Gordon Brown vs David Cameron

Politics is about choices. It is not about wishes, for wishing won’t make it so. The Blairites might wish that a formidable challenger to Gordon Brown would emerge in the next year, but none will. The Brownites might wish that they could pass their man off as the very model of a modern Englishman, his income redistribution programme complete, but they can’t. The Tories might wish their man harboured purely Thatcherite instincts, but he doesn’t. And the Lib Dems might wish … well, for something.

Neither Brown nor Cameron offers the clear alternative to the status quo that Margaret Thatcher and, later, Tony Blair offered. Thatcher, not immediately but eventually, said that those who saw nothing but further decline in Britain’s future were wrong, and proved it by re-ordering the relationship between the government and the trade unions, and between the state and the private sector. Blair offered a clean break with Labour’s goal of controlling the commanding heights of the economy by abandoning Clause 4 and its commitment to the nationalisation of major industries, and with a tax regime that surely would have brought the nation to ruin. Later, too much later perhaps, he bravely resisted the opposition of his Chancellor and many in his party to put on offer a reform of the welfare state that passes control of service quality from producers (teachers, hospital administrators) to consumers of those services.

The fact is that voters will have to choose between the imperfect instruments that will be on offer in a world in which the sharp policy distinctions that prevailed in the early days of the Thatcher and Blair eras no longer exist. Gordon Brown is the man who has done much to produce a growing economy, with full employment and nil inflation. But he is also the man who has expanded the public sector without even a pretence of reforming it; who ceaselessly trolls the complex tax structure in a hunt for new and worse retroactive tax increases to heap upon a groaning middle class in order to fund the state’s expansion and his redistributionist proclivities.