Conservatives are Carnivores

Some of you may have heard of Phillip Blond. For those who have not he is loosely what passes for an intellectual in these debased times. In his capacity as a self-appointed Socrates he is the director of ResPublica, yet another ‘think tank’ or, to put it another way, a refuge for the otherwise unemployable. Thinking is a harmless enough occupation for those who can find no other, but Blond ambition, sad to say, has also been adopted as something of a guru by the Conservative leadership.

The problem is not that he thinks but what he thinks, and what he thinks is arrant nonsense, a belief that one can have conservatism without conservatism; one can have, to use his own expression “Red Toryism”. He’s to be found pontificating in the latest issue of Prospect, urging David Cameron not to lurch to the right in the face of wobbly opinion polls. In this he reacts to Tim Montgomerie, the creator of the excellent ConservativeHome website, who last month called for “more red-meat Toryism” and “less red Tory nonsense”.

Yes, indeed, Blond is a Red Tory. If you really want to know more about that particular oxymoron then you could do no better than have a look at his recently published Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain, though I’m making no recommendation here. Would you like a taste of the Blond style? What about this then;

Given the emergence of such a new ethos, it might well be that at the limit, issues of fair pricing, proper remuneration for work and quality of workmanship could become issues of local rather than central jurisdiction.

You can have three hundred pages of similar Blondisms, as he plods along in an utterly tiresome way in a pilgrim’s progress towards the Red Tory citadel. The whole thing is nonsense; dull, tedious, second-hand ideas, presented in the most laborious fashion possible; an attempt to seek depth in pots of prolix prose, the sort of thing that would have brought George Orwell out in a rage. It really is a case of never use one word when twenty will do.

It’s difficult to believe that Blond could ever have been taken seriously, with his absurd and vacuous borrowings, his confusion over so many issues, particularly in the area of economic and social policy. If the Party fails to win the General Election it will be in part thanks to the hesitancy and lack of clear direction introduced into its programme by Red Toryism. When it comes to Conservatism we should all be carnivores.
:-)

One Nation Tory

I think there is a lot of misunderstanding about David Cameron, about the task he has set himself, about what he represents. I’ve seen some of this reflected in comments about his performance. I would like to try to clarify things, as much for myself as for anyone else who cares to read what I have to say. What follows is, if you like, an appreciation in progress.

I should say to begin with that David is not my favourite Conservative politician; that honour belongs to Boris the Menace, the fantastic Mayor of London and sentimental old leftie. Ideally I would prefer to see Boris lead the party, but then realism kicks through the walls of my dream. Everybody I know loves Boris, but we also know that Boris is a treasure and a liability at one and the same time; one would always be waiting for him to stand on a landmine, to fall into some media or public relations trap.

Then there is David, certainly not colourful, just more dependable, more reassuring. The thing is the Conservative Party needed David Cameron in the way that Labour needed Tony Blair; they came at the right point in the respective histories of their parties. He can only really be understood against the background of the civil war that beset the Tories all during the Major premiership, refusing to settle down through the leadership of William Hague, Ian Duncan Smith and Michael Howard. He brought a kind of peace to a party that at last recognises that power is more important in some instances than principle.

I know with a certainty that his style of politics would have been defined as ‘wet’ during the Thatcher years. Indeed, as Peter Oborne has pointed out, he has described himself as a ‘one nation Tory’, the term used by Thatcher’s opponents, harking back to the days of Benjamin Disraeli, another time when the party was in transition. But that’s exactly what the party needed - a reconnection with older, less-bruising traditions. I don’t think Cameron has necessarily ended the divisions- and some of these go deep, particularly over Europe- but he has successfully presided over a highly effective armistice, uniting the likes of William Hague and Kenneth Clarke, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Gove in senior office.

People might argue that Cameron simply walks in the shadow of Blair, as Blair walked in the shadow of Thatcher. He is a pragmatist, that much is certain, but I can see no other comparison with Blair, a man, so far as I am concerned, who immersed himself in the deepest forms of turpitude, who presided over a government that massively increased the power of the state as it weekend our civic culture.

That’s what Cameron’s brand of ‘new old’ Conservatism is about - reversing the damage caused by years of mismanagement, returning responsibility to ordinary people, shoring up the ramparts of society. Cameron as prime minster will mean a return to responsible government, to cabinet government with decisions taken collectively, away from the presidential façade of Blair and the cronyism of Brown. Peter Oborne puts it even better;

He comes into politics out of a sense of personal service and duty. He believes in self-reliance, patriotism and personal independence. He will not, as Tony Blair did, abuse his office for personal enrichment. He will not be intoxicated, as Blair was, by power for its own sake. He will not go weak at the knees when he meets an American president or an international tycoon. He may very well fail, but he is rooted in a clear and purely British set of values. I can think of no leader who stands so squarely in the Tory intellectual, social, moral and political tradition.

