So, now they don't even believe in tax cuts...
"I believe in tax cuts, grammar schools and big business. Mr Cameron, am I still a Conservative?"
So asked one Tory MP at a private meeting in the Commons last week.
Last night in a fascinating interview Rupert Murdoch made the same point in public. "If you believe everything he says," the media tycoon said, "there's not going to be an alternative between him and a New Labour government", before going on to warn of the danger that the Conservatives could end up as a "cheap imitation" of New Labour.
Today the shadow chancellor George Osborne deliberately to always put "economic stability" before tax cuts.
So why are the Cameroonians ignoring the squeals of their natural supporters? Because, quite simply, they believe they need, in PR jargon, "permission to be heard" from the millions who are NOT their natural supporters and don't listen because of what they assume the Tories believe in.
Because they think it's absurd to suffer for policies they either don't really believe in - cutting taxes even when the country's borrowing heavily - or policies that they'll never actually carry out - creating more grammar schools or replacing the NHS with an insurance-based system. See David Cameron's for an explanation. This is and was the "heir to Blair" strategy which Cameron blurted out in private and then denied having said.
Given it worked for Blair why not for Cameron?
It might, but - and it's a big but - the difference is that the Left was intellectually exhausted after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Thatcher's victories in the industrial struggle. The Right on the other hand is intellectually vibrant still and believes that it's now winning the arguments as a high-spending, high-taxing government, which believes in simply running the public services better rather than revolutionising them, begins to struggle.
If Cameron appears to be turning his face against ideas then the coalition of right-wing Tory MPs, Murdoch, the Telegraph and co could all still yet halt the Cameron bandwagon.
The Cameroonians' reply to this is that Margaret Thatcher did not pledge to cut taxes in her 1979 manifesto. She focussed instead on tax and union reforms.
The tightrope Cameron is walking is to reassure the Right whilst not infuriating the centre when, if, they think he was only trying to look centre-ish rather than actually be it.
I'm 
Comments
We seem to be heading for a curious situation in which the leaders of the two main parties are firmly in the centre of British politics whilst their backbenchers fan out from the centre out to the loony-tunes extremes of left and right.
Meanwhile the Party that always portrayed itself as being in the centre (even when its policies were all over the shop) has a temporary leader and a very uncertain future role.
Plenty of interest for us politics geeks to watch in the coming months...
Just as Gordon Brown made efforts to show he was not just another Labour "tax-and-spend" Chancellor, David Cameron and George Osbourne are trying to show they are about more than cutting the odd tax to keep the rich happy. Instead, they are about economic management through smaller government, and neither of them have ruled out tax cuts at all - in fact they seem the inevitable conclusion of sensible economic management.
The facade of Brown's economic competence is beginning to collapse, and it looks like the Conservatives are willing to learn lessons from his mistakes. Good on them!
Labour and the Tories may both complain about this run to the center, but most of us Americans are longing for the day when our politicians come back to it.
Cameron will eventually drift somewhat to the right - all tory leaders do. But if he survives long enough then the centre ground will be vacated when Blair goes because none of the Labour "future leaders" are as centrist as Blair. At that point policy differences will emerge again.
As one wag put it, "Gordon may have the bad luck to inherit the economy he created".
I once called DC the Young Pretender, this was a genuine feeling at the time; I feel this is becoming a more and more an apt phrase. He is presented with policies by his advisors, from which he chooses the most populist and presents it as his own; this is the same man who had no policies to offer during the leader election. He makes me feel uneasy.
Corinthians 9:22. : To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.
I suspect Tory carping will diminish when they make huge gains in the next local elections. To enact any kind of policy one has to be in power, power in the UK, especially in a time of relative affluence means the centre. Once in power it is possible to ramp up the agenda to a more radical vision. Thatcher's 79 manifesto was not particularly controversial.
Surely the disquiet on the Tory backbenches will only grow louder? I think the quote Nick uses at the start of this piece hit's the nail on the head, taking away key Tory polices such as Grammer Schools, Tax Cuts and being the voice of big business must be rather galling for some Tories. I guess the Notting Hill set of the Tory Party is following Phillip Gould's 'Unfinished Revolution' to the word in the re-modeling the Tory party into a clone of New Labour.
I will be interested to see if the Tory party will back the education proposals next month when it comes down to the crunch. I imagine that many in the Tory Shadow Cabinet and Backbenches will be very uncomfortbale with the idea of proping up Tony Blair. David Davis said as much in his leadership bid. Surely it makes more sense to oppose Tony Blair in the education bill as if he looses he will surely have to resign?
I actually rather agree with Mr Murdoch's comments to the 91Èȱ¬'s Business Editor Jeff Randell about waiting to see Cameron policy's. Hopefully the media will stop giving Cameron 5 stars for his various peformances when they only merit 3 starts.
Yes, the following months will be fascinating to watch. Surely Cameron will have to play a key card soon to set himself apart from Blair? He just seems to be running out of sectors to play it in.
A liberal play is my bet, and a start to the Mod-Con campaign. More heavy slating of Brown's economics will also come.
Blair be warned. You're rival is even more shiney.
