Cameron and Blair

he’s never seriously tried to stage a meaningful fight with the party’s Right
… because he’s one of them.

As a distant and not very well informed observer, Chris’s point makes perfect sense to me. Cameron has an interesting crew around him, and plenty of ideas which could be presumably be packaged as a convincing (to some, anyway) communitarian alternative to Labor (I’m thinking primarily of Phillip Blond here, but there are elements to such a hypothetical package as well). But, whatever the appeal (or lack thereof) such ideas may have, they aren’t going to be taken seriously by large numbers of swing voters unless Cameron can present himself as someone who will genuinely push for them, as opposed to use them as window-dressing. And, for better or worse, the best way for a politician to so present themselves in mass democracies is to go out of their way to find fights which will divide themselves from certain segments of the electorate which otherwise might have been expected to support them. It’s ugly politics, but it works: Clinton’s dismissal of Jesse Jackson, et al, proved to centrists that he was willing to offend certain predictable Democratic voters, which proved that he was serious about taking a different path. It’s gamesmanship, pure and simple, but if Cameron isn’t willing to play it–if he isn’t really willing to call out and condemn the comfortably Tory-voting board of directors of Tesco, for example–then voters will draw the predictable (and, in all likelihood, accurate, conclusions).

#4: unless Cameron can present himself as someone who will genuinely push for them, as opposed to use them as window-dressing

I’m beginning to think, though, that the base may like the communitarian stuff much better as window dressing. The wealthier part of the base, at least. What I’m about to say may come across as caricature, but I’m going on the basis that a large part of living life as a Tory is upholding the pretence that everything you’ve done in order to make you and your offspring comfortable was justified and / or is respectable. You sought the largest possible house with a plot of land for yourself and your family: well, just by living there and helping out once a year with the village fete, you helped to make a community. You got involved with the governance of the local church school (the one you sent your kids to): well, that helped to maintain education standards. Even so, there still must be some part of every Tory that knows that this is mostly garbage, since they, like everyone else, also know which side their bread is buttered on.

One possibility would have been to pick a fight with an ultra Eurosceptic, but perhaps even that definition cuts too close to the bone.

In Ireland, (the rather right-wing) Eoghan Harris calls this the “blood on your shirt” theory of politics – i.e. the electorate likes to see a bit of blood on its leaders’ shirts to show their mettle.

It corresponds to my perception of the difference between Cameron and Blair – Blair is just a better performer (“actor” more pejoratively). In particular, Cameron seems oddly passionless, whereas Blair was obviously very good at communicating a sometimes quite manic belief in what he was saying at any particular time.

Of course we might want to suggest that Blair actually was a (soft) Conservative politician, and that he picked fights with the hard left wing of his party because at root he held an essentially soft Tory view of their position. Cameron is a likewise a (soft) Conservative. He isn’t a quasi-socialist masquerading as a Conservative. The two situations are far from being the mirror images of one another this analysis implies.

Exactly. If there’s a false equivalence being drawn here, it’s on this thread, between Clinton’s Sister Souljah moment and the Clause 4 debate.
The former was exactly the gestural piece of positioning that people have been criticising upthread. (It also engaged with American racial politics in a dogwhistling way, as did the executions Clinton oversaw in Arkansas during the 1992 campaign.)
The latter amounted to a genuine conviction: that common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange had no support in the electorate, lacked intellectual coherence following the collapse of the eastern bloc, and had zero validity as a practical programme of action. Capitalism’s recent troubles will have swollen the numbers of those who’d now take issue with that. At the time it was the sincere belief of every senior Labour figure, with the exception of eccentric aristocrat Tony Benn. Renouncing Clause 4 was honest, in the way Adam Roberts describes. And, equally importantly, it was politically meaningful, in that it demonstrated that the market-reconciled right controlled the party apparatus firmly enough to amend its constitution.

Like Harry, I think Chris Brooke is drawing a smart contrast with Cameron. Not only is his sincerity is in doubt, as the results on May 6th will demonstrate. His control of his party is also in doubt. His first European summit, assuming he ever gets there, will demonstrate precisely how much independence he has from the eurobore headbangers he has been pandering to for the last five years.

