A weird, sprawling kind of speech from David Cameron in Davos this morning. It started off on an
unusually, if expectedly, gloomy note: all talk of Europe’s debt-induced decline in the face of competition from India, China and Brazil. And he emphasised, of course, that Britain would, and
should, stick to its current trajectory of “tough” deficit reduction. But it’s where it went from there that was more striking still.
Cameron contrasted his position with that of “the pessimists”. These people, he claimed, have a charter which includes propositions such as, “we in Europe are incapable of solving our debt and deficit problems,” and, “we’re attached to liberal values that are leaving us far behind the juggernaut of authoritarian capitalism”. Whereas for Cameron there is nothing true nor self-evident about any of that. What he’s doing instead, he claimed, is making the case for optimism.
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