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Spoiling for the fight: How David Cameron brought the Tories within sight of power—and what they might do with it (The Economist, 7/10/08)

The clever stupid party

These contradictory critiques—that Mr Cameron stands for nothing at all, and that he is a closet extremist—are probably both mistaken. He is at bottom a deeply old-fashioned Conservative; so old-fashioned, in fact, as to confound the expectations shaped by recent Tory history.

In a sense, that history has consisted of a long argument about Margaret Thatcher. Her transformation of Britain’s economy is interpreted by some Tories as proof that the proper way to win power is to promise upheaval, especially in taxation, and the proper way to wield it is via radical reform and confrontation. Another view is that Mrs Thatcher was, as Mr Cameron now puts it, a “revolutionary but also a gradualist”, who achieved her aims cautiously, often without advertising them in advance. For most of the time since 1997, the first interpretation has appeared to predominate.

The strain of Conservatism that Mr Cameron embodies has thus become unfamiliar. It is pragmatic, incremental, willing to adapt to win and keep office. This is the flexible Conservatism of Benjamin Disraeli, a 19th-century prime minister, combining his awareness of the needs and votes of the lower classes with the gradualism of Edmund Burke, who articulated Tory alarm at the French Revolution. It is a Conservatism that is sceptical of state power and favours market solutions, sound money and patriotism—but all in moderation. This is perhaps the real contrast between Mr Cameron and David Davis, who left the shadow cabinet last month to dramatise his disgust with Labour’s erosion of civil liberties. Both believe in the principle he wants to defend, but Mr Davis really believes in it.

That is not to say, as some lazy pundits do, that Mr Cameron’s Tories have few or no policies. A popular refrain among his senior lieutenants is that they will not repeat what they see as Mr Blair’s big mistake: a failure to plan adequately for government. They propose, for example, to scrap Labour’s identity-card scheme, introduce the election of local police chiefs and repeal the 42-day maximum for detaining terrorists before they are charged (if there is no new evidence that the 42-day limit is needed, Mr Cameron says circumspectly). They would place a limit on immigration from outside the European Union, a misguided idea that Mr Cameron has at least taken care to justify in terms of demographic change rather than race.

There are still gaps, such as his failure to say definitively whether he opposes the expansion of Heathrow airport—part of a general tension between his claim to champion both environmentalism and business. But the demand, in some quarters, for a more radical prospectus rests on a misunderstanding of his Conservatism. He is not offering a Tory Utopia, but better management and greater efficiency: a different emphasis rather than a revolution.

In the key area of public-sector reform, some senior Tories privately describe their approach as “Blair without Brown”: that is, furthering the agenda of choice for consumers and competition among providers that Mr Blair eventually fixed on, without the brake on reform applied by Mr Brown during his time as chancellor.

Probably their most interesting ideas have been advanced by Michael Gove, their ferociously charming education spokesman. (Tory plans for the National Health Service are more modest, not least because of the perceived need to neutralise old claims that they secretly intend to destroy it.) The headline proposal, modelled on the example of education reform in Sweden, is to break the post-war monopoly on state secondary education by giving groups of dissatisfied parents and others the right to set up their own schools with government funds. It builds on the programme of academies—state-funded but relatively independent schools with outside sponsors—begun by Mr Blair. Not everyone is convinced that the spirit of civic activism is sufficiently vibrant in England for the scheme to take off.

Mr Cameron also invokes that spirit in his prescriptions for what, with some hyperbole, he describes as Britain’s “broken society”. To cure the ills of single-parenthood, benefit-dependency and the like, he proposes a tougher welfare regime (though not all that different from the government’s), tangible if unspecified support for marriage through the tax system and more job flexibility for parents. But the Tories’ main tools will allegedly be voluntary and religious organisations—Burke’s “little platoons”—who, they argue, know more about, say, helping drug addicts than the government does. Mr Cameron also talks about establishing new “social norms”—using signals from government to establish healthy models of behaviour. He cites the success of previous campaigns against drunk driving as a precedent. In Glasgow on July 7th, Mr Cameron talked with new stridency about personal responsibility and “moral choice”. [...]

Mr Cameron caused a rumpus by using the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 to call for a “solid but not slavish” relationship with America, and to say that liberty “cannot be dropped from the air by an unmanned drone”. He now insists that he is a “natural Atlanticist”. He has been supportive but critical of Britain’s role in Afghanistan, arguing, for example, that the civilian effort should have been better co-ordinated and the military command simplified (by 2010, he says, any British troops still in Iraq will be on their way out, whoever is prime minister). He describes his foreign-policy approach as “liberal conservatism”, which supposedly combines idealistic goals with a realistic approach to achieving them.

Perhaps—though theories of diplomacy do not always survive their first contact with real-world decisions. Mr Cameron is, however, ineluctably wedded to one foreign-policy tenet: Euroscepticism.

Senior members of his team merrily aver that theirs will be the most Eurosceptic administration since that term had any currency. Mr Cameron himself casts his views on Europe as a function of his liberalism, rather than as a symptom of little-Englander parochialism. Tory scepticism “about big European bureaucracies”, he says, “is exactly the same as our scepticism about big national bureaucracies”. Whatever the rationale, the long internecine Tory struggle between Eurosceptics and Euro-enthusiasts is over: the sceptics won.

Happily for the GOP, though sadly for America, Democrats haven't figured out that they need to offer "Clinton without Lewinsky."

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 2, 2008 5:11 PM