Tories

Wednesday

Alex Massie

A Tory-Liberal Coalition is Easier than a Lib-Lab Pact?

I’m glad to see that more people – Iain Dale, John Rentoul, Iain Martin among them – are paying attention to Labour’s eclipse. At present Labour could finish third in the popular vote for the first time since 1922 and yet many people seem to assume that a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition or arrangement of some sort is the most likely, even inevitable, outcome of a hung parliament. I don’t believe this is the case and not only because of Nick Clegg’s attack on “desperate” Gordon Brown this morning. The Liberal Democrats have based their campaign for proportional representation on the grounds that it is unfair that, as they did in

Tuesday

Alex Massie

The Conservative Backlash Begins

Well this was entirely predictable. The authoritarian right insist that Dave’s efforts at making the Tory party electable are in fact what has prevented the party from storming to a landslide victory. We’ll be hearing a lot more of this nonsense if the Tories fail to win a majority but Melanie Phillips’s most recent post is a decent enough starting place and summary of the argument. Naturally she quotes Norman Tebbit at length and, presumably, it’s only a matter of time befre Simon Heffer and the others weigh-in too. Of course this analysis conveniently ignores the fact that it’s the manifest, obvious, failure of the right that has left Cameron

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Who’s Afraid of a Coalition?

You English, sometimes you are the crazy people. Here’s Iain Dale for instance, dismissing any notion of a Tory-Liberal arrangement: All coalitions end in failure, the partners don’t agree, postponement and indecision become the order of the day. Britain today does not need a two-headed donkey. This, as anyone with any knowledge of politics anywhere else could tell you, is piffle. It’s not even true of British politics. Few people would argue that the Labour-Liberal coalition at Holyrood was one of democracy’s grander moments but it wasn’t obviously worse than, say, a majority Labour ministry might have been and it was, in fact, all too stable and all too able

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Is Nick Clegg really Robert Redford?

And not in a Cleggover* or Rentoul-bait sense either. No, you remember The Candidate? Of course you do for you enjoy political movies as much as we do. Which means you’ll also remember the movie’s strapline: Too Handsome. Too Young. Too Liberal. Doesn’t have a chance. He’s PERFECT! And you’ll also recall the movie’s final line, delivered after Redford’s character wins an unlikely victory: What do we do now? It was never clear that Redford had an answer to this and nor, frankly, is it obvious that Nick Clegg does either. Again and at the risk of repeating myself, how can Clegg be the “Agent of Change” if, once the

Monday

Alex Massie

Tonight’s Tory PEB

Well, what do you guys think of it? Not bad, I think, especially for a broadcast put together at the last minute (the Tories having pulled their planned anti-Brown PEB), But, as ever, there’s the problem that if people think Cameron a little too slick, a little too polished, a little too much the salesman then the slicker, more polished the Tory presentation the more it feeds into this (unfair) perception. Not that the alternative – incompetence – is any better of course…

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Towards a Tory-Lib Dem Future?

I don’t really know if the Tories “Vote Clegg, get Brown” argument will work but if I had to bet on it I’d guess that it won’t. There’s a large enough constituency out there that doesn’t want either the Tories or Labour. Nevertheless, the post-election environment now becomes very interesting. Suppose, just for now, that Labour come third in the popular vote but actually win the most seats. What happens then? And this could happen. Consider this scenario: Tories 33%, Labour 28%, Lib Dems 29% – according to Electoral Calculus and, admittedly, on a crude national and uniform swing, this could produce a result something like Tories 258, Labour 265,

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Lessons for the GOP From a Tory Defeat?

