Last week, it was all doom, gloom, debt, the deficit and austerity from the Tories – and rightly so. But, this week, they’ve returned to the sunny uplands. First, we had George Osborne’s tax cut for seven out of every ten people. And, today, we had David Cameron’s closing speech at the Tory Big Society event. I lost count of how many times he dropped words like “hope” and “change”. And, yes, he even namechecked Barack Obama. But don’t give up just yet – there was more to it than that.
Cameron’s main point was, effectively, a dividing line: between what he called the “short-term” and “centralised” politics of Labour, and what he sees as a longer-term, more expansive version of the state – one which empowers people to act on behalf of themselves and their communities. We already know the rough outlines of this: data freedom, Gove’s school reforms, elected police commissioners, that kind of thing.
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