Cameron the neocon?

Jonathan Freedland has a piece in today's Guardian where he argues that for all the talk of "compassionate conservatism" Cameron, like Bush, is surrounded by neocon advisors and allies such as Ed Vaizey and Michael Gove. The comparison is, although not quite right, an interesting one because it isn't that Freedland is wrong about Cameron necessarily. He outlines a number of the measures that Cameron has voted against, such as increased spending on health and education, extended maternity leave, and the right for employees with young and disabled children to request flexible working and so on. He also points out that Cameron has mooted the idea of a flat tax, as practiced in a number of post-Soviet countries in Eastern Europe. In general, Cameron has spoken of a need for 'more capitalism', as if those who favoured this had been somehow on the defensive for the last 25 years. Freedland's suggestion is a bit like Polly Toynbee's yesterday:

"Brown signalled it yesterday: it is that Cameron is a rightwing wolf in compassionate sheep's clothing. He is the same old Tory, just rebranded and with a full head of hair."

My own view is that it would be more risky than one might think to follow the Freedland-Toynbee advice. For one thing, I doubt very much whether the electorate as a whole is anything like as impressed with Gordon Brown and his achievements as they are. And I'm also not sure that "he's just the same old Tory" line will work with Cameron because it is a little too simplistic. They have confused social liberalism with welfare, thereby understating, if not completely ignoring, the cultural shift that Cameron represents. Blimpish thought I was relying on a stereotyped view of the Tory party by taking this view. While I'd have to admit that this might well be so since I actually don't know any Tories (or I may do, but am unaware of it - people tend not to admit to that sort of thing up here), I really don't think that someone who skirted around a question over whether he had ever taken class A drugs at university would have been able to become Tory leader a few years ago - or someone who argues that gay couples should be able to adopt in certain circumstances.

Freedland is right to say touchy-feely rhetoric about social inclusion means nothing if you're going to preside over a regime that slashes welfare for single-mothers or whatever but the point is that under previous Tory administrations, it was arguably the other way around and not very many people seemed to notice. I was a welfare rights advisor when Thatcher was in power and it was then that social security was reformed to include a single-parents allowance in Income Support applicable amounts and unlike with the Blair regime, they were not compelled to seek work or training to be eligible for these. The hard-faced Victorian rhetoric, in other words, didn't always match the reality, whereas it was that nice John Major, aided and abetted by the affable Ken Clarke that the Guardian inexplicably seemed to like so much that saw quite stringent restrictions to welfare, particularly to unemployment benefits.

In other words, people tend not to pay anything like as much attention to fiscal policy as Mr Freedland and Ms Toynbee suggest and it is the case of the former that illustrates the point because when it comes to Bush, it is he that hasn't been paying attention. Bush has been, of course, very right wing in his social policy but I consider it hugely significant that much of the criticism of this has focused on the President's evangelical faith and the implications that has had vis-a-vis abortion, the issue of gay marriage, the involvement of faith organisations in inner-city projects and so on.

But if you look as his fiscal policy, the picture is more complicated. Under his Presidency, federal education spending has been increased, as has spending on Medicare - to the extent that it represents the biggest expansion of any federal programme since the New Deal. Other aspects such as tax cuts for the rich and the proposed attempt to privatize pensions are more traditionally right wing but taxes certainly have not been increased to pay for all this, resulting in what the Economist described as the fastest fiscal deterioration in US economic history. Irresponsible perhaps, by other interpretations quite Keynesian given that it was done during an economic slowdown. Whatever else he might be, Bush is no 'fiscal conservative'.

Contrast and compare with Clinton: touchy-feely liberalism in the American sense, and on the right side of the 'culture wars', yet he dismantled a major plank of the New Deal by pushing responsibility for welfare back onto the states and was in his approach to deficit reduction a real 'fiscal conservative', unlike Bush or Reagan. Who noticed? Not that many people, which is why there's nothing in Freedland's piece that would change my view that Labour should be worried about Cameron.

And I worry about the Labour party if they imagine that the electorate is as fond of Gordon Brown as so many of them seem to be. Simon Jenkins' article in the same paper today was much better than Freedland's, although I'm open to the criticism that I would say that since he's making similar points:

"Brown and Cameron will offer a fascinating encounter. They are chalk and cheese, blandness and bile, candy and acid. Brown is the old politics, long protected by Blair's coating. He is all facts and figures, human nature wrapped up in a comprehensive spending review. Cameron is youthful. His politics are digital, offering pathways to the subconscious that Brown has yet to discover. By 2007 he will have had two years of experience in the job over Brown.