Ross Douthat uses his New York Times column today to update Manhattanites on the British election. As you might expect, Ross is broadly supportive of Cameronism and goes so far as to call it “a more detailed and specific vision of what conservative reform might mean than almost any English-speaking politician since the Reagan-Thatcher era.” However: Even if they manage to pull out a win, the Tories will have to actually execute the transformation that they’ve promised. Here the American experience is not encouraging. From Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, almost every modern Republican president has pledged to decentralize government and empower local communities. But their

Saturday

Alex Massie

The Enthusiasm Gap

As James says, we’re going to need to wait a few days before we can be sure if the Lib Dem surge has legs but, yes, right now something is happening. The headline figures for the three polls we’ve seen since Clegg’s coming-out party are: ComRes: Con: 31 (-4) Lab: 27 (-2) Lib: 29 (+8) ICM: Con: 34 (-3) Lab: 29 (-2) Lib: 27 (+7) YouGov: Con: 33 (-4) Lab: 28 (-3) Lib: 30 (+8) That’s all striking enough but so too is this finding from the Independent on Sunday’s ComRes poll: Only 53% of self-proclaimed Labour voters say their preferred election outcome is a Labour majority. By contrast 67%

Wednesday

Alex Massie

A Choice Revolution

Reihan Salam has a characteristically excellent post on school choice that has some bearing on the Conservatives’ proposed reforms in England. Reihan’s talking about the US and the suggestion that Milwaukee’s voucher programme hasn’t delivered as much as one might like, but his general argument applies to this side of the atlantic too. Bottom line: choice is not enough. Or, to put it another way, choice is a beginning, not an end*. As he puts it: [C]hoice-based reform at its best creates an opportunity for educational innovators to create new models, deploy new technologies, etc. The ultimate goal is to create a flourishing educational marketplace that goes beyond the binary

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The Tocquevillian Tories, Part 2

Three excellent, interesting responses to the Tory manifesto from Iain Martin, Danny Finkelstein and John Rentoul. I recommend them all. And by way of folllowing yesterday’s post… It’s not a libertarian manifesto by any means and it’s not, contra Rentoul, laissez-faire either but it’s certainly more appealing than anything produced by Labour and more relevant than the Liberals’ offering. But it is, as Martin says, a considerable gamble even if, in the end, it is built on the recognisably Tory planks of Family, Community, Country… The Cameron idea of the state is not, despite what some folk seem to think, for a small state. After five years of Cameron central

Tuesday

Alex Massie

The Trouble With Referendums

I’m not opposed to local referenda and ballot initiatives. But they need to be carefully handled. As commenters have pointed out and as California’s experience demonstrates these can easily fall prey to powerful interest groups. This is especially so if the threshold for putting an issue on the ballot is too low. And 5% of available voters is, I’d hazard, too low. Apart from anything else experience suggests that youcan get 10% of voters to believe in just about anything. Consider this example from tonight’s YouGov tracking poll: 11% of voters say they’d like to see a “Grand Coalition” in which the Tories, Labour and the Liberals share power. That’s

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The Tocquevillian Tories

I think that today’s Tory manifesto is really quite a piece of work and potentially a work of genuine radicalism. It looks west and back and while it honours plenty of traditional Tory themes its inspiration is American in ways that not even Margaret Thatcher would have imagined – and that the Lady would have found too radical. Hopi Sen worries that none of the questions he asked about the manifesto have been answered. So here, in a fraternal spirit, is how they might be so answered: 1. Why is a pledge on cutting inheritence tax for millionaires a higher national priority than reducing the deficit or tax cuts for low income

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Libertarian Paternalism in Action

This, folks, is how the Nudgers and so-called “libertarian paternalists” work. From the Tory Manifesto’s (rather brief) passage on civil liberties: The indefinite retention of innocent people’s DNA is unacceptable, yet DNA data provides a useful tool for solving crimes. We will legislate to make sure that our DNA database is used primarily to store information about those who are guilty of committing crimes rather than those who are innocent. We will collect the DNA of all existing prisoners, those under state supervision who have been convicted of an offence, and anyone convicted of a serious recordable offence. We pushed the Government to end the permanent retention of innocent people’s

