I found this week’s Conservative conference very interesting to observe - not because I thought they managed to establish a new position and momentum for themselves, but in fact because of the very opposite. For the position they were groping towards setting out is all too consistent with what the Conservative party has been saying really ever since Thatcher.

Let me explain.

The developing wisdom seems to be that Osborne’s proposal to restrict Inheritance Tax (IHT) was very clever in winning back more public support, and that alongside a reasonably strong performance from Cameron, they have therefore together re-established the Conservatives somewhere near back where they were before the departure of Blair.

In fact I don’t share the general consensus that the IHT proposal puts the Tories back into the game of winning support from the mainstream: it remains a fact that even at the moment 94% of the public don’t pay IHT, and while aspiration means that something more than just 6% of people are interested in it, cutting the proportion who pay it to just 2% seems to me a very long way from the really ambitious and radically different policies that Cameron knows he needs to win votes form the centre ground.

But more generally I don’t share the analysis that the unstoppable Cameron bandwagon of last year is now back on the rails - for several reasons.

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After much heavy trailing, the Conservative policy group on Economic Competitiveness, today finally published its report.

The headline that the Conservatives are pushing is a call for Inheritance Tax to be abolished, on the grounds that too many middle-income earners are now paying it.

As house prices have continued to rise very fast in recent years, it is true that the number of estates qualifying to pay inheritance tax has risen. So have they got a point?

Well, according to the BBC, “no inheritance tax is currently payable on 94% of estates, according to official figures”.

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Gosh, David Cameron really is ditching the moderate image and scarpering back to cover his home bases:

Cameron on offensive with call for tax cuts (Daily Telegraph)

Osborne vows to ”˜pick fight’ with Brussels (FT)

This really is tantamount to giving up on trying to win over the moderate voters he would need in order to win a General Election, and just doing what’s necessary to shore up his core vote in order to avoid a meltdown in the Conservative vote.

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As regular readers of this blog know, I am passionately committed, almost to the point of obsession, about accountability and democracy, for example in local health services.

So why do I find myself opposed to a referendum on the European Reform Treaty? It seems rather a counter-intuitive, anti-democratic and an unpopular view to take so I think it needs a bit of explanation.

Referendums are clearly initially very appealing. It seems quite simple: if you believe in democracy, then you should be prepared to ask the public anything and everything, and get them to make the decision.

This seems fine until we look at the actual experience of what actually happens when you do put something to a referendum. And the general (if not universal) experience is that when voters go to the polls, they don’t actually vote about the question on the ballot paper - but instead treat it as a poll on how they think the government of the day is doing generally.

Referendums

The European issue itself provides some good examples of this. Read the rest of this entry »

David Cameron is starting to seem more like the heir to Kinnock than the heir to Blair

Today must be something of a crossroads for how David Cameron goes about his project for making the Conservatives electable again.

For the first year and a bit of his leadership, his plan seemed clear and seemed to be going well. His message was Change, and he put across a general picture of moving the Conservative party away from some of its more extreme positions which are at odds with the modern world. So he tried to show himself as more inclusive, more gay-friendly, and ethnic minority-friendly. He embraced the environment, and accepted the minimum wage. The best thing of all, for him, was that he did all this without really saying anything specific, that he could be held to, or that would really give us any idea of what he might do in government. And for a while, of course, this really went well - he had all the political momentum, and got the Conservatives ahead of Labour in the polls for the first time in a long time.

Then it all started going wrong. His party revolted over grammar schools and, crucially, won its battle with him on it. His ‘A list’ initiative to have a more diverse group of candidates, started more obviously to come off the rails. He has come out with a highly traditional-sounding initiative to support marriage. In recent weeks it has started to seem as though, like William Hague before him, after an initial spurt towards the centre ground, his party is now successfully dragging him back to where it feels more comfortable - that they have taught Cameron “the error of his lefty ways”, as one poster on Conservative Home has put it this morning.

And then the Ealing byelection happened. He continued to take a boldly different approach, and imposed a candidate who wasn’t even a party member. This brave gamble truly went wrong when it turned out that the non-partisan local businessman had also played with the other side. The campaign on the ground too often descended into farce, with the Grant Shapps “1234″ astro-turfing incident, complete with unbelievable denials, and the leaking of postal vote results. But it wasn’t these cock-ups, entertaining as they were, which are what really matters about the Conservative Ealing campaign. It was the fact that Cameron went in over the heads of the local party to impose an external candidate, and fought the campaign very much his way - even as “David Cameron’s Conservatives” - and then failed to pull off any improvement from the last election. Conservative MP Mark Field outlines nicely some of the things he got wrong - and surely the very personal failing of Project Cameron in Ealing gives serious succour to those in the Conservative Party who do not think he is the man for them.

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I used to sit next to Quentin Davies at meetings of the European Movement’s Management Board, about ten years ago. He always seemed very courteous, and he was definitely a bona fide pro-European - but he is also very definitely a real Tory.

That makes him all the more valuable to Gordon Brown. Brown has been trying hard over recent months to close down the narrative which portrays Blair as the one who appealed to Middle England, and Gordon as the conscience of the Old Left within New Labour. Winning over a proper traditional old-style Tory, must surely be his ideal way to start his premiership (and clearly the timing of today’s announcement is not coincidental).

Davies will no doubt be a great start to Brown’s “Government of all the talents” - and I’ll be astonished if by the end of the week Davies is not a minister of some variety, or High Commissioner to Australia, or something.

His move is also of course yet another shove of the Cameron bandwagon off the rails. For his first year or a bit longer as Leader, it seemed that Cameron could do no wrong: all the momentum was with him. As I’ve noted before one reverse does not mean he’s lost the war, but the hole he’s finding himself in seems to be expanding.

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These seem to be important times for David Cameron and his effort to persuade the British public that the Tory party really has changed and is now something that Middle England voters can safely vote for.

First he “lost” the argument with his party about grammar schools, and today there is news that much of his party, including his Parliamentary colleagues, do not accept his stance on many modern liberal moral issues.

A few battles going the wrong way doesn’t mean that he’s lost the war yet, but it does seem to be in the balance. He is consciously trying to do what Blair did to Labour in the 1990s - drag his party towards the centre ground and electability. And it wasn’t all as plain sailing for Blair as political culture now sometimes remembers.

But there is one crucial difference between Blair and Cameron. Blair really was not a socialist, and so he was able to persuade the British public that he wasn’t, and he wouldn’t be a socialist Prime Minister. But Cameron really is a Tory. He might accept gay marriage but no-one would really attempt to deny that he is a Conservative. Other than relatively around the edges, he is not going to change his party’s fundamental ideological approach, as Blair did.

If Cameron can’t persuade his colleagues, as Blair did, that the imperative of victory means having to swallow a lot of things they thought they never could - and be seen to win a battle with his own party - then it will severely damage his ability to stand before the electorate and claim that he leads a Conservative party that has changed.

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.

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