Cameron has substance — but it’s nonsense

David Miliband says that the Tory leader’s core idea of social responsibility is a hopeless muddle of state action and individual duty. If Labour gets its act together, he is doomed Maybe The Spectator will turn out to be correct that the Tories are doing everything right (Leading article, 7 October). There is always the knock-down argument against internal critics: David Cameron is following New Labour’s successful recipe, New Labour was all positioning, ergo the Tories are on track to win the next election.

But I have been back to Tony Blair’s 1995 party conference speech. Love it or loathe it, the first-term policy agenda was in place: the minimum wage; the windfall tax on privatised utilities allied to benefit reform; devolution and the end of hereditary peers; nursery education, tougher school inspections, and school workforce reform — all were there.

Policy lists are not the main point. Success in politics depends on coherent ideology and effective politics — unity, competence, imagination, empathy, symbolism. Coming out of the conference season, it is clear that the government suffers in any comparison of day-to-day headlines. But this is the superstructure of tactical advantage and if I had to choose, I would prefer the depth of ideological long-term clarity. This is where the Tory plan falls apart.

I actually agree with David Cameron that ideology is not the same as policy. Policy gives expression to ideology, rather than defining it. Ideology comes from a value base and an understanding of the world. Work in these two areas has taken British progressive politics, previously defined by an out-of-date ‘Labourism’, from the sick man of European social democracy into one of its healthier variants. More important, it has moved the party from being agenda-takers since the 1973 oil crisis (when the post-war Keynesian consensus came unstuck) to agenda-setters.

New Labour has given modern intellectual expression to the idea of social justice. I remember when the change really started, because I was there. The late Sir Bernard Williams guided the Social Justice Commission through a debate in the winter of 1992 about what we meant by social justice. He constructed a hierarchy of four ideas that together have, implicitly or explicitly, come to define the values of modern progressive politics. Everyone should have equal legal and political rights; basic needs should be met as the foundation of citizenship with responsibilities assumed in return; equal opportunity, a far more radical concept than people realise, should be the policy lodestar; and inequalities unjustified by merit, need or desert should be curtailed.

The Tories’ new big idea, ‘social responsibility’, simply does not match up. Social responsibility is a component of the drive for social justice — in a proportion that reasonable people can disagree about — but not an alternative to it. A cursory glance at David Cameron’s conference speech shows why it cannot make the grade.

Mr Cameron says social responsibility is about ‘turning to each other’ rather than to the state. OK. Then he says the environmental agenda is his passion. Fair enough — let’s leave to one side the fact that he never mentioned it before November 2005. He then says personal action is not enough to solve the problem. That is true. So the solution he proposes is ... err ... government legislation.

I am sorry but this is nonsense. He proposes to ‘turn to the state’ for action because ‘turning to each other’ is not enough, yet turning to each other, and not the state, is his big idea. There are equal contradictions on security and health. If he carries on like this, I am going to have to join the brigade which insists that university degrees are not worth the paper they are written on.

In the end any Conservative party worth its salt has to dispute the core propositions of social justice. The reason is simple. As Friedrich Hayek explained very clearly 50 years ago, once you admit that social justice is the central purpose of political and moral life, then you are damned to a slippery slope of collective action that is contrary to a world view based on personal freedom.

There is a second step in the ideological journey. Labour was stuck in opposition because it never clarified the distinction between means and ends. But it also failed to develop a clear analysis of the world in which we live. Not any more.

The Prime Minister said in his TUC speech that our idea — interdependence had become a cliché. But understanding the centrality of economic, social, cultural and political interdependence is critical to our strong ideological and political direction as a governing party, because it provides a prism through which to understand the modern world. I have seen no idea of similar leverage from the Tories.

From traffic to terrorism, the economy to the environment, our interdependence means that the extension of personal freedom relies on collective action (and if it needs underlining, not just state action). Nye Bevan turns out to be right: the freedom to choose is worthless without the power to choose, and the power to choose depends on how we organise the rules of the game.

New Labour was created out of values and analysis. Renewal will mean coming to grips with the limitations of what the government has done, and pushing the boundaries of what is seen as conventional wisdom — from education, where we increasingly need a personal curriculum and not just a national one, to Europe where the environment provides an excellent basis for rejuvenating the EU. Policy by policy, success will depend on the combination of empowering government, dynamic markets and active civil society.

The truth is that during the 1980s and 1990s progressive politics reached a critical moment. It had to reconcile two competing traditions: socialism and liberalism. It did so by fusing a social democratic belief in social justice through collective action with a liberal belief in individual freedom in a market economy. Social democracy learnt the lessons of liberalism; liberalism was tempered by the lessons of social democracy.

There are two Conservative traditions, too. But I honestly do not see how unfettered markets, which uproot traditions, communities and hierarchies, can be reconciled with the desire to conserve things. There is a faultline and it will not be concealed by vacuous slogans.

The next election will be about change versus more of the same — but not as most people think. The Tories will have just about caught up with New Labour 1997, saying they support the minimum wage, devolution and extra public spending. They will be promising not to rock the status quo. Simon Heffer rightly calls it ‘followership not leadership’.

New Labour, if it gets its act together, will by contrast be offering significant change to build a fairer, richer Britain in an interdependent world. I cannot wait.