Continuing on from some of themes I struck in the early part of today's debate, partially as a result of another opinion piece in today's Times, this from Conservative MPs Nick Gibb and Gary Street
Already since the election a number of Conservatives have called for fundamental change to show that we are in touch and comfortable with the modern, diverse Britain that voted last week. They are right. We do have to change the way that we speak and act if we are to win over the millions who did not even contemplate voting for us. We do have to offer a positive vision if we are to connect to young people, among whom we are now neck and neck with the Liberal Democrats.
Yep. I've been saying this for a while now. The Tories are simply, lets just say, an old party. Gibb and Street go on. The next bit is in many ways much more interesting:
To begin with, the party has to come to terms with, and be comfortable with, the fact that health and education, just like the police and the Army, are in the state sector to stay. This is a political fact. Since 1997, terrified of our opponents’ accusations that we would privatise everything, our approach has been to develop a few headline-grabbing polices — bringing back matron or giving head teachers the power to exclude disruptive pupils — in order to “neutralise ” health and education as issues so that we could talk about more “natural” Tory issues such as law and order and immigration.
But being comfortable talking about public services is only the start. The Conservative Party needs a new agenda for the State. In the 1990s — after the huge transforming success of privatisation of state-owned industries — the Conservative Party sought to apply market disciplines to the public services by adopting an internal market philosophy. The theory was that by opening up public services to choice and internal competition they would be forced to adopt best practice and provide high-quality services. The trouble with the theory is that schools and hospitals within the state sector cannot go bankrupt and there are no shareholders to force out poor-quality leaders. In the internal market, a comprehensive school head teacher who peddles 1960s education ideology hated by local parents will face falling rolls but will simply trim his staff numbers and soldier on.
The choice and competition approach has allowed us to develop policies that enable the middle class to escape public sector provision altogether. But it has also meant that the Tories have not been able to speak convincingly to the millions who have no choice but to wait impatiently on hospital waiting lists or see their children failing to reach their true potential in the local comprehensive.
If I'm reading this right, these two are essentially suggesting a Tory position that one could legitimately interpret as being to the left of Blair and his inner circle. And ultimately, this is what is so maddening and bewildering about the current situation. A fair number of Conservatives - probably not approaching a majority, but a good number nonetheless - have essentially ceded that the British public has shifted leftward since Thatcher's years. And I think this is more or less true, as the polling data for voters under 50 suggests. But at this very moment, the traditional party of the left (Labour) is led by a man whose instinct is to continue pushing further right. Blair's (and his people's) public rationale for this rightward instinct is that the inherent conservatism of the British people demands nothing less, that as soon as the Conservative yell "boo" on immigration or asylum, "middle England" will come running back. Either the Blairites remain completely traumatized by their formative political years (which I think is certainly the case for a number of backers in the media - case in point, Martin Kettle), or they simply think implementing policies to the right of the middle England are the best policies. Well, thats fine if they do, I suppose. I by no means reject the Blairist "reform" agenda out of hand - I don't think the case against tuition fees is by any means self-evident, for example. But the Blairistas need to stop kidding the rest of us that their policies are the "best a progressive government can do" and that they can only do so much because the British public is inherently "too right wing" for anything more. Please. This is probably true of the United States. But, as Blair seems to forget, Britain isn't the United States. At least it wasn't the last time I checked.
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