Once upon a time, it was the easiest thing on earth to read what the press calls ‘the mood of conference’.
Birmingham
Once upon a time, it was the easiest thing on earth to read what the press calls ‘the mood of conference’. The Conservative party was a great tribe, authentically representing large swaths of British life. It was not very political, so on the rare occasions when it expressed real anxiety about something, you could tell it was serious. Political parties of this sort no longer exist and cannot be revived. Most people have better things to do. Party politics has undergone ‘producer capture’. The Conservative conference is therefore part media event put on by the leadership, and part surprisingly impressive gathering of experts, councillors, charities, lobby groups, companies, and now, Liberal Democratish think tanks too, all of whom actually know and care about policy (a subject which, in the old days, was never discussed). There is much to be said for this, but it does mean that the conference has ceased to be a means for the powerful to take the temperature. I have no idea what ‘the mood of conference’ is, and nor does anyone else.
Which means that the reaction to George Osborne’s idea of removing child benefit from top-rate taxpayers is difficult to gauge. Could it be, as the middle-class Tory newspapers hurried to suggest, that this reform is more than bourgeois flesh and blood can bear? Or is it a fair and logical saving which stops poor people paying tax for richer ones, and a clever way of chipping away at the expensive doctrine of the universal benefit? Although I enjoyed paying my child benefit straight into our high-interest bank account when our children were of the relevant age, I tend to the latter view. But the handling of the question shows all the pitfalls of modern political management. Osborne’s team decided to try to take the sting out of the announcement by trailing it on television before the Chancellor’s speech, using the ‘he will say’ device which is such a muddling feature of news handling. This irritated the newspapers, all of whose journalists with children will lose by the measure. They then had all day to prepare attacks on it. David Cameron positively wants to get across the message that the cuts must be borne just as much — more, indeed — by the Tories’ natural constituents as by the general population. But nowadays voters are so hyper-aware of how much they pay in tax, because it has been going up for so long, that the government has to keep guessing about when revolt will flare up. So Mr Cameron spent Tuesday here half apologising. His strategists are palpably nervous. If this matter is truly the Tory equivalent of Gordon Brown’s abolition of the 10p tax rate, what hope is there for the cuts? Cut, cut, cut, I say.
It is 30 years this week since ‘The lady’s not for turning’ speech. The point of the Cameron/Osborne cuts is to avoid having to make the equivalent speech next year. They want to ‘kitchen-sink’ the problem next month. Mrs Thatcher’s famous declaration of toughness in 1980 was made necessary by her initial weakness in not feeling able to cut more, earlier. Mr Cameron’s argument is the very unThatcherish ‘We’re all in this together’, but, as one of those involved in the strategy whispered to me here, ‘We also want to say “There Is No Alternative”, but we can’t. Can you think of an, um, another way of putting it?’ I’ll try, but the point about There Is No Alternative is that there is no alternative.
Incredible, when you think of the history, that Martin McGuinness appeared here at a fringe meeting. ‘Twenty-six years since his lot last joined us,’ says my friend the Tory battle-axe, who was there for the Brighton Bomb.
My old friend David Frum speaks here to a small dinner I organise. He is one of the few American Republicans to see that the great Tea Party anger may sweep the Republicans back to the control of Congress next month, without bringing a lasting conservative recovery. It is not like 1978, says David, with Reagan emerging against the vacillating Carter. The insurgents have no strategy for the deficit, and no solution to the demographic change which favours the Democrats. When George Bush senior won in 1988, he had a lead of a third among college graduates. Today, that lead has vanished. The Republicans have become the party of the uneducated and the old, which does not place them well to be the party of reform. David Frum is therefore interested in what David Cameron is doing. Unusually in modern political history (the only other time was between 1979 and 1981), American politics could learn from Britain something to its advantage.
Perhaps it is different in Australia. Tony Abbott, the Australian Liberal leader, is in town. He did just as well as David Cameron in his country’s recent election, but electoral arithmetic prevented him (just) from gaining office. He employed the sort of robust talk which Tory modernisers here avoid. ‘I fear,’ says one of their progenitors, ‘that our message hasn’t taken root Down Under.’ I wonder if greenery is a factor. Cameron’s Conservatives embraced climate change doctrines zealously as part of their revamp, while Mr Abbott is a sturdy sceptic. The public did not object to the Tory change at the time, but the moment is approaching (six months? a year?), as the price of energy rises, when environmentalism will be seen as a conspiracy by the well-off to impose more costs on the poor — just what Tory welfare policy is trying to avoid.
A small new mannerism now used by experts, particularly economists, is much in evidence here. When interviewers ask them a question, such as ‘But what does that do to the government’s numbers?’ they start their reply with the word ‘So’, as in ‘So, the numbers start to look bad’. Where does this come from? America? Germany? And what does it add?
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