Cameron's realignment of our party politics

stereodog

And long may it continue! I too would describe myself as a Liberal in the 'manchester sense' as Mr Nelson puts it. This has meant that I have never had a political party which truly represents me and I shuttled between the Lib Dems on social matters and the Conservatives on economic ones (although I have usually voted Lib Dem). Now it seems that we might see the birth of a party for us Gladstonian Liberals.

Edmund Jerk

You're right, up to a point, in saying that the Tories have economically-liberal roots. And yes it would be a good thing in there was a party that represented good old fashioned Manchester Liberalism.

But the problem I have with the Lib-Dems who might form a merger with the Tories, isn't that they're economic liberals: it's that they're also social liberals, that they believe in multiculturalism, greater European integration, mass immigration (for cultural rather than economic reasons),in the loonier side of AGW theory and that they want to destroy (or rather "reform") our national institutions. In short: that their beliefs are antithetical to conservatism. All this might be okay for Steve Hilton and c. but I don't think a merger will fly with proper conservatives in the Tory party and Tory voters themselves.

Obnoxio The Clown

Is there an intentional irony in your scathing description of "patrician Tories who believe the benighted masses need direction from an enlightened elite" while at the same time praising an enlightened elite for realigning politics without the consent of the benighted masses?

Or are you just stupid?

denis cooper

Let me get this straight.

The dividing line now is between those "who place trust primarily in people and communities" and those "who primarily trust the state", and those "who believe the benighted masses need direction from an enlightened elite", are on the wrong side of this divide, while some Labour MPs like Jim Murphy are on the right side.

So if a politician takes the view that we should be ruled by "an enlightened elite" not here but in Brussels and Strasbourg and Luxembourg, and helps to push through a new treaty to give that EU elite even more power to rule over us, while determinedly denying "the benighted masses" any say on that treaty even though he was elected on the promise that he would support entrusting the final decision to the people in a referendum, where exactly does that place him?

Minnie Ovens

Now it seems that we might see the birth of a party for us Gladstonian Liberals.

Just remember what happened to them.
I still believe that Hilton pulled a coalition from the jaws of victory but I am very interested to see whether the coalition will pull off the necessary cuts needed to bring government under control once more. I am very interested to see if the schools will be turned away, at last, from their rabid left wing practices which have devastated education and our young for thirty years.
Cameron is playing a dangerous game and I am deeply suspicious of him and for the ability of his charm to keep everything from careering out of control.
But I cannot see anyone else starting to pull us out of this disastrous mess so he has my support for the time being.

Jangster

Edmund Jerk hits the nail on the head. Especially where Europe is concerned, the Libdems are on the wrong side of history....and we don't need more Ken Clarkes in the Tory Party.

Jerry hayes

Entirely agree with most of that! http://bit.ly/92MTrD

Swiss Bob

Given that they're all interchangeable drones would anyone be surprised if all the parties merged into one?

All their policies are the same, only the faces change. The one detectable difference is that the coalition is more articulate and don't sound like communist party apparatchiks, the equivalent of a reach around while they fyuta.

London Calling

Personally I think it’s a wee bit too early for a political autopsy Fraser. The honeymoon period is not yet over, however I do believe compromise will be the anchor to carry the coalition forward, regardless of the schizophrenics within both parties. Cameron’s recent comments regarding withdrawal from Afghanistan could well be described as schizophrenic and prompted a response from the Taliban that Melanie Phillips previously foretold in her blog, it made Britain’s position in Afghanistan look weak.

When the Axe has waned and the stump exposed only then will true leadership prevail in getting our economy drip fed back into recovery. Gimmicks should be exposed for what they are and Job creation the fruits of this Coalitions labour. Meanwhile it’s a pressure cooker economically and much more needs to be done to convince the public that cost cutting will be aligned with think tank mentality to guide us through the storm, so far I am not convinced this is happening soon enough, all the focus seems to be on attacking the less fortunate instead of encouraging those who are capable of giving so much more. Stalemate is the position we find ourselves in at present due to lack of investment get the economy moving again, and this is the challenge that defines the coalitions current and future success.

I raise my glass to optimism…otherwise we are politically orphaned if all the media can focus on is waiting for the cracks to appear within the coalition in conjunction with an I’m alright Jack/Jackie mentality at the top of our social class…if this is the case we are all doomed and most certainly not in-it together…

Doppelganger

Tory principles/attitudes (call them what you will) are worth fighting for in their own right. A closer relationship with a disaggregated bunch like the LibDems would only make the Conservatives even more meaningless and irrelevant to voters than they already are under Cameron's cynical and what I fear will be useless leadership of his party and country.

