Cameron vs Brown
Listening to David Cameron on the radio this morning as he explained why Grammar Schools are a bad idea (whilst simultaneously trying to explain why his shadow cabinet is full of old Etonians) it became clear to me what some of the opportunities and threats are for both sides in the battle between Cameron and Brown.
The main threat for Cameron (and the opportunity for Brown) is that Cameron is trying to find a language that is sufficiently different from the Old Conservatives to have appeal but not so similar to New Labour to make him sound like Blair. On current trajectories Cameron will increasingly sound like a political opportunist (as he did this morning) while Brown sounds like a serious politician full of integrity and with a heavyweight track record on the political front line.
As the contest hots up the danger for Cameron is that he sounds shrill while Brown sounds grown up, deeply experienced and statesman-like.
At the heart of all this to my mind is the capacity for both men to connect a modern political ideology together with a personal integrity and a commitment to transparent and unshakable ethical principles. Brown is starting to do this and is being effective in my view.
As citizens we have a deeply held need to trust our politicians; our everyday lives are too full to follow the detail of every white paper, the nuance of every argument, the impact of every piece of legislation, the real meaning of every ministerial speech. The need to trust is the need to delegate the running of the country to our leaders.
The way for leaders to build trust is to walk their own talk. The additional task for political leaders is to translate political ideology into a set of core principles and then to make policy coherently against those principles. As citizens we can then judge the work of government not on the detail but on the application of those principles.
In fact we could start voting for an ideology again as opposed to voting on narrow self interest or single-issue concerns (or who wears the neatest suits or has the best teeth or some other celebrity nonsense).
Once we have elected a party on the basis of ideology we might disagree with what they do but at least we can understand their decisions without having to be expert on all the issues.
Too often in the past we have not been served at all well by the political class. We have either had high-minded ideology that is so disconnected from the everyday business of running a country that the endless political debates are meaninglessly hollow (you know who you are). Or we have had Blair's managerialism ("hey, look we do the best we can as the challenges show up and don't talk to me about ideology because there is no room for it around here").
Neither of these are anywhere near good enough for a citizenry hungry for change and leaders we can trust.
The danger for Cameron is that he sounds like a manager leading a business through a period of difficult cultural change (like Blair increasingly did) while Brown increasingly sounds like a real politician leading a country.
Cameron urgently needs to explain what New Conservatism stands for and how that fresh ideology can connect to everyday problems.
I suspect Cameron won't be able to do it because his aging party membership won’t let him. But without a coherent ideology and the ability to translate that into policy Cameron's challenge will wither. His views about Grammar Schools (and everything else) will never matter because the Conservatives will be consigned to history as a political force.
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His argument is that Cameron Conservatism is about (a) society rather than just economics, and (b) about internalising social externalities ('social responsibility'). In other words, making people aware of and responsible for the costs of their own behaviour. Hence climate change as a totemic issue - possibly the biggest externality in history.
Makes sense - and points to a lot of issues that we'll be looking at in our new project on The Politics of Public Behaviour. A couple of points that still need answering though, are:
1. Yes a market economy, but what kind of market economy? This is still uncertain and rightly disputed, as we argued recently. Conditions in workplaces, the interraction between work and families, social mobility, and levels of inequality all still matter - and can be influenced.
2. Is this an alternative to government or a different type of government? Climate change for example, requires government to set a framework in a way that neither the market or civil society could without it. So individual/international carbon trading is a new type of framework, but still needs governments if it is going to happen.
The answer to this second question is unclear at the moment and is probably the most important one of all.
The notion that politics is about the whole of society not just the economy doesn’t seem to me to be a particularly penetrating analysis (despite Letwin’s eloquence) in shaping a new political movement. Neither does the idea that there is a relationship between our individual actions and collective consequences. Yeah, right.
It seems to me that Letwin’s speech is a precise example of how tough we find it to even talk about politics anymore and why we shouldn’t put up with it any longer.
If we are to reconnect our everyday experience of living in our complex, global, ever-changing world with a relevant and compelling political discourse we have to try a lot harder and we need our politicians to take a lead.
At the moment it seems to me that we have ‘lowest common denominator’ politics – the minimum ideological positioning we can get away with in order to avoid actually being held to account for anything that might look like a principle or an ethic or a value.
The truth is that individually we all have our own internal politics, our own world-view, however difficult we find it is to express. We all have our own values that we use to guide our actions every day. Connecting with those world-views, leading the process of expressing them confidently and appealing to the compass that guides all of our individual actions has historically been the hallmark of successful politicians and political movements.
The Conservative project is a long way from that right now in my view. New Labour is closer but still has a lot of space for Brown to fill.
I think the electorate are tired of endless debates about initiatives, projects and specific flagship ideas designed to capture the media’s attention and therefore don’t vote with their feet in droves. Instead of the ideas I think we need the ideology. We need to believe again with our hearts not least because politics is the art of imagining a better society, it is about ends rather than means.