Back to the future
by Kirsten Bound
This reminded me of a couple of things:
Firstly Ronald Heifetz's chapter in Demos's The Adaptive State, where he writes:
An adaptive challenge requires people to distinguish between what is precious and essential and what is expendable within their culture. In cultural adaptation, the job is to take the best from history, leave behind that which is no longer serviceable, and through innovation learn ways to thrive in the new environment. Therefore, adaptive work is inherently conservative as well as progressive.
And secondly of David Cameron's own speech at Demos on modern conservatism, where he argued that New Labour genuinely was new, had learnt from Thatcherism, and [whilst it has failed to deliver] it had found the right combination of economic efficiency and social justice.
The elephant in the room (and in Willets' book?) is the question ' if New Labour took the best of Thatcherism and adapted it, what do the Cameroons regard as the best of New Labour? For example, Cameron argued that economic efficiency and social justice were priorities for Thatcher aswell as Blair, refusing to identify anything new there.
There are some signs in individual areas ' for example, George Osborne's praise for Surestart a couple of weeks ago. But when it comes to underlying principles, the big question is not whether the Tories need to modernize or not, but what that really means. What will be conserved and what will be adapted?