Why winning isn’t enough – and a response to The Fink

I delivered the Keith Joseph lecture last night, entitled Winning Is Not Enough. My point: that the Tories have adopted so many Labour policies out of tactical considerations that they are in danger of getting to office only to find they have signed up to continuing Gordon Brown’s agenda. The problem is not so much Gordon Brown himself, but his misunderstanding of government and politics: it’s his ideas that are so dangerous. If those ideas survive with a blue rosette, they are no less dangerous. And if a Tory government adopts these ideas then that’s not change. It’s more of the same.  

By the time you add up all the concessions Cameron has felt it necessary to make to this amazingly unpopular and unsuccessful Prime Minister (NHS spending pledge, the idea that care = cash, 50p tax, Lord Stern, DFID spending pledge, Climate Change Act, inflation targeting), they will tie his hands in office.