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’s a brand new year’, Mr Cameron told his Oxford audience last Saturday as he launched his election campaign. Why, so it is. He also has a ‘new politics’ on offer — new, new, new — but without a coherent philosophy, Tory or any other, to underpin it; no Disraeli, or Balfour, or Thatcher he.

Indeed, at a time when many of Britain’s institutions have been debauched during Labour’s period in office, when the nation has largely lost its sense of moral and political direction, and when citizenship of an increasingly identity-less country signifies less than at any time in its history, the feebleness of the Tory response is astounding.

Britain is not only in poor shape economically, but politically. Its parliament is discredited in the public’s eyes and has lost its authority over the polity, perhaps irrecoverably. Party organisations and memberships are in the doldrums, and the independence of the civil service has been compromised, especially by Blairism’s corruptions of it. At the same time, much of the battered country’s legislative and legal sovereignty has been surrendered to Europe.

The non-Conservative might therefore have expected genuinely conservative themes to be commanding the party’s ‘address to the people’, not least because such themes have a continuing resonance with the public. Among them are the principle of nation, the valuing of its history and traditions, and the defence of established institutions — not their dispersal into private hands. These themes also include pride in citizenship and in the fulfilment of its duties (not ‘responsibilities’), the upholding of the rule of law, and the belief that a common value system is necessary if civil society is to cohere.

Yet they have largely disappeared from the Conservative party’s current stance, or can be glimpsed only in dilute, timid or half-baked forms. It is as if the party, in its ‘modernised’, pick’n’mix condition, was embarrassed by the very impulse to conserve. But this dissolution of principle has an obvious primary cause: the dominance of the vulgar ‘free market’ ‘low-tax-and-small-state’ sales pitch, which has played havoc with the moral authority of the Conservative inheritance in Britain.

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