Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Why winning isn’t enough – and a response to The Fink

I delivered the Keith Joseph lecture last night, entitled Winning Is Not Enough. My point: that the Tories have adopted so many Labour policies out of tactical considerations that they are in danger of getting to office only to find they have signed up to continuing Gordon Brown’s agenda. The problem is not so much Gordon Brown himself, but his misunderstanding of government and politics: it’s his ideas that are so dangerous. If those ideas survive with a blue rosette, they are no less dangerous. And if a Tory government adopts these ideas then that’s not change. It’s more of the same.  

By the time you add up all the concessions Cameron has felt it necessary to make to this amazingly unpopular and unsuccessful Prime Minister (NHS spending pledge, the idea that care = cash, 50p tax, Lord Stern, DFID spending pledge, Climate Change Act, inflation targeting), they will tie his hands in office. And those of us who vigorously oppose the ideas coming from Gordon Brown can hardly be expected to applaud them if endorsed under duress by Cameron.

The full text of the lecture is here. With a nod to Danny Finkelstein, Guido describes it as “Finking is not enough” – and The Fink has done me the honour of a Fisk (here). He spots what he regards as a contradiction. Now, I’m a great fan of The Fink, and he and I sparred over cuts last October – which I thought necessary and he did not. Yet again, we disagree.

His point: that in my lecture I say it is the greatest deception in politics is to say “we’ll just copy their policies now, dress in their clothes for a bit, and do the good stuff later on.”

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