Cameron is making the intellectual running now — with a little help from the Blairites
What do you give a Prime Minister who wants nothing? The Indian government has been asking itself this for some time, ahead of Gordon Brown’s official visit later this month. The famously frugal Prime Minister would have little interest in any trinket. Presenting him with some casual clothing could be misinterpreted as an impolite sartorial hint. So after much deliberation, Delhi University has been ordered to award Mr Brown an honorary doctorate. The chosen subject: ‘academia and public services’.
It is not yet clear whether Mr Brown will accept. The degree might invite unhelpful questions about what, precisely, he has contributed to the theory of public services. True, he stood athwart Tony Blair’s pro-market reforms and has lost little time dismantling them in office. But if he has an alternative intellectual agenda, it is one that can barely be discerned in Westminster let alone in New Delhi.
In fact, as this week’s political battles show, the intellectual running in British politics is now being made by the Conservatives. We glimpsed this last year when Alistair Darling filled his budget with Tory policies. And we have seen it yet again this week with Brown’s ‘relaunch’ amounting to little more than the regurgitation of plans for nuclear power and health screening. Mr Cameron, meanwhile, saw in the new year by announcing the most radical welfare reform proposals Britain has ever seen.
A Conservative government would end the ‘let them eat tax credits’ approach to welfare and test every single one of the 2.6 million incapacity benefit claimants to judge what work each of them is capable of doing. The Jobseekers’ Allowance would last for two years and then be replaced by Australian-style ‘work for dole’ schemes. Mr Brown is too shrewd a politician not to sense that the public mood is behind such toughlove approach. So he did not know whether to accuse the Conservatives of heartlessness or plagiarism.
The more time the PM spends trying to match Tory ideas, the harder it becomes to caricature Mr Cameron as a spin-obsessed ingénu with no substance. In a series of speeches and documents, the Tory leader is laying out in ever greater detail what he means by a ‘post-bureaucratic era’. What he means, above all, is a radical break from Mr Brown’s tired world-view.
At the core of Mr Cameron’s strategy is a trust in civil society. It is about adapting to what Mr Cameron calls ‘an era of dispersed knowledge and power — rather than the concentration of authority’. This is a commercial, economic and social trend — and creates the demand for smaller government. Mr Cameron is aligning the Tories to an age where people do not trust politicians and want the power to act for themselves.
His education policy, for example, would allow any organisation to set up and run a state school within the state budget (likely to be at least £6,000 per pupil.) He also proposes locally elected police chiefs, so the public’s priorities, and not the latest panicked diktat from the Home Office, will determine law and order policy on the streets. Weaving all this together is the classic Conservative mission: to roll back the state. Mr Cameron, of course, adds the crucial rider that he is also ‘rolling forward the frontiers of society’.
Mr Brown will recognise all this only too well: it is where the Blairites were taking Labour before losing their leader. People like Alan Milburn were convinced that the only future in British politics lay in the empowerment of voters — and was determined to claim this territory for Labour. He would quote Keir Hardie to the effect that socialism ‘is the people themselves acting through their organisations, regulating their own affairs’. John Reid argued the same, telling his party he wanted to create choice for everyone, not just the rich.
It took a political force as strong as Gordon Brown to put a lid on this intellectual energy and to keep it hermetically sealed. So, while the Blairites did the initial ideological bulldozing, it is Mr Cameron who is building on the ground the former Prime Minister cleared — especially in school and welfare reform. ‘If it had not been for Blair, we could never have been this radical on welfare,’ one shadow Cabinet member told me, admitting the debt owed by framers of the Tory Green Paper on welfare reform to John Hutton, Blair’s last welfare minister. ‘John Hutton and Lord Adonis [schools minister] will be gnashing their teeth when they see what we’re doing. It’s what they dreamed about.’ Not all ex-Blairites confine their energy to teeth-gnashing. While Mr Brown may have little time for or interest in their thoughts, they find a ready and appreciative audience in the centre-right think tanks flourishing around Westminster. People like Professor Julian Le Grand and Simon Stevens, both key ex-advisers to Blair, can now be found writing pamphlets or giving closed-door speeches discussing their experiences and prognoses. It is remarkably easy these days to persuade a Blairite thinker to address a right-of-centre audience in London, where they are heard with genuine fascination and not a little admiration.
Most Westminster think tanks need to work with people from opposing parties to stress their cross-party credentials (thus protecting their charitable status). Perhaps as a result, the strain of thought emerging in some such organisations is a fusion of left-wing ideals pursued by right-wing methods. The Tory education policy is, in effect, the Blair ‘trust school’ writ large. The Tory welfare plan would enact the American-style welfare reform Mr Blair once enthused about. And these have come from a thriving think-tank circuit which has been blending such ideas for years.
Just as Baroness Thatcher relied on the Centre for Policy Studies while in opposition, Mr Cameron uses Policy Exchange, the most influential of the think tanks. James O’Shaughnessy, its deputy director, was recently hired as Cameron’s policy chief. This relationship helps to explain why a Conservative party which had no policies anyone could name four months ago has assembled such a coherent agenda so quickly.
Mr Brown still has his policy hatched inhouse (or, more accurately, in Ed Balls’s house) and — apart from the appointment of Stephen Carter as principal special adviser in No. 10 — is sticking to his tiny team of aides. But he will at least be psychologically ready for Mr Cameron. After all, he spent the best part of a decade battling Blairite ideas on welfare and schools internally — and will feel more comfortable fighting them across the dispatch box.
Blairism is not dead after all, but lives on as the base of what many Tories now call progressive Conservatism. In Cameron’s hands, the empowerment agenda is more potent than ever — and may defeat Mr Brown yet.
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