Brooks: Cameron is the right alternative to Obamaism

Bruce, UK

"I'm from the Federal Government and I'm here to help."

All you need to know really.

TGF UKIP

Unfortunately, James, this image that is constantly sought to be painted of a determinedly devolving Cameron just won't wash.

It just doesn't square with all the hectoring, bullying, obsessive determination to thrust his and the Mekon's ultra green agenda down "society's" throat. Nothing could be more detrminedly centrist and statist.

Verity

I can't stand either one of them.

greyspender

Another witless and unhelpful comment from Verity.
Who do you mean? Cameron and Obama? Obama and Brooks? Brooks
and Cameron?
And just who would you suggest
instead of Cameron as Tory party
leader?
It's easy to be negative. How
about something positive for a
change? I have asked this before
without response.

Tom Pride

This accords with the rejection of politics as a left / right spectrum. A more helpful spectrum is between:

Regressives - statist / collectivists / centrists who believe that collective action is more fruitful than individual action and who then use the power of the state to enforce their views on how society should be, inevitably crushing the liberties and creativity of individuals in a triumph of a suffocating state over personal responsibility and wealth-creating enterprise; and

Progressives - free market libertarians who cherish and protect the liberties of the individual against an all powerful state, who value the wealth creation of a free market economy, the role of non-state institutions and who advocate personal responsibility and the self-respect that self-sufficiency brings, and, who seek to strike a pragmatic balance between these ideas and the role of the state to produce a living tapestry of men and women and people in which individuals can reach their full potentials and society is at ease and flourishes.

The collectivist assumes self-evident moral superiority and seeks to regress to the failed statism of the 20th Century; the libertarian is pragmatic, working with grain of the human condition. The spectrum is a y=x3(cube) function with the optimum libertarian point higher along the curve than the inflection point, an equilibrium position where social democracy sits and totalitarianism far down beyond the inflexion point. Gravity pulls to the left and down the curve.

Frank P

Perhaps it is time to remind readers of The Spectator of what some of us were attempting to warn them about during the six months run-up to the US election, or let James Lewis do it for us:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/04/obama_alinsky_and_scapegoats.html

The thought that a potential conservative Prime Minister of the UK is seeking ways to ingratiate himself with an Alinski trained revolutionary - and a proselytising one to boot - is gut-wrenching.

Verity

Your constraint on this occasion is admirable, but don't make a habit of it, please! I come here to get fired up again by you as the calluses that now cover my sensitive soul grow tougher and thicker by the day. The spicey raw meat that you usually serve - like vengeance should be - cold, usually gets me salivating. Forgive me for saying so, but that was a particularly bland morsel. Prepared in haste, perhaps?

Susan Hill

I think Cameron hugely overestimates, as probably does Obama, the small amount of interest or concern people have in Green issues at present. OK, yes, they want our own wildlife to be protected, they will try and save trees and ask farmers to stop spraying so many chemicals and removing hedgerows - but beyond that, frankly, and apart from the usual students and eco-rent-amobs, they have far far more to think and and worry about ; how to feed their families, have their children educated well, keep their jobs and their houses, save a bit... environmentalism beyond a certain minor area is not a drum Cameron should keep banging. The AGW lunacy is being exposed at every turn, only 34% of Americans actually think it matters now - he should listen. People care about whether their streets are safe, about knife crime and muggings and burglary and drunken yobbery,and spongers and terrorists here under student visas and so-called asylum seekers who are nothing more than economic migrants. They care about crelty to animals and people who torment little children to death and care homes that abuse the frail and vulnerable elderly. These are things Cameron should be speaking up about before banging on about green stuff. Just talk to anyone out there.
Oh and right now, they care even more than all of it about a possible swine flu pandemic.

Verity

Greyspender - You say "I have asked this question a number of times." I'm sorry, but I seem to recall neither your name nor your question on this "number of times".

I have answered this question from others on several occasions and I won't bore the regulars around here by addressing it again. However, for a clue, you might usefully scroll up the page to Tom Pride's entry, with which I am in complete accord.

I'm sorry, Frank but unwittingly scrolling down to the photo of these two self-seeking, conscience-free, cheap opportunists before my breakfast had even gone down, I was overcome with nausea and everything went cloudy.

If you crave au bleu, I have a post on today's The Wall regarding the 22 year-old beefy daughter of "Lord" Goulding. Silly moo.