Yes, for all these reasons and more he deserves our support and encouragement. This is the hour; he is the man.

Red Toryism

The Conservative Party does not do ideology, at least it shouldn’t, an entirely personal view, I confess. But David Cameron wants to put an intellectual gloss on post-Thatcher Toryism, to give it coherence, a basis and a sense of direction. So, along trundles a new thinking tank, the ResPublica, and along comes Philip Bond, given to promoting something he calls ‘Red Toryism’, as if we had not sickened enough of red over the past twelve years. Now I really am seeing red. :-))

It seems to me that Blond is just another promoter of second-hand and muddle-headed ideas. His ‘fresh, candid thinking’ includes such revolutionary platforms as breaking up large supermarkets, higher charges on supermarket carparks and-wait for it-rules to prevent the building of new supermarkets. So, you see, Mister Blond clearly has a thing about supermarkets. Perhaps he took a tumble from a trolley when he was a baby?

Sorry, I’m being unfair; there is more to ‘Red Toryism’ than this: there is the proposal to give the residents of council estates the ability to control budgets for services as diverse as education, housing and policing. Just how this control is to be exercised is not clear to me. More than that, where is the demand for this form of decentralisation? Do people in council estates really want to be taken away from the delights of day time TV? I don’t know the answer to these questions. Perhaps they do, though I rather suspect not.

What ‘Red Toryism’ reduces to, if I can simplify matters, is an attack on a successful business sector coupled with the belief in forms of community utopianism. What Mister Blond does not like is Thatcherite neo-liberalism, the belief in the power of markets and the power of personal initiative. Yes, there deep and radical thinking is required about the future direction of policy, as David Cameron said at the launching of the good ship ResPublica last week, just not the ‘deep and radical thinking’ of the Blond variety.

We’ve been here before. This is the soft soap vision that carried ‘Blue Socialism’ into Downing Street, the pap that once went by the name of a ‘stake holder society’ and-Lord help us-‘communitarianism.’ The reality, of course, was the empowering of a Labour tyranny and the disempowering of people, the disempowering of Parliament. Where there are communities, in other words, let us bring fragmentation, let us bring alienation, let us bring migration. Yes, give more power to people by handing it away, on no authority whatsoever, to Brussels.

Power brings its own demands, its own responsibilities. It’s best to be practical about these matters, not to be caught in a snare of tiresome ideas and empty programmes. Red Toryism is no Toryism. It’s the politics of the circus, the thinking of the second rate. Be pragmatic, be realistic are the two guiding ideas David should take into government. All else will follow.

David's Dilemma

There are two points that I would like to drag up from my previous blogs: first, that Czech resistance to the Lisbon Treaty was likely to be no more than a mirage, and second, that David Cameron would not hold a referendum on the ratified Treaty, because that would turn in to a plebiscite on British membership of the European Union itself.

It’s a pity that this Treaty has been forced through in the way it has; it’s a pity that the contempt that has been shown for democracy, inconvenient democracy, all along the crooked way. It’s a pity that we, the British people, were promised a referendum on the European Constitution, and then denied this referendum because a magic waned was waved which turned the Constitution into the Treaty, a fraud by any other name would smell as rank.

But here we are; the Treaty is with us; Klaus has capitulated. We wake to hard realities, to David’s Dilemma. He faced up to this with commendable speed and has quite rightly, in my view, announced that there will be no referendum if the Tories win the next election. The alternative was to let the issue fester on for months, giving ammunition to our enemies. Yes, I know it will cause a lot of upset and also know that it may put some marginal seats at risks if Euro sceptics drift towards UKIP. Still, it’s a bold move, one that had to be taken.

I personally did not want us to advance one step further along the road to integration and I never want to see a European super state. The very idea of a President Blair absolutely sickens me, and I do not exaggerate. Take a dog from the streets of Paris rather than have this man, this warmonger and hypocrite, have any future leverage over our affairs.

Having said this Europe itself, the European Union, is our destiny. Departure, which I have never argued for, would be disastrous in simple economic term. I could never vote, moreover, for an organisation like UKIP, that collection of geriatric schoolboys. I’m a Tory by instinct, by upbringing and by intellect, and while I have had serious reservations over the general direction of the party in the recent past, I want to see a Tory victory in the next election; I want to see the end of this Labour government; how badly I want to see the end of Brown and Lord Rumba. That’s all that matters now. It does for me; not Europe and not a chimerical referendum.