticisms are, after all, shared by many Lib Dems and thoughtful Blairites.
But if his message is all criticism and no creation, opinion may harden against him. He is like an architect keener to demolish a decayed building than reveal the blueprint of what to put in its place.
This coming general election, more than most, is likely to be fought on the issue of trust. Labour, by tolerating Gordon Brown\'s leadership, has handed the advantage to the Conservatives, since voters, for the most part, no longer believe a word Brown has to say.
But if the opposition allows the sense to grow that it is not telling all, worries about trust could hurt Cameron. Localism is only something you can believe in when it happens. But the lesson of the great birthday cake disaster is never to take the electorate\'s acceptance of your good intentions for granted. Secret plans are the first step towards plans that never happen at all.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]eron-australia-1993-cake-feral
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