Your evidence for an "intellectually vibrant" Right? An exhausted Thatcherism has been jettisoned alongside many traditional Tory attitudes. The only zone of right-wing intellectual creativity, neo-conservativism, is virtually identical, in terms of foreign policy and global institutional reform, to the current position of the New Labour Right. Blair's team also developed a distinctive and fairly coherent centre-left ideology that has not yet been matched by Cameron's team. Yet New Labour's top down radicalism is in trouble because a highly centralised executive cannot cope with a whole range of centrifugal forces, including the passive resistance of large numbers of electors to being told what to do by people they no longer entirely trust.
Instead of challenging the very basis of centralised politics with some model that decentralises or at least rethinks the nature and exercise of power or offers a renewal of authority through a new creative compact with the people, the Cameron leadership has simply asserted that it will fight on ground already laid out by Tony Blair - liberal centrism. The Tory response to Blair's possible, indeed probable, errors and failures is merely to try to do more of the same but in a less nanny-ish and less regulated way. This is little more than another manoeuvre to capture the levers of the state - the aim seems to be a cross on a ballot on one day by persuading swing voters in swing seats but nothing much deeper than this. All very entertaining for political groupies but increasingly irrelevant to the public. There is certainly little that is intellectually vibrant in such a strategy. But let's see what happens - as Americans say, 'things change'.
I think this is less curious than it appears on the surface. The Conservatives *may* have learned a few lessons from New Labour, the most important one being that you have to get elected to be able to make a difference! And in the world of personality politics, the choice for the majority of voters is not one of policy but of image.
To move towards the centre ground is to fight Labour not with the right-wing policies that Blair and Brown are so good at debunking, but to offer people a change of leadership that does not worry them unduly. "Your mortgage will be safe, your schools will be safe, the NHS will be safe, but we are nicer people..." It might be strange, but in the Big-Brother celebrity culture that we live in, this could be the party's best bet of a win.
We are fast arriving at the situation where the cynic's old invective about politicians "all being the same" appears to be coming more and more true, as they pawn their old-style ethics for the sold line of poll-led public opinion. The average political opinion in this country is, of course, a mean. Our politicians are fast becoming pathetically average in their attempts to align with the bulk vote.
I disagree that the Left suffered from intellectual exhaustion. There is almost no doubt that the 1992 Labour manifesto would have won the 1997, albert probably not as heavily, given how unpopular the Tories were. However, that was by no means clear when Blair started the reform process, and after 18 years out, the Left was hungry for power.
If offering up Thatcherism 3 times in row isn't a lack of intellectual energy, I don't know what is. The unwilligness to embrace change and adapt to modern Britain is what is causing the Right to struggle, not any problems with image.
I'm a Liberal voter who is seriously
thinking about voting Conservative
for the first time in 14 years.
However, before David Cameron does actually get my vote, he needs to, among other things, grow up and stop pulling stupid stunts like pulling his MEPs out of the Conservative grouping in the European Parliment. He also needs to treat Europe with more respect than he currently does.
It's also interesting to note that while he now speaks some of the Liberal language, he doesn't yet seem to understand it - I note for example that he hasn't addressed his party's prejudices against gay people or other minorities.
It will be interesting to see if his policies actually reflect his statements and if he has convinced enough people by the next election that these enlightened policies will not simply be dumped if he gets into power.
Nick, your headline is rather misleading. Cameron has merely stated, entirely sensibly, that he will not commit to tax cuts until he has the economy in a position to do so. This surely shows that Cameron, in the mid and long-term, is committed to tax cuts, but is unwilling to offer easy political points to Labour by committing to them straight away. Conservatives are committed to smaller government, lower taxes and individual freedoms; Labour is committed to higher public spending - and thus higher taxes, greater government powers and greater state control of the individual. Nothing Cameron has said or Blair has done has altered this. Because they agree on some things does not mean they're all the same. Cameron is very brave to take this approach, it is to be hoped he is rewarded.
The Left is politically speaking non-existent but equally it is more or less the only source of intellectually progressive thought on- if not in- politics.
The last time UK politics actually included a true political dimension, was in 1997 when the Lib Dems proposed a modest rise in tax to provide more services. Since then 'politics' has been reduced to spin and rhetoric, fighting over an illusory, constructed 'middle ground,' with both parties promising superior services at no real extra cost.
Never has this farcical state been more apparant than now with Blair's reforms derided by his party and championed by Cameron, and Cameron's reforms drawing support away from Labour at the expense of support in his own party.
Nick says, "The Cameroonians' reply to this is that Mrs Thatcher did not pledge to cut taxes in her 1979 manifesto."
It only takes a couple of mouse clicks to check this. The 1979 manifesto section is available at Keele University's web site (just use Google). It says, clear as day:
"We shall cut income tax at all levels to reward hard work, responsibility and success; tackle the poverty trap; encourage saving and the wider ownership of property; simplify taxes - like VAT; and reduce tax bureaucracy."
Brian (comment 1) was right when he said there would be 'plenty of interest for us politics geeks to watch in the coming months'!
I can only agree with the last comment. The Lib Dems are incapable of runing there own party never mind our country.
As for taxes. Tax is a great thing and im proud to say i pay them. We have public sevices better than we have ever had in the past and thats its thanks to the peoples tax. We have the NSH free at the point of need, we have free education, Police and fire sevices. Its thanks to Taxes that the economy is as strong as it is and that this country is thriving in many ways. Thanks Tony, thanks Gordon. This is how it sould be done!
Torys, watch and learn my firends.