There’s little comfort to be found on Cameron’s woolly centre ground

9 January 2010

‘It’s a brand new year’, Mr Cameron told his Oxford audience last Saturday as he launched his election campaign.

It has left a void which today’s Tory leadership has attempted to fill by waffle: about aspiration, opportunity and change — and last weekend about ‘building the big society’. There has, historically, been no Toryism as meaningless as this. Yet the nature of our times, as well as the needs of a democracy, make demands upon a Conservative party which are plain enough, or so one would think.

They are demands to defend the principle of the independent nation-state from usurpation of its powers, and to rise to the challenges of accelerating social disintegration, the implosion of the parliamentary system, and intensifying external threat. It might have been expected that the Conservative party would demonstrate qualities of command and vision which past crises — some of them of lesser dimension than those of today — have evoked in its predecessors.

Instead, the crass Tory prospectus has over the last couple of years offered to ‘repair the broken society’ while simultaneously ‘leaving people to live their own lives’. Never mind the contradiction. Make poverty history and create a more egalitarian society, just like Labour aimed (and failed) to do? No problem. ‘Strong public infrastructure’ and improved NHS, together with cuts in public spending? Of course. ‘Free business from over-regulation’ but also ‘stand up to big business’? That’s us. Wear a red tie one day and a blue one the next? On the ‘centre ground’, why not?

Why not? Because liberal democracies are more fragile than they look, and ours is in deep enough trouble without further dissolution of its moral and political orders. And when words, principles, parties and institutions lose their meanings, and a free-for-all takes their place in the name of ‘modernisation’, a weak Conservative party can only unhinge society further. Britain cannot afford its alternative party of government to be in such intellectual disarray.

Moreover, for the Tories to have lost their moorings and to be ineffectively led leaves a historic vacuum. The party has traditionally possessed an authority and even a style, which — for its foes too — helped anchor the political system as a whole. No longer.

David Selbourne is a political philosopher and theorist. The Principle of Duty is published by Faber.