Thatcher in 1979 smashed the Labour party and thus made Blair electable. She still approves of him. Blair then smashed the Tory party. Something tells me he would not mind if he had made Cameron electable, a bizarre political compliment returned. British politics is longeur subject to periodic explosion. An explosion may be at hand."

Labour malcontents should be wary and remember the just because Blair says something, that doesn't mean it isn't true: never ever underestimate the Tory party.

The Cameronian wins the crown

Or the poisoned chalice, depending on your point of view. I'm depressed - it must be some kind of milestone when not only policemen start looking younger but when the Conservative Party go and elect a leader who is actually younger than you.

But if I were a Conservative, I'd be feeling rather chipper this evening because from the field of available candidates, Cameron was undoubtedly the best choice. Before even considering whether he is equal to the task, it's worth considering what Cameron and his election represents for the Tories.

For one, it would tend to indicate that they have at least started to kick the dangerous habit political parties so often fall into of mistaking their own party activists for the electorate. A mistake because the 'grassroots' in any political party are almost always more ideological and partisan than the ordinary moderately politically interested voter and quite often, to be frank, a good deal more unpleasant, in my experience.

What could illustrate this point better than looking at the leaders the Tories have come up with since they foolishly embraced party democracy? Howard doesn't really count because his was a coronation as an act of desperation, and Hague only half-counts because it was he who invented the silly rules in the first place. Rather it is IDS who was the Tory 'people's choice' par excellence, chosen largely for his ideological purity and his 'heroic' rebellion against the Major regime during the passage of the Maastricht Treaty, the rank and file having deluding themselves that his obsession with the machinations of the EU was as important to floating voters as it was to them. That Labour has had if anything a longer record of this sort of destructive wishful thinking is a point to which I'll return and I'll leave this one with the observation that the Davis camp's criticism of Cameron as another Blair was misplaced: this is exactly what the Conservatives need because what Blair showed was that an ugly party needs a leader that seems nicer than they are, better-looking if possible and not quite one of them. I think the more perceptive amongst the Tories have learned this lesson. If you want a comparison, it's a lesson that the US Democrats remembered when they chose Clinton and then rapidly forgot when they opted for Al Gore and then John Kerry.

Whether Cameron is equal to the task or not should not distract attention from what his election means for the Tories. They've decided they want to be elected again, a step of no small importance. To criticise his lack of policies misses the cultural significance: enough Conservatives seem to have realised that while promising to punish those in society you consider deviant may well make the party conference moist, it doesn't wash well with the overwhelming majority of the electorate who know single-parents for the most part suffer rather than luxuriate and who probably either know personally or who have met people who use illegal narcotics but for the most part manage to avoid becoming crazed junkies or crack-whores.

Speaking of drugs, one wonders if the the Tory faithful hadn't in the past been ingesting rather a lot of them if they imagined that figures like Hague and IDS would return them to power. With Cameron they seem to have understood the importance of charisma. Anne Perkins has a rather sharp piece on this in the Guardian. She argues, rightly in my view, that when people argue that Attlee would have never survived the modern media age, they are perhaps overlooking the way in which this quiet, understated politician personified the mood of the times. She makes the shrewd observation that while Tony Benn could (and still does) bang on about people not considering the 'ishoos', this ignores the fact that the very issues he was concerned about only got the publicity they did because Benn was something of a personality on his own right.

And what she has to say about Blair deserves the attention of those Labour party supporters, members and MPs who imagine that it is he who is the sole source of their problems: the likes of the embittered Glenda Jackson et al are merely repeating the same mistake they have made in the past when they thought Foot-Hattersley was a winning ticket if they are deluded enough to think it is they and their preoccupations that are more appealing to the electorate than what is presently on offer. The criticism that New Labour has squandered two massive Commons majorities is entirely valid but one should make it in the knowledge that they wouldn't have been there to squander in the first place, had it not been for Blair.

It's important because the Labour Party is entering a dangerous phase. The Iron Chancellor is as Prime Minister likely to inherit an economic situation that should be all too familiar to the Labour party. Despite the rhetoric, Brown has been in some ways like just like every other Labour Chancellor: he has ended up spending a lot, and borrowing a lot because he didn't think he could afford to be honest about the tax increases that he either knew must have been necessary, as his opposite number George Osborne suggested - or he didn't anticipate them, which would tend to cast doubts on his competence.

The reality of the situation is that Brown inherited a relatively benign set of economic circumstances from the Major years; a fairly hefty increase in taxation from Norman Lamont which curbed excessive consumer demand plus the ejection of Sterling from the ERM that ushered in a period of cheap money - a good combination for British exports. He probably deserves credit for not buggering it up completely, no mean feat for a British Chancellor, but he is bound to inherit as PM an economy where people feel the shoe pinching more than they have done for several years.