I actually think Clinton campaigned more to the left than he actually governed. The Souljah moment was just symbolism. In office, he pushed the gays aside, ended welfare, etc.

I think he hasn’t taken on the right because he’s got a broader problem – alternatives to right-wing politics in the Tory party just don’t have any theoretical weight that can be used to supplant the existing model (if I can use the term loosely). Philip Blond gets touted a lot, but it’s evident from recent bleating that the Tories themselves don’t understand his work, and from what I’ve seen (not a great deal) it’s as contradictory as one would expect any kind of “communitarian” Toryism that isn’t paleo-conservative to be.

How can Cameron balance the communitarian views of the crusty right with the new libertarians through a political theory that is itself untested and hasn’t worked out how to do this? Blond’s theories (and Cameron’s to the extent that they differ from his peers’) don’t have a solution to this problem. So Cameron can’t slap down his right wing trogs by any means except the one thing that those trogs understand – power.

Blair was in a slightly different position because it is possible to come up with a coherent theory of modern social democracy which incorporates multiculturalism, choice, pluralism, etc – you just have to steal a few ideas from the rest of the social democratic world and forge them together with a model of “muddling through,” which is very British in itself. So he could risk a public stoush if he had confidence in his own speaking ability (and being a vampire with near-infinite powers of hypnosis, why wouldn’t he be?) because he had a vaguely coherent model to back it up with.

I think Cameron genuinely believes in his social justice goals. He just can’t back them up with a Tory theory, and he’s too rusted on to Tory politics and culture to understand that they’re never going to work there.

“I think Cameron genuinely believes in his social justice goals.”

LOL no. But he has done marvellously well in making it possible for someone to type that with a straight face.

Harry quotes Chris Brooke:

Cameron, by contrast, has made a lot of centrist noises…never seriously tried to stage a meaningful fight with the party’s Right, to lure them out into the open, and to slap them down in public.

Why would he bother? Voters are slowly drifting away from the Left towards the Centre without much need for a Right-wing “Night of the Long Knives”. There are a fair few free-floating Right-wing votes (UKIP, BNP) to be garnered who he does not want to put-off. But the non-CON vote is very hard to chisel away at.

The UK polity has been undergoing a Centrist electoral convergence for the past decade or so. This Centrism has been at the expense of the Left, as indicated by LIB’s steadily increasing share of the collapsing LAB vote. The general stability of the CON vote (mid-30s) is interesting, given the declining fortunes of Right-wing ideology over the period (Iraq war, GFC).

Poll avg. APR 2010: CON = 34; non-CON (LAB 27 + LIB 29) = 56.
Election MAY 2005: CON = 32.3; non-CON (LAB 35.3 + LIB 22.1) = 55.4.
Election MAY 2001: CON = 31.7; non-CON (LAB 40.7 + LIB 18.3) = 59.
Election MAY 1997: CON = 30.7; non-CON = (LAB 43.2 + LIB 16.8) = 60.

Looking at this trend it appears that the CON’s will win a plurality in 2010, with a vote ~ 35%, non-CON’s getting ~ 55%, OTHERs achieving ~ 10%. My sense is that the CON’s will do better in seat shares than in vote percentages, owing to the shaky grip LAB has on marginal electorates.

I don’t know how long the LABs can suffer this decline without more or less suffering political extinction. This does not bode well for the Broad Left given that the UK GREENs do not seem to be setting the House on fire.

The Blairite “social democracy” was based on:

1) Make sure that house prices keep going up without mortgage interest rates rising
2) Do not put up income tax (anything else is fine, such as the income-based national insurance, but income tax itself is sacred)
3) Read the daily mail every day and pass a law banning something.

Those things were deemed necessary to appease the middle england floating voters. Given that, he had a platform to do whatever he wanted, from establishing a scottish parliament to invading Iraq.

Meanwhile, Gordon Brown fucks himself with the floating voters, or the ‘bigots’ as we must now call them… What a man.

Well not only a bigot, but a moron too. The poor woman asked “These East European immigrants, where are they coming from?” Where does she imagine people from Eastern Europe come from? No-one’s going to hold this against Brown are they?

The media are… And I expect the bigots will too…

People who think the Prime Minister ought to have enough braincells to realise when he’s wired for sound might also have a view.

