All bets are off

27 June 2007

Fraser Nelson says that the new Prime Minister has positioned himself in territory that the Tories have left vacant, and is ready to fight a cultural battle to defend the ‘British way of life’ and win over the C1 voters who decide elections

His attempts to lure Liberal Democrats into his government took all of Westminster by surprise, and Quentin Davies’s astonishing defection on Tuesday hit the Cameron team like a thunderbolt. The only certainty about Mr Brown now is that he intends to surprise. Could this supposedly leftist Scotsman actually win over Middle England, the C1s who decide every election? Not so long ago, this was thought impossible. Now, all bets are off.

Insofar as the labels ‘left’ and ‘right’ carry any meaning in British politics today, Mr Brown appeared to be to the left of Mr Blair. He has fought almost every pro-market reform of the public services proposed by No. 10 in the last few years and prides himself on the transfer of money from rich to poor. At the Treasury he has combined profligate borrowing with the highest tax burden ever seen in mainland Britain. He has raised an army of public sector workers which now outnumbers the population of Denmark.

And yet this is the same Chancellor who has nurtured the City of London’s extraordinary boom and made the Bank of England independent, who saved Britain from the euro, who backs nuclear power, supports the renewal of Trident and has a long affiliation with the United States and its thinkers. And while he has a near-insatiable appetite for tax revenues, it is trumped by his hunger for winning the next election. Now he has become Prime Minister, his ambition is leading him inexorably into areas where Conservatives fear to tread.

Patriotism has long held a fascination for Mr Brown, and his obsession with ‘Britishness’ is more than a glib attempt to present himself as more than a Scottish interloper. Under Mr Cameron, the Tories have backed away from the theme of nationhood, mindful of the disaster that was William Hague’s ‘foreign land’ speech and the evidence in polls that the public saw the Conservatives’ immigration policy at the last election as suspect and even crypto-racist. So the Union flag is replaced by a montage of green leaves on the Conservative conference stage. The flag and patriotism are discarded political assets which Mr Brown will now pick up and use with a vengeance.

Thus far, his ‘Britishness agenda’ has scarcely swept the nation (the flags waved in England today tend to be red and white, without any Scottish blue). But he is aware that concern about immigration and cultural integration has defeated leftist parties across Europe, most recently in France. In Britain, polls in 2007 rank immigration as the public’s top priority. Yet since the last election, immigration and cultural issues have been the no man’s land of British politics.