Cameron is making the intellectual running now — with a little help from the Blairites

12 January 2008

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

In fact, as this week’s political battles show, the intellectual running in British politics is now being made by the Conservatives. We glimpsed this last year when Alistair Darling filled his budget with Tory policies. And we have seen it yet again this week with Brown’s ‘relaunch’ amounting to little more than the regurgitation of plans for nuclear power and health screening. Mr Cameron, meanwhile, saw in the new year by announcing the most radical welfare reform proposals Britain has ever seen.

A Conservative government would end the ‘let them eat tax credits’ approach to welfare and test every single one of the 2.6 million incapacity benefit claimants to judge what work each of them is capable of doing. The Jobseekers’ Allowance would last for two years and then be replaced by Australian-style ‘work for dole’ schemes. Mr Brown is too shrewd a politician not to sense that the public mood is behind such tough-love approach. So he did not know whether to accuse the Conservatives of heartlessness or plagiarism.

The more time the PM spends trying to match Tory ideas, the harder it becomes to caricature Mr Cameron as a spin-obsessed ingénu with no substance. In a series of speeches and documents, the Tory leader is laying out in ever greater detail what he means by a ‘post-bureaucratic era’. What he means, above all, is a radical break from Mr Brown’s tired world-view.

At the core of Mr Cameron’s strategy is a trust in civil society. It is about adapting to what Mr Cameron calls ‘an era of dispersed knowledge and power — rather than the concentration of authority’. This is a commercial, economic and social trend — and creates the demand for smaller government. Mr Cameron is aligning the Tories to an age where people do not trust politicians and want the power to act for themselves.

His education policy, for example, would allow any organisation to set up and run a state school within the state budget (likely to be at least £6,000 per pupil.) He also proposes locally elected police chiefs, so the public’s priorities, and not the latest panicked diktat from the Home Office, will determine law and order policy on the streets. Weaving all this together is the classic Conservative mission: to roll back the state. Mr Cameron, of course, adds the crucial rider that he is also ‘rolling forward the frontiers of society’.