Last Tuesday I was invited to a speech by Oliver Letwin entitled Do Cameron Conservatives have a theory? In the end I couldn’t go but it didn’t matter too much as the speech ended up getting quite a bit of coverage

A lot of people have had some fun ridiculing it because some of the language he uses, quoting some of his more technical wording, and Blair at PMQs mocked his reference to Marx as probably being a reference to Groucho - a highly sophisticated gag that surely must have taken him hours to think up.

He did start off using some very technical language indeed, but as he explained - and as even Simon Hoggart accepted - he was explicitly doing that in a somewhat self-mocking way, precisely to make a point about the nature of use of political language.

And opposition politicians who have mocked that language should also possibly stop to think for a moment and wonder if they’ve been had. So far the main criticism of Cameron has been that what he says hasn’t had any substance. Now they are actively helping the Tories to publicise the fact that Conservative ideology can indeed be explained in long and technical words. I’m sure Cameron doesn’t want everyone to think his theory is incomprehensible, but the publicity this speech has got has done a lot to counter the impression that Conservative ideology is entirely lacking in substance. This interpretation is reinforced by Iain Dale saying in the Telegraph that he needs to translate this explanation of their ideas into “language that non-Oxbridge Old Etonians are able to understand” - aiming to create a sort of general impression that Letwin knows what the Conservatives think, and if we haven’t just managed to understand it, then that’s we haven’t been paying enough attention or we’re not clever enough.

So let’s get beyond the complaints about the language, intentionally caused or not, and look at whether Letwin actually did say made any sense.

His basic argument is that Marx made politics all about economics, and since the war on Marxism was largely won in 1989, it’s not been clear what politics should be about (and especially not for British Conservatives, as it was they who had “won the war”. Hmmm)

Fortunately they’ve now worked out the answer and it is that politics is now not about economics but about the nature of society, or “the way we live our lives” (”socio-centric” rather than “econo-centric”). So as he quotes Cameron,

“It’s not economic breakdown that Britain now faces, but social breakdown…The mission of the modern Conservative Party…is to bring about Britain’s social revival: to improve the quality of life for everyone in our country, increasing our well-being, not just our wealth.”

The second part of their theory is that whereas “Brownian New Labour” is all about direction and control by the state, through state-run public services, Cameron Conservatism is about finding ways to incentivise people to fulfil desirable things like social and environmental responsibilities. The theory of human nature which promotes this way of doing things is the same in the social sphere, as led the personal incentive-based system of capitalism to triumph over state socialism.

Will the framework-theory based on these liberal conservative intuitions come in time to win the battle of ideas in socio-centric politics as comprehensively as its precursor, liberal conservative free market theory, did in the old econo-centric political debates?

It is too early to tell.

But one thing at least is clear. Cameron Conservatives have both an analysis of the nature of twenty-first century politics and a theory of the role of the modern state.

So OK, yes, he’s right that it’s good to have a theory, but does this one really tell us anything much new?

Politics is about more than economics, it’s also about the whole of society - τα πολιτικα - or, in other words, er, politics. Well, it seems too tempting to say that this has been obvious to everyone except right-wing conservatives for a long time, but it is true that does seem like just another way of saying that the Tories need to move towards the centre and be a bit cuddlier. To be fair, Letwin only claimed that he was trying to discern some consistent theoretical features in what Conservatives are now saying, but it doesn’t seem to me that this really says very much at all. It gets you in the right general area but doesn’t really say anything about how they plan to go about doing it: you expect a political theory (even one of Letwin’s post hoc varieties of conservative political theory, rather than a ‘dogmatic’ one) to tell you how you plan to solve problems and devise policies, not just the area in which you plan to do it. This was meant to be a theoretical rather than a policy lecture, but the theory isn’t much use if it doesn’t give you really any clues at all about what policies might flow from it.

His second point perhaps gets a bit closer to being more specific. But it is still only really saying that it is a better approach to encourage people to do the right things, rather than get the state to do everything good itself. This isn’t much of an insight. He is right that Brown’s and Labour’s instincts are more authoritarian, but if economic capitalism has won the battle, then so has “social capitalism” - there is not actually anybody much out there arguing that every single social decision that we take about our lives should be taken by the state.

Perhaps this points us in a direction just a little: you can see that for example a National Health Service less closely run by the state might flow from it, but that’s far from clear, and what he’s saying doesn’t seem to me to be really about that.

Look again more carefully at what Letwin claimed the Conservatives now have:

Cameron Conservatives have both an analysis of the nature of twenty-first century politics and a theory of the role of the modern state.

They’e not ambitious claims - all they’re saying is that they know which field we’re playing on, and have a general idea that the state shouldn’t seek to do everything that’s desirable itself.

Well I guess they do do that - but it seems we’ve a wait yet if we want to see even any guiding principles for how they might go about framing some actual policies.