The Danger of Wanting to be Californian

Fraser’s article on the Californification of the Tory party is a splendid piece of work and highly recommended. I enjoyed it very much. And yet, the more one thinks about it, the more problematic, and perhaps even contradicory, some parts of this vision of a Tory future seemed to be.

For one thing, it seems as though the California the Tories hope to learn from is actually a pretty small and exceedingly wealthy corner of a large and complicated state. That is, there’s rather more to California than Cupertino and Palo Alto. The Bay Area is a lovely, lovely part of the world but it’s hardly representative of its own state, let alone an obviously replicable vehicle for economic and – as the modern Tories might put it – “lifestyle” growth. Equally, if you were to pick a place to reinforce the notion that the party leadership is so wealthy and comfortably off that it struggles to appreciate the concerns of the Average Joe then, yup, San Francisco and the Bay Area might be the place you’d choose.