Paddy

So long as Labour are never trusted with power ever again.

Grumpy Optimist

Edmund Jerk has hit the nail on the head. Europe could be the straw that breaks the coalition. The pressure for greater integration could be intense and has to be resisted. Indeed this could present opportunities to disentangle the UK from the mess. But the LibDems would never agree to this and to be frank, I don't quite trust Cameron.

How ironic it would be if Europe broke the coalition given how hard the Tories have tried to paper over the cracks.

Doppelganger

Where is my post?

Verity

Swiss Bob ... would anyone be surprised if all the parties merged into one? Not I! In fact, it could be sold to the public as being more efficient as it would do away with the need for expensive elections!

strapworld

Paddy, just remember Kinnokio and Prescott and co were forecasting the end of the tory party when Blair was first elected!

There is a real need for a party of the values which the old Labour Party had. They were patriotic, hardworking and had values. Keir Hardy must be turning in his grave looking at what they did in his, and his colleagues, name!

I wrote some days ago that I could see a amalgamation of the Lib Dems and Cameron's Liberal Tories. Such a party would be a natural home for many present members of the Labour Party and what is left of those that call themselves Labour could go to their natural home The Communist Party.

Yesterday I wrote that I could see David Davis and other tories breaking off to form a true Tory or English Nationalist Party. One not afraid of telling the real truth about the EU etc. Bringing an end to the nonsensical Ukip and their childish politics. I am sure that the EU welcomes Ukip because they have made an intelligent and adult opposition to the EU virtually impossible! It would also end all the other flotsum and jetsom of parties/groups of the right of politics who deny the peoples of this country a real voice.

Politics may become interesting!

yank

Grumpy Optimist: "Europe could be the straw that breaks the coalition.

.

.

Yes, foreign entanglements are best approached cautiously and slowly, and while always hanging onto your wallet. Those who ignore these principles risk much more than transient political power.

Over here today, we are celebrating Independence Day, a bit that you all should take no small measure of pride in as well, not only for what it is that you've wrought here, but for the common sense decisions made then in Westminster, in accordance with the above principles.

Jefferson's first Declaration draft included the lamenting phrase "We might have been a free and great people together." That sentence was struck by the Continental Congress, so that we might forever remain a free and great people together. And none of that has ever required a new parliament between us, either.

Fergus Pickering

Tory Principles, says Doppelganger. What Tory Principles? The great Tories don't have principles. They have feelings. It's bloody Socialists that hsve principles. I'll tell you a great Tory. William Wordsworth. And I'll tell you another. Joseph Conrad. Read 'The Secret Agent'if you want a Tory vision. Or read The Immortality Ode. If you want a politicians then I give you Edmund Burke. Feelings, beliefs, not principles. Got it?

Craig Mitchell

The prospect of a Conservative-Liberal merger is nothing more than that of the Peelites returning home.

Marcher Baron

"it brings “permission” to ditch policies that were only there to assuage the right of the party and take the Tories further in a direction he has always wanted." You mean the policies for which those inconvenient nuisances the electorate voted?

Doppelganger

Fergus Pickering

I referred to "Tory principles/attitudes (call them what you will)" and not just "Tory principles". I chose my words particularly because I suspected someone might jump at the word "principle" and seek to drag the argument into a tediuos ul-de-sac.

So thanks but no thanks for your otiose reading list.

Swiss Bob

Vertiy, yes, they could call themselves the EU Party then at least the electorate would know exactly where they stand.

TGF UKIP

Edmund Jerk hits the nail in many ways and Fraser Nelson is simply fulfilling his function as editor of the Cameron Tory house magazine by acting as apologist for his beloved Cam.

The truth is as usual much simpler than the convoluted thesis with which Fraser presents us. All we need do is remember who and what Disaster Dave really is - a PR man. An instinctive pleaser and appeaser who finesses and temporizes through every situation. He spent four and half years in opposition not just refusing to takeon Brown, but actually adopting his language and many of his policies.

Dave is in his element in coalition, he thinks he doesn't need to bother any more with those nasty conservative types on his back benches and in the constituency parties but the fact is, as he will most uncomfortably find out, that no other modern PM has had quite so many opponents and enemies with most of them siting behind him.