SG,

[I]t’s evident from recent bleating that the Tories themselves don’t understand [Blond’s] work, and from what I’ve seen (not a great deal) it’s as contradictory as one would expect any kind of “communitarian” Toryism that isn’t paleo-conservative to be.

I would disagree that any kind of imagined Tory yet non-paleo communitarianism is necessarily contradictory, unless you are going to label any and all forms of cultural or social conservatism as “paleo.” David Miller, Charles Taylor, the Radical Orthodoxy folk (whom Blond supposedly learned something from, but after listening to the presentations he gave while visiting the U.S. recently I wonder how much he learned), and others have all talked about the philosophical and political grounds for non-ethnic appeals to sozial solidarity and “conservatism,” and they make a good case. Whether it could ever be translated into a democratically viable package, especially within a first-past-the-post party environment, is probably doubtful, the Tory flirtation with Blond’s ideas being perhaps the latest example of such.

Chris,

From personal experience, I can say that it is impossible for any moderately literate person to read Red Tory without severe pain. And that’s before you even consider the content.

I haven’t read his book, and if it builds upon the same ridiculous account of intellectual history which was on display in his American presentations which I mentioned above (Rousseau is the father of the left, Rousseau was an individualist, so the left is entirely individualist!), then I’m sure you’re correct. But on the basis of some of his (at least here in the U.S.) more widely available writings, I wouldn’t go so far: his Prospect piece from last year may have been filled with a lot of unsubstantiated communitarian boiler-plate, sewed unreasonably upon various Cameron proposals, but his insistence upon the connection between local civic (and economic) empowerment and democratic legitimacy (not to mention his slams on Thatcher) rang completely true to me.

People have wondered why every high street in Britain looks the same. The answer is that shops are allocated centrally by a group of retail agents, equipped with Goad plans, sitting in offices on Hanover Square, acting on behalf of land owners.

I’m guessing this is humour, but I’m not sure which variety of conspiracy-theory is being parodied…?

Russell Arben Fox, thank you for suggesting alternatives to paleo conservatism. I have to point out though that any of the kind of theories you describe in your response to Chris will run up against a significant problem in British society that conservatives of all stripes seem woefully unprepared for – class. British society is steeped in class differences, and conservative “thinkers” don’t seem to have found a way to deal with this problem. The labour party in Britain have consciously given up on it as too hard, so how can the Tories possibly cope? The little Blond I read had no room for unions in his civic movement, for example, and he seemed to be consciously trying to write them out. A political movement which hates unions and can’t adapt its modern “theories” to them is going to really be struggling to deal with the realities of a class-fixated society like Britain.

Paul Keating said it best when he observed that, in their more honest moments, the conservatives know in their dark little hearts that their philosophy is not grounded in anything more sophisticated than greed and selfishness, and they can’t build a political theory on it, nor can they inspire others by it. That’s why they find appeals to racism, bashing the unemployed, and tax cuts so compelling – they can only appeal to the basest motives of society, never to loftier goals. To his credit, Cameron has made the best effort I’ve seen in a long time, but even he has started resorting to bashing the unemployed as soon as his poll ratings start to slide; and his actual political philosophy is incomprehensible to his own troops. He’d be meat hanging on a hook if the labour third way hadn’t been shown to be equally useless by the GFC.

I would disagree that any kind of imagined Tory yet non-paleo communitarianism is necessarily contradictory, unless you are going to label any and all forms of cultural or social conservatism as “paleo.”

It is extraordinarily difficult to combine communitarianism and the expectations of modern capitalism. For a start, to be part of a community you have to be permanently resident there, and that’s often not compatible with work. My husband and I once moved four times in two years for the sake of jobs: it’s hard to develop community in that situation. It’s also hard to develop much sense of community if you’re working full-time and commuting to work. Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ relies heavily on volunteering, and yet it’s already difficult to get volunteers for existing programmes now because people are just too busy with work. It will only get harder to find such people once retirement ages are raised and mothers are expected to get back into employment ever more quickly.

Blair invaded Iraq to show that he wasn’t beholden to The Left and then look what happened. Maybe Cameron is right to be cautious.