A novice with the right ideas

27 September 2008

The Spectator on Gordon Brown's conference speech in Manchester

Nor should he back down an inch from his determination to fix Britain’s ‘Broken Society’. The most shameful passage in Mr Brown’s speech was his bogus conflation of social breakdown with military defeat. ‘This country,’ the PM said, ‘has never been broken by anyone or anything. This country wasn’t broken by fascism, by the Cold War, by terrorists.’ It is absurd to suggest that identifying deep social problems and proposing a plan of action as Mr Cameron, Chris Grayling and Iain Duncan Smith have done is somehow unpatriotic. On the contrary: the unpatriotic course is to ignore the depth of the social crisis in Britain — debt, family breakdown, worklessness, addiction — and do nothing about it.

Above all, Labour showed in Manchester that it is more implacably statist than at any time since 1997. ‘Those who don’t believe in the potential of government shouldn’t be trusted to form one,’ said Mr Brown. And on this matter he stood shoulder to shoulder with Mr Miliband, who made the astonishing claim in his own speech that ‘unless government is on your side you end up on your own’.

Mr Cameron has made it his mantra that ‘there is such a thing as society: it’s just not the same as the state’. Clearly, this government does not see the distinction. Next week, the Tory leader should explain precisely why this distinction must lie at the heart of the next wave of welfare and public service reform. The modernised Conservative party takes child poverty more seriously than ever; the difference is that, unlike Labour, the Tories do not believe that the problem can be solved by legislation. Mr Cameron must also assert unambiguously his commitment to fiscal conservatism, after Mr Brown made clear that he is willing to borrow more and more to fund his public spending sprees. After The Spectator’s analysis last week of the abuse of the Private Finance Initiative to cook the books, it was ironic to say the least to hear the PM slating financial institutions for off-book accounting.

‘It’s a referendum on the government at the moment,’ Mr Brown said on the Today programme on Wednesday. At the general election, he insists, voters must make a choice between two parties and two programmes. It is Mr Cameron’s task next week to show that he is ready to offer such a choice; better a novice with the right ideas than an abbot whose time is past.