Blair’s winning strategy was to expunge the Labour party’s reputation for insane and unpopular ideological socialism. He did this by picking battles with the hardcore supporters of such loony leftery thus proving that the parliamentary party had “changed”, had learned lessons from its four electoral rejections and was therefore ready for government again.
Blair was able to win these battles and maintain support from large chunks of his party for two reasons:
- a lot of the policy changes he claimed to embrace – such as support for free enterprise, low inflation and sound public finances – had been proved to be pragmatic by the mid 1990s when Thatcher’s reforms had started to bear fruit;
- activists and people on the left who did not agree with Blair’s Don’t Upset The Middle Classes policy platform had nowhere else to go, they hated the Tories enough to vote tactically and there was no party to the left to defect to.
Whether he means to or not, Cameron seems to be doing his best to keep alive that horrible phrase “heir to Blair”. The New Conservative party appears to have a strategy of double-triangulation: moving further into Labour territory than Labour moved into Tory territory. For Cameron it is not good enough to say “Labour failed because they only gave the impression of moving to the right rather than actually moving to the right”. For some reason he seems to think that to win “the centre ground” (whatever that is) he has to steal some of Labour’s worst policies.
Dizzy thinks that this is part of a strategy to generate heat between the party leadership and the membership, a Clause Four moment to cast off the blue rinse image of the Old party. I think it is a catastrophic error.
Whether or not Cameron actually agrees with all female shortlists or punishing the majority of drinkers for the sins of the badly behaved (just two recently announced totally un-conservative policies), he is clearly trying to appeal to electoral demographics which have not traditionally voted Conservative. But if he thinks that traditional conservatives or the new generation of classical liberals will simply go along for the ride he is making a fatal mistake.
Unlike in 1997, there are alternatives for conservatives to voting Conservative. And if conservative voters don’t think that Cameron is going to be much different from Blair or Brown, why on Earth would they hold their noses and vote tactically? By being so desperate to be seen to have “changed”, Cameron puts the core vote at risk. By moving his tent so far away from the traditional conservative lawn, he risks alienating the people who might spread enthusiasm for the Conservative party or even actually go out and deliver leaflets and knock on doors to win him an election.
Conservative party pollsters may be making an electoral calculation, after all you can only lose disaffected votes once, but I think that taking “grass roots” support for granted could be a disastrous mistake.
UPDATE: Vote Starkey!
It’s possible that Cameron taking on his own party and winning could be the moment that the public realise what a strong leader he is.
Who are “the public” in this instance? Am I a member of that public?
One of the major problems with the Labour government has been that it does not have any “principles” to fall back on when formulating policy. Are you really saying that a move in this direction from the Tory party will be a good thing?
We used to have a political system where the parties would battle it out in an election to persuade voters that their ideas were best. We now have a system where the main parties battle it out to try and tell voters what they want to hear. Who are the “leaders” here? Cameron is doing his best to prove that he just says what the focus groups tell him, just like Blair did.
Not that his pollsters will give a shit, but they are unlikely to get my vote with that kind of strategy.
I will just hold my nose and vote for ‘call me Dave’ and hope for the best,although I have prepared my escape from Britain already…much to my shame.
As a former ‘grass roots’ Lib Dem, frankly the whole sorry mess of our political leadership leaves me cold. I am left utterly ambivelent by the lot of them. Not one is capable of laying out a clear vision for the future, as simply, any vision they may have cannot be paid for.
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