Dave conned the Tory Party back in 2005 and lost the Tory Party the election in 2010, and the Tory party will have its revenge on Dave.

David Ossitt

Fergus Pickering

"The great Tories don't have principles. They have feelings. It's bloody Socialists that hsve principles."

I agree entirely Fergus an astute comment wel observed.

NicholasV

All these would be "Gladstonian liberals" had better decide whether it's the Gladstone of the balanced budget (hooray!) whom they support. Or the Gladstone of the "ethical foreign policy" (Bulgarian Atrocities etc) - didn't we get enough of that with Tony "Messiah" Blair? Or the Gladstone of the divinely inspired "whim" eg Irish Home Rule, with no preparation of his party and the inevitable party split....?
If the Liberal Democrats were to rediscover something of their Manchester heritage (Cobden, Bright, rather than the ambiguous Gladstone), so much the better as they have been taken over largely by cryto-socialist Social Democrats.
That the former Social Democrat Finkelstein should be so much in evidence as an arbiter of Conservative policy and opinion is something that should cause true "Tories" to shudder.....but that is the nature of the "Devil's Pact" which has given rise to this coalition.

Verity

Wot UKIP said. With bells on.

Tarka the Rotter

I'm totally with obnoxio the clown on this one...

Tarka the Rotter

"Socialists have principles... "it's true! I've been reading up on Nye Bevan, who did as his Kremlin masters bid him. He wanted the NHS to cary out euthanasia, not so much on medical grounds but on political expediancy grounds, to bump off capitalists. George Bernard Shaw (another socialist) wanted scientists to develop a gentlemanly gas to be used against 'the aquisitive class' and Beatrice Webb, when told of the cattle trucks carrying millions of people to their deaths in Stalin's Siberia remarked, 'You can't make an omlette without breaking eggs'. Socialist principles indeed... I rest my case.

TrevorsDen

One interesting side show of this post is once again seeing how many people have their head in the sand.
A formal coalition like the one we see developing might well be better than the vague coalitions we find within parties. Its in the open and there are practical excuses for any differences. Thats why media are finding it difficult to make 'splits' claims stick. A situation with a small tory majority would still bring out the 'split' claims and in that event they would be more difficult to manage.

the reality is, Fraser is right, but will it happen? The next election will tell. Whether we have AV or not its quite possible to imagine the coalition partners not standing against each other where there is an incumbent and relying either AV or normal politics to decide the outcome of the remaining seats. Tories should remember that this is hugely to the benefit of the Tories. If the public have a favourable view of the coalition it should also be to the benefit of the LDs.

The harsh political medicine should serve to unite the coalition against Labour and the financial necessity of welfare reform, pension reform plus some hoped for success in education policy really is all I as a right wing (in the Manchester not US sense) tory could hope for.

What I REALLY do not want to see is a return to Labour. I also seem to remember that pragmatism was a favourite buzzword of Harold Wilson's - and he knew a few things about politics.

John English

You only have to look at a lot of the Tory fringes on the internet, including some posters here to see why Dave is right to try and recast the Tory party away from these people.

Bitter obsessives who bang on repeatedly about Europe, immigration and grammar schools. These sort of extreme ideologues helped the downfall of Major and Dave is right to try and recast the Tory party.

Simon Denis

It has been evident for some time that we are seeing the rebirth of the old Liberal party. The heirs to the Right Liberals who defected from Asquith to Baldwin have buried the hatchet with heirs of Lloyd George. All the old themes are present - retrenchment (and how!), reform (AV) and an independent, business led, peaceful foreign policy. In many ways a large number of Tory voters are probably well disposed to such an outcome, but they (we?) have reservations. The renewed kid gloves approach to crime is deeply worrying, as are the emerging loopholes in the clamp down on immigration. "Europe" is an ever present threat. Such are the dark, pessimistic and nationalist strains of true Toryism, the creed which loves the lady and cherishes an uneasy respect for Enoch; which has no truck with the "Good old cause" and supports Charles the First; which hates Bercow for his latest piddling assaults on pageant and tradition; which is prepared to defend the death penalty and conceives of society as a form of inheritance rather than as a contract. Perhaps this old chorus is finally dying away, but it offers something richer and more alluring than the bland, temperate optimism of our whig masters.

