Moving Beyond Mrs. Thatcher

The attention of the British political class is focused on the slow political death of Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his Labour government. Day after day, sober prognostications and wild guesses fill the papers and airwaves. Will it come in days, weeks, a few months, or not until 2010? Meanwhile, Conservative shadow government lies in wait—but not idly. Little noticed by the public, "green papers" outlining Conservative policy pile up on the party's Web site: seven so far; 13, maybe more, to go. If it sounds like a countdown to a new government, that's because it is. With all indicators pointing to a Cameron-led victory at the next election, the Conservatives are seriously getting ready for power.

Ever since David Cameron became Conservative Party leader nearly three years ago at the age of 39, he has faced two big challenges. The first was to rebrand his party, which in the wake of Margaret Thatcher's tough economic reforms needed to cast off its reputation as "the nasty party." The second was to show that his repositioning of the party was more than cosmetic. Skeptical at first, the electorate is now massing behind the Tories, who traveled in high spirits to Birmingham for their annual party conference this week. The fact that the polls have shown them running consistently ahead of Labour by 20 points or so for the better part of 2008—a lead only temporarily dented by Brown's recent attempts to fight back—suggests Cameron and his team must be doing something right.

The growing library of green papers, running to nearly 400 pages so far, is further proof that the Tories, after 11 years in opposition and often in disarray, have put their house in order. The message emerging from the documents are clear: this is not Thatcher's Conservative Party. Here, for example, is a sentence from the education policy paper that could not easily have been written into a Tory party platform of old: "The country that provides the closest model for what we wish to do is Sweden." Sweden, the Socialist paradise of popular imagination, as a model for Conservative policy? Well, yes. In the paper on education, the reference is to groundbreaking Swedish reforms that provide state funding for non-state schools, allowing parents, for example, to remove their children from failing state schools and enroll them in locally controlled, publicly financed independent schools.

It's a reform that fits neatly into the Cameron mantra, "Delivering progressive ends through Conservative means." The phrase may not trip lightly off the tongue, but the Tories believe it's a fair description of their new policy framework. "Education should be a path toward a more equal society," says shadow education secretary Michael Gove, who recently returned from a trip to Sweden. "But our means of getting there are Conservative—choice, competition and trust in the innate good sense of the people at the local level." As in education, much of the Tories' new policy work reflects a more centrist orientation than in the past. Cameron's Conservatives accept many of the goals of progressive governance as set out by Brown and his predecessor, Tony Blair, but they want to strip away traditional leftist features like top-down control from the central government and the sort of tests and targets favored by big bureaucracies. Thus, having studied welfare-to-work models in the United States, Australia and the Netherlands, among others, the Tories share Labour's desire to move as many as possible of the 5 million Britons on benefits into work, but they are not shy about involving private firms in job-placement efforts. Similarly, the Conservatives want local communities to exercise more control over the National Health Service, one of the world's largest employers.

The Tories are finding a sympathetic ear in some unusual places. The Guardian newspaper, a bastion of leftist thought, recently ran a series of articles on "The New Tories" and their policies. The title, not to mention the generally friendly treatment of the Tories, sparked dissent among Guardianistas. Without actually blessing the party's supposed renaissance, the paper said in an editorial that they have at least earned the right to be heard "by people for whom the idea of a Tory government has always been a horror."

Richard Reeves, the director of Demos, a think tank once associated with the rise of Blair's New Labour, is one of those who have been listening. As he wrote recently, "There are now a number of areas, including civil liberties, the environment and education policy, where the Tories can now plausibly claim to be more progressive than Labour." Reeves says the growing conviction that the Tories will defeat Labour at the next election, which must be held by June 3, 2010, has reinforced the emphasis on policy formulation. He says it reminds him of 1995, when "senior advisers around Blair suddenly realized, 'We're going to win. So what are we going to do in government?' " Yet Cameron moved slowly at first. When he took over as leader, his inner circle staked their claim to centrist territory, positioning themselves loosely as pro-green and vowing never to dismantle the National Health Service. But they steered away from specifics, a fact that encouraged his critics, including many old-line Tories who didn't like his newfangled ideas anyway, to write him off as an airhead. It didn't help that he was young, and had only become an MP in 2001. Labour delights in lampooning him still. At the Party conference last week in Manchester, Brown took a swipe at Cameron's team: "Their strategy is to change their appearance to give the appearance of change, and to conceal what they really think. And when salesmen won't tell you what they are selling, it's because they are selling something no one should buy."

True enough, the green papers sometimes seem half-baked—like the 37-page energy document that mentions the word "nuclear" only once. But according to Oliver Letwin, the MP who directs the overall policy-review operation, that's because they are early blueprints in a process that will eventually lead to what he calls "an architecture for government." As it stands, the energy paper, which focuses on the "micro-generation" of power by individual homes and businesses, reflects Cameron's green concerns and personal preferences. A future paper will no doubt address the sensitive nuclear questions, and all the green papers will go through a lengthy public-consultation process, allowing the party to change policy course right up to the actual writing of the party manifesto that will appear just weeks before the next election. Given Labour's dismal standing in the polls, one of its last hopes is that Tory policies will come up badly short and turn off chunks of the electorate. "The more people know about Conservative Party policies," says Labour MP Charles Clarke, a former Cabinet minister, "the less they'll like the Tories." Is that wishful thinking—or political prescience? The voters will have the final say.

© 2008