John Wilkes

What David Cameron should do is take head on the misrepresentation of Mrs. Thatchers "there is no such thing as society" remark. What she meant - and what it was clear she meant before the liberal press relentlessly misrepresented it - was that there is no single thing that is "society" but a collection of individual people who live in one society. They all should live by the same rules but otherwise be free to live their own lives. Individually, left to their own devices, they will care for their own families and, very often, others in their neighbourhood or broader community. They are much better at it than the state ever is and the end product is self reliance and not dependency. At no time since she said it has it been more obviously right.The current government has tried to fix "society" by throwing money at it until there is nothing left and it has been a disaster. David Cameron needs to set out clearly that we can all ask the state to get out of our lives without us being just in it for ourselves. If that is all people ever did, there would be no society (the communal living of people). But Mrs. Thatcher was right - there is no such thing as "society".

porkbelly

What on earth is Brooks talking about? "Order" and "authority" over the economy deriving from "social institutions"? Sounds very much like Mussolini to me - all power still residing in the state but used for right-wing rather than left-wing purposes. Some distinction; either way we can get used to being herded like cattle.

Archie

Well, up to a point, Mr. Forsyth. David Brooks IS to all outward appearances a perspicacious fellow, but he admitted to being hugely bowled over by Obama at a private dinner that the then candidate gave for some heavyweight political journalists; although latterly he seems to be having second thoughts. I suggest that more exposure to Cameron will have the same effect, as we have discovered.

John Moss

Cameron has adopted one iconic policy which illustrates this perfectly - education vouchers.

This is state funding of education, but devolved as far as possible, namely to the parents of the child being educated. At a stroke this reverses the dynamic in the education system, requiring schools to satisfy parents, with their myriad and in some cases, unsophisticated demands, rather than the demands of "experts" and politicians who seek only a hurdle which they can say has been surpassed.

Just as the car market has provided ever more niche machines to suit our varied demands, yet given us advanced engineering and greater comfort and safety at an ever decreasing real price, so education could innovate, invest and improve, as well as get cheaper!

Applying the same ideas to other elements of the welfare state could reduce the cost from the current hundreds of billions and actually see taxpayer's money spent effectively through millions of active "buyers" seeking best value.

Go for it David! You know it makes sense.

Gawain

What a refreshing interview. Brooks was actually allowed to speak in fully formed sentences as if he was speaking to an audience of adults. No irritating BBC hack interrupting just someone trying to get on the same wvelength as his guest and developing the conversation. He even gave a view of what Cameron is attempting (whether you agree with it or believe it) that hasn't appeared in our media. Why can't we have televison current affairs broadcasting like that ?

RayD

The fall of the US to Obama is as significant an event as the fall of the Berlin Wall. Socialism is now the standard form of government of the western world. Ultimately the EU will prevent make it impossible for member states to be anything else. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.

Roy

If I were living in the UK, I would seriously consider voting BNP. It will take a really aggressive party like this to handle all the miscreant yobs that abound in British society today. Takes one to know one . . . maybe, to handle decades of misrule, sloppy policy, and the encouragement of degeneracy unfathomable in all its long history. Labour has outlived itself; it has nothing more to fight for. The Conservatives have lost their way unable to recognize what honest people and nations aspire to. It’s time for a new broom!!

THX1138

Bruce UK-That from the man who deregulated S&L's for his corporate buddies and then used at least $120 billion federal tax payer dollars to bail out the deposit holders when the S&L management went on a speculative rampage.

I'm sure everyone involved including "W's" little brother Neil whose S&L Silverado cost the US taxpayer 1.5 billion dollars was very glad that the Federal Government said "I'm here to help."

Are you kidding me?

I'm not sure Mr. Forsyth is in jest or not. The sentiment expressed by Brooks/Cameron is not some brilliant new insight, but the traditional cornerstone of conservatism. Mr. Wilkes above is quite right in pointing out that Mrs. Thatcher understood it as well as anyone. Only someone taken in by the distortion of the conservative message is going to hail this emphasis on society as 'new' for conservatism. And as far as Brooks is concerned: he was a big cheerleader for Mr. Obama, whom he mischaracterized as a centrist, rather than a leftist. I would expect a better understanding of conservativism from a Spectator writer.