Fernando

Just after the traumatic defeat of 1945 the Tories almost despaired of ever again winning an election on their own and made moves to capture Liberal support. This was encouraged by Churchill, who had been a Liberal and still had Liberal friends such as the formidable Violet Bonham-Carter. In some places Conservative and Liberal association chose a joint candidate. Interestingly, one such constituency was Sheffield Hallam where Roland Jennings sat as a Conservative and Liberal, although he took the Tory whip.
So Cameron is in good company; and Clegg isn’t the first Liberal MP from Sheffield Hallam to support a mostly Conservative government.

Major Plonquer 1

I agree with Strapworld. If Keir Hardie was alive today he'd be turning in his grave.

Naomi Muse

New politics may be newer than it appeared at the outset.

Strategically a merger by default and successful parliament, combined with redrawing political boundaries could mean the death of Labour, as we know it.

Jonathan Woolf

It seems to me a not many people are considering the full implications of AV on Tory voters. AV means that it would be much safer to vote UKIP as a first preference, Conservative as a second. You only have to look at the PR results in the Euro elections to realize how many Tory voters would vote UKIP if they didn't think it would let in Labour or the Lib Dems.

The analogies with Australia are also too superficial. The National party there is a regional one, strong in rural areas of Queensland, where the Liberals are not, but not anywhere else. It is if anything more conservative than the Liberals. A closer analogy in the UK would be the UUP alliance with the Tories, or SDLP alliance with Labour. There is no equivalent to the Lib Dems in Australia, so extrapolating from there to here on AV is dangerous.

Minnie Ovens

Verity
July 4th, 2010 4:28pm

That happened at least three times in the period 1790 to 1890 when a breakaway gruop joined a major party.
Mind you, clling the LibDems a breakaway group is possibly givi g them more respect than they should have.

Yam Yam

I concur with most of your article, Fraser - just as long as you (and, by inference, DC himself) remember that we on the Tory Right oppose EU integration, mass immigration and softer sentencing not because we're "nutty" but because these things are just plain wrong.

Fergus Pickering

But Humpty-Dumpty Doppelganger, principles and attitudes are entirely different things. You can't conflate them just because it suits you.

My attitude to Socialism is inchoate rage. My attitude towards Australians (those without a bat or a ball in their hands) is benign. These are not principles, for God's sake. They are feelings, don't you know. I did not support Mrs Thatcher because of her principles or even her attitudes, but because I trusted her and thought that in general she told the truth, unlike that high principled lying bastard Heath. Had the Labour Party had the sense to go for Denis Healey when they might have done, and had Heath remained the Tory leader I might very well have voted the other way. Do I think Denis Healey was a socialist? No I don't actually. He was a pragmatist. And, like Lady Thatcher, for a politician an honest person.

What you seem to be saying is that you don't like some or all of the things David Cameron is doing. You have that right. Perhaps you would prefer a government led by Lord Tebbit. You have that right too. But dragging 'principles' into it is entirely otiose. Nice word that. I don't think I have ever used it before.

Ian C

Clearly not enough other things to do and think about at the weekend, Fraser!! Like watch cricket or tennis.

To be attributing detailed motives to anyone - especially someone as busy as Cameron is at present - such as 'the end of single party government' is to deny that his priority is to get through the first few months of a very new type of government, the old type of which is even unfamiliar to him.

This sort of speculation, along with much of the commentary that is above, is completely premature and in the minds of the press. The business of making things work now and over the next months and then years, with a mximum of 5, are will be the sourceof occupation of a resposnible PM's thinking. Not a whole load of airy fairy other possibilities that he cannot control.

Chris

Cameron is in coalition, as it’s the only way he could have become Prime Minister.

Cameron is giving the Lib Dems policy after policy, as it’s the only way he can remain Prime Minister, in the long term.

The coalition exists as the tory election campaign was awful. As is the party leadership. And people just don’t want them in enough.

It was a vast failure. And the party is not good enough.

The tory voter ego, never fails to amaze. Like all of this is some grand masterplan, and what the tories wanted all along

Christopher

Libs are polling 14%. A pollster friend of mine is convinced they will be in single figures by May 2011.

Sorry. Sooner or later the Libs will turn on the tories. They will have to, to survive

Verity

Christopher - "Sooner or later the Libs will turn on the Tories."

Good. I want to see David Cameron savaged. Four and a half years to win against toxic socialist crap and he couldn't do it. The Tories didn't like him or trust him enough. I am still baffled as to why he wasn't sacked at the end of year two of failure. He had the word Loser pasted on his forehead.

Although being savaged by the Lib Dems would be akin to being scolded by a torpid frog.