Gordon Brown vs David Cameron

Irwin Stelzer

14 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

On the environment, both men are vying to gain title to the greenest of the green. Brown has his climate change levy, which is more about the Chancellor’s restless search for revenue than about greenhouse gas emissions — witness the fact that it is levied on non-polluting nuclear power. Cameron has offered a series of bizarre stunts (windmills on your roof, biking to work with a trailing ministerial car) and sensible proposals (a combination of targets and market incentives to encourage switching from petrol), but we will have to see just how much economic growth he will be willing to sacrifice on the altar of environmentalism, should the need for such a trade-off become apparent. Brown has decided to live with Blair’s decision to favour the construction of costly nuclear plants, not the most efficient way to increase electricity output while reducing carbon emissions. Cameron, whose backbenchers are more pro-nuclear than Brown’s, is nevertheless more sceptical about providing taxpayers’ money for an industry unwilling to commit its own capital without promises of substantial subsidies: he remains open to arguments that there might be more cost-effective ways of meeting both environmental and energy security needs. Since a significant portion of the costs associated with nuclear come at the tail-end of the lives of these plants, when both Brown and Cameron will be dozing in the House of Lords, or worse, the attraction of the nuclear option for politicians is that they can favour it now and leave it to their successors to bear the final costs. It will be interesting to see which man avoids that temptation.

A final thought about domestic policy. Cameron will operate under an imperative and a constraint that will be absent in the case of Brown: the healthcare, education and other domestic policies he may propose will directly affect his constituents. Brown will be developing programmes that will have no effect on the Scots living in the constituency that sent him to Parliament. That lack of direct democratic accountability is a worrying feature of what Andrew Neil has called ‘the Scottish Raj’.