The centre: where conviction goes to die
Yesterday, I allowed the consideration that my comment at the end of this post was "shockingly naive" (by which, of course, I meant naïve). Back in April, while admitting that Cameron's leadership of the Conservative Party had not been everything for which I had hoped, I suggested, essentially, that Cameron was too well steeped in the liberal tradition and had too great a respect for the traditions of his country, as well as his party, to go too far (i.e., to go much further) along that path with which he had been ostentatiously toying.
A grave misjudgment of the man, it seems.
Way back when, I said (though I was by no means the first) that Blair's leadership was an exercise in following and making it look like leadership. His obsession with focus groups, dedicated to finding out what people want rather than demonstrating an ounce of conviction (at least in domestic policy: no-one could argue he has not shown conviction in the geopolitical theatre, for which I applaud him), made him, essentially, into the man that says, "There go my people. I must find out where they're going so I can lead them." Cameron, in the spirit of his rather fatuous new slogan, "Change to win ... win for Britain", appears to have swallowed unthinkingly the same canard. (Mixing my metaphors there, sorry.) Cameron believes that people are unshaking in their belief in the inherent virtue of public services, and so the only way to get the Tories back into power is to embrace that whole corrupt statist edifice wholeheartedly, abandoning ideological opposition to it as the mere baggage of a bygone era when this country actually managed to create a dash or two of wealth.
Even assuming he is right (and let's not forget that it's not Conservative policies to which people object: it's the fact that they are Conservative policies), that by no means indicates that in order to win elections Cameron shouldn't challenge this particular piece of staggering collectivist complacency. He has done the hard work of making the Tory leader trustworthy again: now, surely, he must use that trust to tell people the truth about the public sector. The only reason people are so convinced that public services are inherently good is that they have been so relentlessly conditioned to look to only one place for so many of the things they need: the state. They have no experience, even during that brief period when the inexorable expansion of the state was, if not actually reversed, at least significantly reduced, of living in a country where the state doesn't perform a great many of the functions of day-to-day life, so they have no experience of how it might be possible to do them better and cheaper without the state taking its cut. The state, like any other organism, is primarily self-serving. It must ensure its own survival first. In the case of the state, part of that task is accomplished by making itself seem indispensible when in reality it is entirely superfluous.
A grave misjudgment of the man, it seems.
Way back when, I said (though I was by no means the first) that Blair's leadership was an exercise in following and making it look like leadership. His obsession with focus groups, dedicated to finding out what people want rather than demonstrating an ounce of conviction (at least in domestic policy: no-one could argue he has not shown conviction in the geopolitical theatre, for which I applaud him), made him, essentially, into the man that says, "There go my people. I must find out where they're going so I can lead them." Cameron, in the spirit of his rather fatuous new slogan, "Change to win ... win for Britain", appears to have swallowed unthinkingly the same canard. (Mixing my metaphors there, sorry.) Cameron believes that people are unshaking in their belief in the inherent virtue of public services, and so the only way to get the Tories back into power is to embrace that whole corrupt statist edifice wholeheartedly, abandoning ideological opposition to it as the mere baggage of a bygone era when this country actually managed to create a dash or two of wealth.
Even assuming he is right (and let's not forget that it's not Conservative policies to which people object: it's the fact that they are Conservative policies), that by no means indicates that in order to win elections Cameron shouldn't challenge this particular piece of staggering collectivist complacency. He has done the hard work of making the Tory leader trustworthy again: now, surely, he must use that trust to tell people the truth about the public sector. The only reason people are so convinced that public services are inherently good is that they have been so relentlessly conditioned to look to only one place for so many of the things they need: the state. They have no experience, even during that brief period when the inexorable expansion of the state was, if not actually reversed, at least significantly reduced, of living in a country where the state doesn't perform a great many of the functions of day-to-day life, so they have no experience of how it might be possible to do them better and cheaper without the state taking its cut. The state, like any other organism, is primarily self-serving. It must ensure its own survival first. In the case of the state, part of that task is accomplished by making itself seem indispensible when in reality it is entirely superfluous.
posted by Novus at 09:42
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