The power of ideas is vastly underrated in British politics. It has become fashionable to dismiss them as “ideology” and declare oneself in favour of “what works”. But the idea of what works is, of course, driven by concepts. As Keynes put it:
I write this because ConHome has just run a piece by Max Wind-Cowie saying, “Equality should not be a dirty word for the Conservatives”.“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slave of some defunct economist.”
I do admire the way Demos, seeing Labour on the way out, is trying to inject as much of its agenda as possible into the Conservative party. But “equality” is, alas, a trap. There is a fundamental distinction between inequality and poverty – and I’d argue that the latter should be the focus of the Conservatives’ attention.
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