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Jonathan Rutherford
© Jonathan Rutherford 2008
Is the future conservative? The answer looked less certain after David Cameron's conference speech in Birmingham yesterday. The financial crisis is profoundly altering our political landscape. It has brought the New Labour project to an end, and it has derailed the New Conservatives. Both are products of the neoliberal era which is now disintegrating around us. Its rule-book is being torn up. The status quo has vanished. In Birmingham Cameron was looking for solid ground. He found it in the past, and a return to dull, reactionary Toryism.
Cameron can connect with people. He knows how to use ethical and emotional language to his political advantage. But after ten minutes listening to him I'm pitched back in time to the 1990s and the dog days of Thatcherism, remembering that passion to be rid of John Major's government, and that longing for change. For however much the New Conservatives protest, they cannot escape the discredited orthodoxies of the past, and in Birmingham yesterday Cameron sounded like he'd given up trying. He resurrects Margaret Thatcher and tries on her mantle. 'We will rein in government borrowing. You know what that means. The country needs to know what that means.' He's not afraid to make cuts in public spending in the face of hostility. It's a reminder that there are many Tories spoiling for a fight with the public sector unions. They want to settle Maggie's unfinished business.
And what is Cameron's response to the economic hurricane ripping in from across the Atlantic? He backs away from it. He talks to Gordon Brown. George Osborne meets Alistair Darling. 'I'm a man with a plan', he says. In truth he doesn't have a plan. The Conservatives invented the policies and politics of deregulation and privatisation that have unleashed this destruction, and they're still entangled in them. Sure, New Labour is to blame as well. Both the Conservative and New Labour governments have driven the process of economic liberalisation further and deeper than other European countries. When we finally hit the bottom, we'll have a deeper hole to climb out of. Cameron is a novice because he's learnt nothing from the economic mistakes of the past. He's a fairweather politician who talks about reviving a broken society but has no credible political economy to achieve it.
Cameron takes refuge in the verities of Victorian upper-class manliness: 'It's not experience we need, it's character.' Victory over economic adversity will be won on the playing fields of Eton. And, like that mythical figure Flashman, he will pick on the weaker members of society and appease the stronger. The collective culture of respect for work has gone, he complains. The principle of unconditional benefits 'simply encourages a benefit culture'. As the housing market collapses, wages stagnate and fall and unemployment rises, Cameron is focused elsewhere, on a 'full pitched battle' against the 'something for nothing culture'. Who is the enemy? The banker making £6000 a day from people's indebtedness? No, it is the welfare claimant scraping an existence on £6000 a year. 'If you don't take a reasonable offer of a job, you lose benefits. Go on doing it, you'll keep losing benefits. Stay on benefits and you'll have to work for them.' It's the priorities of the bully with no sense of social justice.
Cameron's speech shows that he is beatable. His compassionate Conservatism looks threadbare. With his instincts for tax cuts and his commitment to rein in state spending, he has no credible solution to the economic crisis. The middle classes and working classes are increasingly concerned with social insurance, safeguarding living standards and ensuring social stability and ecological sustainability. They are discovering that these collective goods are in dangerously short supply. Cameron has nothing to offer. The Conservatives are irrelevant. So where are the new politics to come from? Who will take on this crisis and restore economic stability with social justice to Britain?
Posted 6 October
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