Perhaps the latest round of squabbling from the Tory grassroots (the front bench may have successfully rebranded themselves with the party’s official name, “Conservatives”, but the bulk of the party are the same Tories they always were) will provide the Liberals some tactical space - if they were willing to use it.
ConservativeHome, that shining beacon of peace on earth and goodwill toward men, is pushing its agenda for 2008. The most recent item on this agenda is to try to get George Osborne to scrap the Tories’ policy of matching Labour’s spending plans until financial year 2010/11 (other items include the usual slaver-jowled baying for the BBC’s blood - I suppose I wouldn’t know, but I can’t see how it is a conservative policy to attempt to undermine the nation’s most internationally prestigious institution? - and a call for electoral reform that’s timid in scope but actually quite sensible, and obviously in the party’s interest).
David Cameron’s response at his press conference was that he believes the policy of matching Labour’s spending plans is the right one. The noise of the rabble, however, indicates that whatever friendly noises the front bench makes, the party’s centre of gravity is way off to the right.
All of which makes Nick Clegg’s Orange Book-toting economics a lost opportunity. We do not need another triangulating fudge of a party to fight it out over the same patch of turf arbitrarily described as the “centre”. The Tories could simply not follow them into radical territory like the (now-abandoned) “1p on income tax for education” policy. There would be a grassroots revolt. Of course the Tories can occupy the economic “liberal” ground, and as a credible party of power, they have in fact come to own it. It’s all very well for the Lib Dems to say that they had the ideas first; that hardly matters. The Tories are the party of laissez-faire Classical Liberalism.
On the social liberal ground, respect for individual liberties (negative freedom) is also open to appropriation by the Tories - notice Cameron’s choice of the ID cards issue on Nick Clegg’s first PMQs. Positive freedom - freedom to rather than freedom from - is an area where the Tories may make little inroads (such as the theft of the Lib Dem pupil-premium payment policy, as noted on Red Box blog), but they can’t really go very far.
If the Lib Dems are bold in this area, they can cease to be redundant. If they are timid, they have the ground stolen from beneath their feet by the Tories - and they will deserve it. Any guesses for who wrote this:
This modern decentralisation agenda is key to achieving social and environmental progress in the twenty-first century. We will never win the fight to make British poverty history as long as we rely on top-down, centralised state mechanisms. We will only achieve our green objectives - whether improving the quality of life in our neighbourhoods or reducing carbon emissions - by empowering individuals and communities.
That could have been straight out of Clegg’s speech I mentioned in my last post; but it was actually Cameron in an overture to the Lib Dems and the Greens (and their voters), to much teeth-gnashing on ConservativeHome.
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