Tories

So Long Lynton Crosby

Man responsible for Tories disastrous 2005 campaign now likely to have nothing to do with their 2010 effort. That’s the Lynton Crosby story, right? Surely this is excellent news for the Tories? What am I missing? Standard caveat: the influence of political consultants and strategists is, generally speaking, over-hyped. I think. But they are fun to write about.

The Republicans and Cameron, Cont.

Background: John O’Sullivan wrote a piece for National Review arguing that the GOP had nothing useful to learn from the Tory party’s post-1997 experiences. I took issue with that here. Mr O’Sullivan then sent in this response. Here’s my reply to his reply. John O’Sullivan is right. It was remiss of me to overlook the fact that, as Executive Editor of Radio Free Europe, he is currently based in Prague. Nonetheless, he is also National Review’s Editor-at-Large and was, for nine years, that magazines’ Editor-in-Chief. He has also edited the National Interest and been a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute. For good measure his family home is, I believe,

The View from Inside the Cocoon

It can be dangerous to be more catholic than the Pope. That was my immediate reaction to John O’Sullivan’s piece on David Cameron in the latest issue of National Review. O’Sullivan dismisses the notion that there’s anything the Republican party can, let alone should, learn from the Cameronian Makeover. O’Sullivan is hardly alone in thinking this. That is, British conservatives exiled in Washington tend to disdain Toryism. From their comfortable berths at Heritage, AEI or National Review they tend to think British conservatism is fatally muddied by compromise and lacking the appealing clarity of the dominant strands in American conservatism. They dislike the uncomfortable truth that Britain is not an

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

The Davis Agenda

I suspect Peter is right and that David Davis’s remarks about “the Davis agenda” will raise a few eyebrows. But I find them encouraging. There’s an obvious upside to Davis returning to the front bench at some point since, despite the Tory parties advantageous position in the polls, the party could do with the extra muscle Davis would bring. From the point of view of civil liberties, however, there’s something to be said for Davis prowling the back benches, keeping an eye on a Tory party that may well find it too easy to slide away from the civil libertarian agenda once it’s in power. Davis, then, has an important

Carrying the Country First

An excellent post from Blimpish, making the point that while Labour governments tend to be elected with great enthusiasm, voters are usually more cautious when choosing Conservative ministries. It was only in 1983 that Thatcher won her landslide (Reagan, of course, emulated her example in 1984). And as he says, you don’t need to win your party (completely) to win the country: Thatcher’s latter-day hero-worshippers may believe the British people enthusiastically embraced the full-blooded Thatcherite agenda of sound money, free markets, union-busting, etc.  But it wasn’t the case; leaving aside that what became ‘Thatcherism’ didn’t really exist in 1979, inasmuch as it was articulated, people were generally sceptical – after

Local Tories

The Conservatives new approach to localism – or subsidiarity – deserves a couple of cheers. It is at least a step in the right direction. Just as well since, allied with Tory education policy and, one might argue, some burnished environmental credentials, this “New Localism” is supposed to be the “Big Idea” animating a renewed, reinvigorated Toryism. So, while today’s announcement is welcome, it’s also imcomplete. Apart from anything else, local accountability requires local financing. There’s not enough in the Tory proposals (yet) to link local councils with local sources of revenue. As the Scottish Parliament has demonstrated, if there’s no link between policy and revenue-raising then more money is

Three Terms are Enough

Brother Bright gives some of his reasons for hoping that Labour will prevail at the next election here. As a good man of the left, one would expect no less from him. And he’s right, I think, to suppose that we’d be facing many of the same problems had David Cameron and Georgie Osbourne been running the country these past five years. In that sense, you can undertsand the frustration some of the Prime Minister’s supporters must feel. Not all of this is the PM’s fault, but he’s the only fellow the public can kick. But for those of us who aren’t automatically attached to any party the calculation is

David Cameron’s Peculiar Unionism

David Cameron’s op-ed in Scotland on Sunday this week was interesting. Not because of anything that Cameron said but because it appeared at all. It’s another small indication that the country is preparing itself for a new Conservative government. To put it another way, I don’t think SoS would have been very interested in an op-ed from Iain Duncan-Smith or Mixhael Howard. What would have been the point? What could they have said to the country that anyone wanted to hear? Not much. So Cameron’s proposals for how he would work with Holyrood are, while scarcely earth-shattering, useful to have put on the public record. Nonetheless, they are sensible, modest

Tales from a Convert

A friend of mine, once armed with impeccable progressive credentials, recently came out s a Conservative – much to the bemusement of his family and many of his friends. With Neill’s permission, here’s the explanation he published on his Facebook page. Sure, this is just one person’s story, but I wonder how many other people might have come to similar conclusions after 12 years of Labour government. Anyway, I think this a pretty persuasive critique of Labour in power: I grew up in a Tory-hating family in Thatcher’s Britain. In those divided times, we were definitely not “one of us” – Mum was a teacher, Dad brought up the kids