This is where I think Polly Toynbee was wrong in her article in the Guardian today. She argues that "tax and spend is popular" but I don't think the electorate is quite so keen on it as she is when it becomes rather more experientially apparent to the average voter than it would be to her that Prudence has been spending rather more than he has been taxing. In this context, it's not difficult to imagine Brown looking rather too old, grumpy and Calvinist compared to the fresh-faced Mr Cameron. If no serious economic alternative is being offered, why have capitalism with frowns when you can have it with smiles? Insubstantial? Deliberately so.

And for the background, those of us who don't care to see another Tory administration in this country should never forget the Labour party's capacity to seriously injure itself whilst navel-gazing. Polly Toynbee writes that "Labour has nothing to fear but its own demons". As if that wasn't rather their problem in the first place.

Show me the money

I was reminded by this of an obvious but infrequently remarked apon point about terrorist atrocities and it's that they cost money. The answer to the question, why is it - if suicide bombing is a function of poverty - that we are not over-run by African terrorists is this: apart from anything else, they can't afford it. The whole business is rather expensive, what with the training, the forged documents and the air-miles that people who think it's a good idea to blow themselves up tend to cover in any given 'martyrdom operation'.

Bit like the motivation of the various countires prior to the invasion of Iraq: apparently only the United States has any economic interests to defend in the region; the French and the Russians in contrast, if you read the Guardian, were acting out of a matter of principle. It would be shallow cynicism to suggest that the fact these countries were Saddam's biggest trading partners in Europe had anything to do with the position they took.

I'm an economic historian, so I can do "it's the economy stupid" with the best of them (yes dear, it is all about oil - just not in quite the way you think) but can we do it consistently please?

Thousands march for Hong Kong democracy

From the beeb:

"Tens of thousands of people have taken part in a march in Hong Kong to demand a fully democratic political system.
Trade unions, activists and civic groups joined ordinary citizens, some carrying banners denouncing China.

They snaked round streets lined with sky-scrapers towards government offices chanting "now or never" and "do you want a clown or a chief executive?".

Campaigners say they want the Chinese autonomous territory's next leader to be elected by universal suffrage."

Pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong and China: can I suggest as a strategy that you find some way to involve the Israelis or the Americans? Otherwise I regret to inform you that no-one is going to give a shit.

Phonics and stuff

There's a piece over at the Jarndyce Blog about the Government's plans to re-introduce the 'synthetic-phonics' method of teaching children to read. Well, that was the method by witch I was taut to reed and right and it surved me veri well indead I think.

Anyway, I've also discovered that apparently the fact that this hadn't been the practice in primary schools in England and Wales was used by free-marketeers as justification of their bizarre notion that education should be privatized. It's only since I've started blogging that I've come across this eccentric idea and I'm wondering where it comes from because this certainly was not Adam Smith's view and I'd thought all but the most loopy 'anarcho-capitalist' types still resisted the widely-accepted view that there are a variety of 'public goods' that the market is incapable of providing. I really think the economic argument falls into, "No, really - the earth's round" category so I won't bother going into it except to point out that no industrialised country has depended on the free-market a universal compulsory education system.

The enthusiasm for the free-market appears to be based on the idea that it would release schools from the 'micro-management' of the classroom by central government. Well, I'm glad that they've seen the errors of their ways because it was Thatcher, followed by Major, who centralised education in this country to an unprecedented degree with the national curriculum and its accompanying 'death by assessment' approach to education. And one could point out that not only is privitisation not the only way autonomy can be passed back to schools, it would not in any event guarantee this autonomy, given that they are subject to the same curriculum and exam system as everyone else.

Finally, I'm not one of those who thinks that state schools are as good as private ones; for the most part they are not, and the reason is really jolly simple: private schools are selective, end of story. The uniform, the 'ethos', the smaller classes, the 'traditional' methods all put together aren't anything like as significant as this simple fact. Parents who have forked out such large sums of dosh aren't for the most part going to put up with their offspring wasting time and disrupting the education of others and if they do, the school always has the option of telling them to bugger-off.

Whereas we in the state-sector have the policy of 'social-inclusion' where one could be forgiven for thinking that the only criterion under which a pupil can be permanently excluded is if Her Majesty's Prison Service absolutely insists.

In the unlikely event that any teacher from the private sector is reading this and is thinking, "Oh no darling - it's the callibre of the teachers in the private sector", I hereby challenge them to a duel behind the Cathedral at six. Weapons are to be hammers and empty bottles of Buckfast.