Thursday

Alex Massie

A Broad Toryism

Speaking at a Spectator debate last night, Tim Montgomerie laid out some of the reasons for thinking David Cameron more the heir to Thatcher than, as some of the old right think he may be, a squishy heir to Heath. I wouldn’t agree with all of it but it’s a good speech and a good case. This bit in particular is a fine summary of the modernisers’ argument: For years there has been an unholy alliance of the Guardian Left and unreconstructed right who only want the Tories to talk about tax, crime, Europe and immigration. […] But added to this traditional mix Cameron also wants the Tories to be

Tuesday

Alex Massie

The Great Ignored

Sunder Katwala thinks that Dave’s talk of the “Great Ignored” carries echos of Nixon’s “Silent Majority”; Hopi Sen doesn’t much care for the phrase either and wonders why Cameron didn’t go for Chesterton or Kipling instead. This seems sound advice though I wonder if eloquence and allusion can carry a message these days without being seen as hopelessly elitist or, worse, pompous and artificial. Rhetoric, I fancy, is mistrusted.  Anyway, this is part of what Cameron had to say: “We’re fighting this election for the great ignored. Young, old, rich, poor, black, white, gay, straight. They start businesses, operate factories, teach our children, clean the streets, grow our food and

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Labour’s Manifesto: The Shortest Abdication Note in History?

And so it begins. At last. The phoney war is over and now the grapeshot will be flying thick and fast. There will be casualties aplenty, decency, honesty and your patience amongst ’em. I’m sticking to my view, which is neither especially daring nor unconventional, that the Conservatives will win and finish with a majority of 30 or so seats. Sticking, I say, even though obviously I reserve the right to change my mind several times between now and polling day. For ages now – or at least it feels like ages – I’ve been arguing that whatever doubts one may reasonably have about Cameron the Tories appear to have

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Tory Obama? Really?

Is Barack Obama really a closet Tory? That’s the question Andrew Sullivan asks in the light of this passage from David Remnick’s new Obama biography. Speaking about race in America and his election, Obama says: “America evolves, and sometimes those evolutions are painful. People don’t progress in a straight line. Countries don’t progress in a straight line. So there’s enormous excitement and interest around the election of an African-American President. It’s inevitable that there’s going to be some backlash, potentially, to what that means—not in a crudely racist way, necessarily. But it signifies change, in the same way that immigration signifies change, in the same way that a shift from

Friday

Alex Massie

Blond in America

As David says, Philip Blond has charmed David Brooks (who, in turn, has not impressed Matt Welch). I wasn’t terribly impressed with Blond last November and am not sure I’ve really changed my mind. Anyway, that post can be found here. Bottom line: Sometimes, if I understand him correctly (not as simple a task as it ought to be), it seems as if Blond wants to take us back to the 1930s – at home and at work. I think he’d like everyone to live in small towns or, preferably, villages too. Now there was much that was good about the 1930s but time, and society, moves on and it’s

Thursday

Alex Massie

The Tories & Middle England: United Against the Unions

The admirable Hopi Sen thinks the Tories will blunder if they continue their Unite-bashing. Childish, playground stuff he calls it: The idea that Gordon Brown is in the pocket of the Unions because errr, he keeps going around condemning them, and (in the case of the RMT) designs business models that make them so angry they disaffilliate from the Labour party is silly on its face – and therein lies the danger for the Tories. This false perception leads the Tories to overplay their hand. If  you put up posters condemning the Government for being in the pocket of the Unions,  that just gives ministers the chance to make you look silly by proving

Thursday

Alex Massie

The Hurt Locker, the Fast Show and David Cameron

Think Defence has some fun with this video, suggesting that it’s a British version of The Hurt Locker. But actually, it’s also a mini-exemplar of some of the debates currently being heard in Tory circles. From the perspective of the Tory grass roots and true believers, the officer in charge here not only looks like David Cameron, he proceeds with the same degree of muddling caution they find so frustrating. The Hefferite and chuntering wing of the party is more in tune with the “Sod this” type of robust approach – especially, though far from exclusively, when it comes to cutting public spending. But getting away with this in a