The Scottish Tory Dilemma

Someone needs to tell Tom Harris MP that the “Unionist” in the “Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party” referred to the Union with Ireland, not that between Scotland and England. Equally, the fact that the Conservatives (in London) and the SNP (in Edinburgh) sometimes seem to be reciting similar talking points should scarcely come as any great surprise: the Labour party is their common enemy. True, the Conservatives oppose the Nationalists north of the border but as far as the UK party is concerned that’s a secondary front and one, more particularly, on which there’s little need for a fresh offensive this year. If, as Alan Cochrane hints, the Scottish Tories

Transatlantic Differences

There are times when it’s good to be away from the hurly-burly of American politics. Doubly so when the subject of gay marriage comes up. Here, for instance, is a story it is hard to imagine happening in the United States: Nick Herbert, the Conservative party’s Shadow Justice secretary has apparently become the second member of David Cameron’s Shadow Cabinet, to enter into a civil partnership. It’s hard to imagine too many senior gay Republicans feeling comfortable doing this, let alone doing so with the blessing of the party’s leader and their constituency assosciation. Then again, gay marriage in Britain has, generally speaking, been decoupled from religion. (Of course, some

Never mind me mate, what about the other mob?

Commenting on this post Ian Leslie – aka Marbury – argues that we’re on the brink of a new era and that just as Callaghan was right to appreciate that one era had ended in 1976, so Darling and El Gordo may be correct to suppose that another has been shipwrecked now. Maybe. Look, I’m not sure this will work, and if it does work it might be partly by accident and yes I know that Brown hasn’t really earned his authority over the last ten years. This is a gamble. But taking a gamble at this stage is better than doing nothing and hoping things will return to normal,

Lessons from a Tory Revival

At Culture11 today, I’ve a piece offering, however impertinently, some advice to the Republican party.That is to say, I suggest five lessons they could learn from the Conservatives’ revival in Britain. The extent to which they are applicable, let alone replicable, in the United States, may differ of course. But they are notions, not policy prescriptions, broadly summarised as:  The Base is Not Enough  The Elites Matter  So do Ideas  When the Electrate Moves, You Move  Atonement Needs to be More than Rhetoric; Or, Time is Not Enough Check the rest out here.

The Littlejohn Vote

As expected, David Cameron’s speech has been well received. In the Telegraph, Iain Martin says this was the moment Cameron “came out as a Conservative”.  Indeed so. But amidst the sobriety and the resolution, there were moments of populist blue meat too. The BBC’s mini-focus group particularly loved this passage: For Labour there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society – just them, and their

Change We Can Believe In?

Ben Brogan suspects the financial crisis is an advantage for Gordon Brown. Perhaps it is. In the short-term. Make that in the very short-term. But in the medium to long-term it’s another millstone dragging him to the bottom. Danny Finkelstein is, I believe, correct: This election will not be fought in the middle of a crisis. It will be fought in the depressed aftermath that results from the crisis. The politics of these two moments are quite different. In a crisis people will be small ‘c’ conservatives, clinging to experience. They fear losing what they have got. But the literature on loss aversion suggests that in the depressed aftermath, when

Where’s Scotland?

Notice what’s missing from this Guardian scoop? A third runway at Heathrow airport would be scrapped by a Tory government that would instead build a £20bn TGV-style high speed rail link between London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. In one of David Cameron’s boldest moves on the environment, the party will today unveil plans to cut 66,000 flights a year from Heathrow by tempting passengers on to the first new rail line north of London in more than a century. Well, working on the dubious presumption that this track will actually be built (let alone that it will be delivered on time and on budget), you’ll notice that these new lines

New Tories, New Danger?

How will Lbour fight the next election? Stupidly, it seems. According to a briefing paper obtained by the Guardian, Labour “has decided to attack the Conservatives at the next election as an unreconstructed, dangerous rightwing party that is only masking its true instincts behind slick positioning.” Oh dear. Labour argue that: “Occasionally the mask slips and we see the dangerous, old- fashioned Tory rightwing instincts hidden underneath. They believe in unfettered free markets, cuts in public services to fund tax cuts for the richest, and a smaller, less effective government. David Cameron believes Britain would be stronger if we stand alone, rather than come together.” I have no idea what

Miliband Day 2

Since Camilla Cavendish makes some points in her Times column today that are similar to some I made about David Miliband’s leadership challenge yesterday, I obviously think she’s written a fine, penetrating piece. As she says, In policy terms, it is the Conservatives who have so far seemed optimistic about the ability of people to make decisions for themselves, and Labour that has made devolving power to a few hospitals and headteachers look like an am-dram production, involving more histrionics and agonising than Racine. The irony is that where it has devolved most power – to Scotland and Wales – it has let nationalists hollow out its core vote. This