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Radically pragmatic, rather than dogmatic’, is the way Oliver Letwin, Conservative head of policy, described the new Tory approach this week. Speaking at Policy Exchange, Letwin was hoping to ‘rebut’ critics who say they’ve not seen much in the way of substance since David Cameron became leader of the party eighteen months ago. Joking that high intellectual concepts should not be the preserve of Labour politicians such as Gordon Brown and David Miliband, the former shadow chancellor set aside his party’s professed attachment to plain English and couched his argument in language he himself described as ‘ridiculously high-falutin’.
Far from being merely a snazzy re-branding exercise in a bid to make the party re-electable after three successive defeats, ‘Cameron Conservatism’, Mr Letwin stresses, has a ‘specific theoretical agenda (which) aims to achieve two significant paradigm-shifts’. Although it is not entirely clear what an insignificant paradigm-shift would look like, his point seems to be that, given the consensus on the free-market ‘from Beijing to Brussels’, the compass of politics must now move from the economic to the social, or rather, ‘become sociocentric’ rather than ‘econocentric’.
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