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Anastasia de Waal
© Anastasia de Waal 2008
Clearly, the main problem with Cameron's plan is that there isn't one.
Rhetorically at least, the Conservatives' priorities now sound very similar to Labour's. The odd reference to Thatcherite economics and the occasional council tax freeze aside, their reincarnation as "compassionate" Conservatives has entailed a general gravitation towards embracing much more liberal priorities. Be it their commitment to ending child poverty, to shrinking the achievement gap in schools or to embracing flexible working for parents, there is much less to differentiate the Conservatives from Labour on what they say now matters to them. How they plan to distinguish themselves, they tell us, is instead through more effective strategies.
The clearest message is that, as a government, the Conservatives are pledging to do less - and to do that less, better. In their view, this is not the irresponsible move it might sound to the statist left. On the contrary, less state intervention will enable the public to re-engage and re-exercise personal responsibility, a crucial step towards mending the Britain that Conservatives keep telling us is broken.
Certainly, if things are to improve without an increase in spending, greater public service efficiency is going to be vital. But what we're not getting from the Conservatives are many concrete tactics for just how they envisage executing this efficiency. The more generous theory is that the Conservatives are keeping a raft of shrewd efficiency measures under wraps. The less generous theory, of course, is that they actually don't have any and are simply hoping to roll back the state and hope for a simultaneous rolling out of civil society. The latter seems more likely.
There is something of a tendency among conservatives when criticising state intervention to remember the pre-welfare state through rose-tinted glasses. The temptation is to imagine that philanthropists, volunteers and church groups (in our near-secular society) will immediately emerge from the woodwork, picking up where (it is imagined) they left off. It is hard to disagree that much state activity is not wildly ineffective; it is equally hard to disagree that the public sector has been wrongly endowed with near-total social responsibility. Yet even were the Conservatives' optimistic reliance on civil society to be realistic, the very least that is needed is a transition plan.
There are, however, concrete policy areas where the Conservatives could, and should, be capitalising on what they have over Labour. The family is the best example; a huge Conservative crowd-pleaser and an area that many, of all political ilks, feel the New Labour government has neglected. Strengthening families genuinely has the potential to fulfil the Conservative answers to progressive problems mantra. Yet the policies the Conservative party is so far proposing are far from progressive, missing not just a significant strategic trick, but betraying a fundamental lack of awareness about the dynamics of family life on the ground.
Marriage is the prime example and the Conservatives' firmest policy area. Cameron repeatedly tells us that he is unabashedly a marriage freak (his term). Why? Because, according to the Conservatives, marriage causes stability and stable families create a more stable society. So, the party plans to promote marriage through the tax system. The problem is that the Conservative analysis of marriage is off the mark.
The significance of marriage today is what it represents: stable circumstances. Unmarried families (through non-marriage and divorce) are concentrated in low-income areas because the prerequisites for stability are missing: employment and education. In other words, marriage doesn't create stability; it signals it. Therefore, simply trying to get people to marry by privileging marriage with a few hundred pounds a year would be a waste of money: it wouldn't produce the stability associated with marriage.
What would 'promote' both marriage and family stability, on the other hand, would be moving people out of unemployment - in part, via something the Conservatives are indeed pledging to tackle (as now is Labour): benefit dependency.
So, if the Conservatives want to strengthen the family, it is their bid towards lowering welfare reliance by boosting entry into employment on which they should be concentrating, not their fantasies about the power of marriage. Cameron tells us he doesn't have a miracle cure, but it sounds too much as though he sees marriage as just that.
Part of the Comment is free Soundings debate, first appeared 6 October
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