Senior Tories are saying that there won’t be many attacks on Ed Miliband from the party’s big hitters at conference. They are concerned that aggressive assaults on him could win him public sympathy.
But both Cameron and Osborne respond to one of the central arguments of Miliband’s speech in their pre-conference turns. Cameron writes in the Mail that ‘the role for government is not to single out good and bad industries, it’s to make it easy as possible for all industries, all businesses, to grow, invest and take people on.’ While as the Telegraph reports, Osborne ‘scorns Mr Miliband’s suggestion this week that the Government should distinguish between “producers” and “predators” as “a gross intrusion of the state”, adding: “To have the person doing my job, sitting in this office, deciding presumably on a whim which ones to tax more, and which ones to tax less, is completely unacceptable, at any time, but in today’s economy it’s just laughable that you could operate such a system. It would be entirely capricious.”
In some ways, though, what is striking about Cameron’s piece in the Mail is that he is also arguing that the current system is broken and that a new approach is needed. He concludes by saying, ‘So right through our national life we’re not just changing policies and plans – we’re changing the way we think. Overturning the wrong-headed ideas that have held this country back. And restoring the common sense and clear thinking that have always made this country great.’
Cameroons would, rightly, say that they have been making this argument long before last week. Indeed, Cameron has been arguing for a new definition of fairness that links outcomes to how people behave for years.
But amidst all this, it is becoming increasingly clear that the new political battleground is over how best to address, what Charles Moore calls, ‘people’s anxiety that morality and money have parted company, both at the top and bottom of society’.
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