Gordon Brown vs David Cameron

17 June 2006

Irwin Stelzer says that the sharp policy distinctions of the past are no more, but that the choice ahead of the voters is still one to relish. This is his audit of the scores so far

Neither Brown nor Cameron offers the clear alternative to the status quo that Margaret Thatcher and, later, Tony Blair offered. Thatcher, not immediately but eventually, said that those who saw nothing but further decline in Britain’s future were wrong, and proved it by re-ordering the relationship between the government and the trade unions, and between the state and the private sector. Blair offered a clean break with Labour’s goal of controlling the commanding heights of the economy by abandoning Clause 4 and its commitment to the nationalisation of major industries, and with a tax regime that surely would have brought the nation to ruin. Later, too much later perhaps, he bravely resisted the opposition of his Chancellor and many in his party to put on offer a reform of the welfare state that passes control of service quality from producers (teachers, hospital administrators) to consumers of those services.

The fact is that voters will have to choose between the imperfect instruments that will be on offer in a world in which the sharp policy distinctions that prevailed in the early days of the Thatcher and Blair eras no longer exist. Gordon Brown is the man who has done much to produce a growing economy, with full employment and nil inflation. But he is also the man who has expanded the public sector without even a pretence of reforming it; who ceaselessly trolls the complex tax structure in a hunt for new and worse retroactive tax increases to heap upon a groaning middle class in order to fund the state’s expansion and his redistributionist proclivities.

David Cameron is the man who has succeeded where his post-Thatcher successors have failed. He is getting the Tories, if not yet loved, at least listened to by an electorate that plugged its ears when William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard spoke of lower taxes, tighter immigration laws, and a tougher policy towards criminals. As the Sunday Telegraph put it, ‘Inch by inch, he is dragging his party into the warm sunshine of credibility.’

But he is also the man who might, just might, find a sort of patronising nannyism irresistible, and make the state intrude where even New Labour feared to tread. No more chocolate oranges; new standards of corporate behaviour that exceed anything set down by Parliament or by regulatory authorities; government responsibility not only to maintain an economy that can improve material standards of living, but to produce Greater Well Being and happiness for one and all. And increased funding for an already overblown public sector, populated entirely by selfless public servants who cannot efficiently use the money showered on it by Gordon Brown.

So what’s a poor voter to do? One possibility is to wish a plague on both their houses and stay away from the polls. This is not an irresponsible act, but a statement that both goods on offer are unsatisfactory. It creates a clear incentive for both parties to spend time figuring out how to lure the disaffected back into the voting booths next time around by competently implementing policies that voters find attractive.