Those new Tories.
All this week the Guardian has been treating us to a series of articles on the "new Tories". It's very tempting to dismiss the entire idea immediately out of hand, as has been New Labour's execrable policy, and to go by the briefing from such socialist luminaries as James Purnell, this is still the emphasis which the party is going to continue with. It's true that by no means has the Conservative party had anything approaching the reflective soul-searching which resulted in the New Labour project, nor has there been such a decisive if shallow message that the party has changed akin to the abandoning of Clause 4.
Such gestures however have not been necessary because of Labour's incompetence and failure to learn from its mistakes. When considering the new Conservatives, what has to be remembered first of all is that it was a very old Conservative policy, the promise to abolish tax on inheritance for all but the very richest estates which catapulted the Conservatives back into the opinion poll lead, bringing Gordon Brown's short-lived honeymoon to an abrupt end. Ever since it has been one disaster and fiasco following another, combined with the economic downturn which has made Labour so incredibly unpopular. While many now see David Cameron as the best man to lead the country, what has not been shown is that same country is in any sense agreeing with the party's solutions - rather, they have become fed up to the back-teeth with a Labour party that has become socially authoritarian, economically illiterate and which has abandoned any attempts at deciding what it stands for or, more pertinently, who it stands for.
The tension, disengagement and pessimism which this has cast on whom should be the party's natural supporters was evident at this week's TUC conference. The unions are now according to some reports funding the party by up to 90% - accordingly, you would imagine that such influence would be causing the party to shift leftwards. Instead, if anything, the party is more craven and broken when it comes to addressing big business than it has ever been. While I personally do not believe that the case for a windfall tax on the energy companies' gross profits has been made, you would have expected that the party could have wrung far more concessions from them than they actually did. Instead what Brown has delivered has been little more feeble than the supposed attempt to get the housing market restarted. While that was a futile exercise, no one can possibly describe reducing the bills of the poorest and elderly this winter in such a way. Really sticking in the claw though is that there is both mass public and media support for taking on the energy companies - whilst the Daily Mail might not have supported a windfall tax, it has been just as angry if not angrier than papers on the left as what it sees as the obscene profiteering and greed in the City, and would have been livid if the companies had attempted to pass the costs back onto the consumer. With Brown's proposals, any chance of there being a simply response if they do exactly that is unlikely to say the least.
There was though another incident at the TUC conference that did show that the Conservative attempt to sell itself as new is only worth so much, and that was Harriet Harman's announcement of yet another quango to investigate social mobility. It wasn't that though but rather than an article went round beforehand which used the "c" word which so exercised Theresa May. You can expect the Torygraph to start screeching about class war, but for Theresa May to do so in almost the exact same language when her own party is currently trying to sell the idea that it believes in greater equality and is the real "progressive" party was pure chutzpah. The real issue is that Labour has long since abandoned calling a spade a spade; whilst the Mail, as Dave Osler points out shouts from the roof-tops about the middle class and the Torygraph invents the "coping classes" to laughably describe its readers, mention or allude to the working class and suddenly we're back to the class war. This is partly because all the main political parties have liked to pretend for some time that we are all bourgeois now, or come up with euphemisms or other identifying features to target voters, but it's also because few of them even seem to want the working class vote, or if they do, to say that they do. Class, above gender, race, sexual orientation or anything else is the main signifier of how you will get on in life and where you will get in it. Labour has demonstratively failed to improve social mobility, but for May then to suggest that Harman also hasn't done anything to tackle gender inequality when she only recently announced plans for positive discrimination, even if you don't agree with it, is plainly churlish.
This is where the idea of the new Tories so falls down. It's not that Cameron and his supporters don't mean what they say - they plainly do, and it's not that he's a shallow salesman, which he is, but then so was Blair. It's that their ideas are contradictory, flawed and less likely to work than Labour's. Jonathan Rutherford and Jon Cruddas have effortlessly identified this in their "Is the future Conservative?" essay from the pamphlet of the same name (PDF). First Cameron repudiated Thatcher by saying there is such a thing as society - it's just not the same thing as the state, then they moved on past questioning the economic position of society, which was not in the position it is now, to instead challenge the breakdown in society, or as they call it, the broken society. In fact, the Conservatives have hardly anything approaching an economic policy, with their only real commitment to "share the proceeds of growth". When Northern Rock failed, the Conservatives didn't have any idea how to respond, except to oppose nationalisation and attempt to paint Labour's delayed decision to as another throwback to Old Labour. Along with this has been their supposed commitment to "making education an adventure, giving children ‘the chance to take risks, push boundaries and test themselves outside their comfort zone’", whilst supporting the academy project which in most areas is doing the exact opposite of this with their almost regimental emphasis on discipline, curriculum, uniform and conformity. Just read the horrifying description of the Evelyn Grace academy in Brixton in today's Grauniad, which sounds almost Orwellian with its slogans of "excellence, endeavour and self-discipline" on posters on the walls. Their decision to recognise marriage in the tax system, with up to £20 a week being the mooted break being given, is both cynical and an incredibly simple non-solution to what is an incredibly complex problem. They have also increasingly moved from so-called compassionate conservatism or Cameron's own description of himself as a liberal Conservative to the old hectoring against the feckless and overweight, whether from Cameron himself or even less subtly from Andrew Lansley. And finally, whilst trying to suggest that they are the new progressives, the new intake of Conservative candidates for parliament are profoundly socially conservative, with their solutions to the "broken society" also being even more punitive than Labour's criminal justice policies.
Cameron has succeeded because he has adopted the language of empathy, of insecurity and of change. He has abandoned the "Continuity IDS" faction while still managing to take them along with him, much like Blair took the wider left along with him in their desire for power. The comparison is apt because rather than being genuinely new Tories, Cameron's Conservatives are instead the unapologetic new Blairites, able to do what only Blair and the even more Blair than Blair Blairites dreamed of doing. The only point on which I disagree with Rutherford and Cruddas is that they suggest the future is for the left to lose. On the contrary, the left has already lost. The Labour party has shifted so far to the right, and indeed, is controlled by those on the centre-right that it is simply impossible to believe that it could ever readjust to the policies which Cruddas and Rutherford propose in response to the new Conservatives. The sooner that the left realises that the Labour party is dead the sooner it will be able to challenge the new consensus which exists between the old new Labour and the new Blairite Conservatives.
Labels: Conservatives, David Cameron, death of Labour, Jon Cruddas, Jonathan Rutherford, politcs, the new Blairites, the new Tories
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