Cameron’s substance is nonsense

14 October 2006

David Miliband says that the Tory leader’s core idea of social responsibility is a hopeless muddle of state action and individual duty. If Labour gets its act together, he is doomed

I actually agree with David Cameron that ideology is not the same as policy. Policy gives expression to ideology, rather than defining it. Ideology comes from a value base and an understanding of the world. Work in these two areas has taken British progressive politics, previously defined by an out-of-date ‘Labourism’, from the sick man of European social democracy into one of its healthier variants. More important, it has moved the party from being agenda-takers since the 1973 oil crisis (when the post-war Keynesian consensus came unstuck) to agenda-setters.

New Labour has given modern intellectual expression to the idea of social justice. I remember when the change really started, because I was there. The late Sir Bernard Williams guided the Social Justice Commission through a debate in the winter of 1992 about what we meant by social justice. He constructed a hierarchy of four ideas that together have, implicitly or explicitly, come to define the values of modern progressive politics. Everyone should have equal legal and political rights; basic needs should be met as the foundation of citizenship with responsibilities assumed in return; equal opportunity, a far more radical concept than people realise, should be the policy lodestar; and inequalities unjustified by merit, need or desert should be curtailed.

The Tories’ new big idea, ‘social responsibility’, simply does not match up. Social responsibility is a component of the drive for social justice — in a proportion that reasonable people can disagree about — but not an alternative to it. A cursory glance at David Cameron’s conference speech shows why it cannot make the grade.

Mr Cameron says social responsibility is about ‘turning to each other’ rather than to the state. OK. Then he says the environmental agenda is his passion. Fair enough — let’s leave to one side the fact that he never mentioned it before November 2005. He then says personal action is not enough to solve the problem. That is true. So the solution he proposes is ... err ... government legislation.

I am sorry but this is nonsense. He proposes to ‘turn to the state’ for action because ‘turning to each other’ is not enough, yet turning to each other, and not the state, is his big idea. There are equal contradictions on security and health. If he carries on like this, I am going to have to join the brigade which insists that university degrees are not worth the paper they are written on.

In the end any Conservative party worth its salt has to dispute the core propositions of social justice. The reason is simple. As Friedrich Hayek explained very clearly 50 years ago, once you admit that social justice is the central purpose of political and moral life, then you are damned to a slippery slope of collective action that is contrary to a world view based on personal freedom.