Curiously, it matters what we end up believing about George Osborne. Conservative political commentators are deeply opposed as to wether Osborne is a right-wing small state Tory (Peter Oborne said he was on the Today Programme, 23 October 2010) or a pragmatic centrist with Big Society overtones (Matthew D’Ancona, same show). One clear conclusion from this disagreement is that Osborne is opaque. He talks about his regrets at the present cuts, but is often described as thinking them sound on permanent ideological grounds as well as temporary fiscal ones (see, for instance a column by Bruce Anderson in the FT at the time of the 2010 conference). 

It seems fair to concluded that if we can’t make our minds what Osborne thinks or wants, then we are in the same boat about Cameron. After all, the men are supposed to be in close agreement.

I think there is a way through these issues. Sunder Katwala  of the Fabian Society said on The Week In Westminster (23 October 2010)that Cameron is a One Nation, pragmatic, High Tory who wants to govern but “may be more ideological than he thinks he is”. Katwala thinks Cameron has a creed which embraces “sound finances”, which is a more ideological stance than those who hold it suppose.

In the same conversation, Ian Birrell, a Tory speechwriter, seemed to agree with Katwala’s analysis, but added that Cameron does definitely believe in the Big Society.

Steve Richard didn’t press the point, but wondered if the Tories were just scared of saying what they want. Catching the presenter’s drift, Katwala noted (crucially I think) that if Cameron is “successful as presenting himself as a pragmatist he may get to be a revolutionary”.

I think this is the point of the Good Society mantra and that it has to be infuriatingly vague because it is cover for some as yet undefined post-state activity which horrifies many of the public. That’s to say that the state may use redistributional taxation to fund access to welfare services for some citizens, but it will own none of them. The guilty secret is that commerce of many different sorts will be doing a high percentage of the work we now think of as the province of the state. “Big Society” is designed to cover that.

“Big Society” is obviously also cover and code for progress toward more people paying for more welfare by direct payment and insurance, some of the latter perhaps compulsory. “Sound finance” is code for that too: what can’t be paid for by state borrowing will more likely come from citizen’s own spending. 

I am tolerably sure that Cameron and Osborne are determined not to “waste the crisis” of the fiscal deficit but are absolutely sure that almost nothing can be said directly. “Sound finance” is for some reason the sort of tough talk the British like. Out of it will flow the beginnings of reform to the welfare system which are a far harder sell. 

Cameron and Oborne have had to design a language which works electorally but which disguises their real goal without being egregiously dishonest with the public. They have just about pulled it off. I think it is fair to say, as I have elsewhere, that this is a “Tory Coup” and that the strategy is an affront to the Tory leaders’ declared intention to govern openly and steadily.  But at least we are nearer to having a decent theory as what they’re up to.

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[This piece ought to be read with this pinch of salt: Nick Clegg told CNN (26 September, 2010) that the Coalition would end up with a tax-take of about 41 percent rather than Evan Davis's 37 percent. If he's right, the tax-take will be about that inherited by Labour from the Tories in 1997, and which they promised they would maintain for a couple of years.]

The dreaded Mrs T never achieved that (36 per cent) level of take, let alone the rate of reduction implied. (That is what I take from two salient documents, one from the IFS and the other the IEA.) In short, the Coalition is headed toward American tax assumptions and miles away from Franco-German, let alone Scandinavian, ones.

I would be even more thrilled if it weren’t for my anxiety that such matters ought to be discussed or at least pre-announced, as a matter of democratic accountability. I do of course see that the Coalition has probably just been learning the lessons readily to be gleaned from Tony Blair’s Journey (subtitle: A handbook to post-modern political reality): (1) Don’t waste your honeymoon; (2) don’t consult, lead. But these are lessons by which to bamboozle suckers, not build consensus and be transparent, which is supposed to be the New Tory mantra much more than it is mine.

It is additionally odd, you might say, that taxation is so popular, as Evan also let us know with the Comres poll conducted for the show. This suggests that redistribution of national wealth may be quite a sellable proposition.

That seems like a proposition to comfort the left. High taxes, big welfare state etc.

 But we need to remind ourselves that the state does not have to spend or control whatever level of redistributed wealth we go for, even if it forces the exchange through taxation. That was the lesson that John Major started proving with his reforms of the welfare state, and which Tony Blair began to sell as he fought to find words for the new State-Lite assumptions he thought were becoming the modern thing.

The Comres data also suggests that the poor really don’t get it. They of all people resist the thought that they do quite well out of the benefits that taxation brings. That may – just – be because they see the damage that Welfare Dependency brings them, though I doubt it. It’s more likely that they have an exaggerated view of their Welfare Entitlement. The core of this problem is the “Social Justice” mantra by which the middle class socialists constructed a language by which the poor are not allowed to be grateful to their benefactors. To put that more coolly: the poor were robbed of any sense of obligation, and that really did scupper them.

If we put all this together, I think we see a future in which there mey be a good deal of state redistribution which funds the poor (and maybe even wider society) to have the benefit of social services which aren’t owned or even controlled by the state. So, yes, it’s socialism, and Big Society, and volunteerism, and market provision.

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1. A defence of Murdoch and News Corp I’ve had a comment that my review of the revived...

(1) Reforming the Welfare State

It’s a long old argument, and Tories have done well by ducking it, but how are we really to get the state to have an optimal (minimalist but efficient) role in guaranteeing rather than providing welfare? Maybe this country really does want and will insist on a state-heavy approach, but I doubt it.

(2) Living with global capitalism

It seems likely that this country faces a long hard economic future in which its appetite for public and private spending is challenged by its difficulty in competing with increasingly successful and aggressive countries all around the world.

(3) Being a world hub of capitalism

It seems very likely that a large measure of this country’s economic success will depend on its being one of the HQs of world capitalism. That will mean that it remains highly unequal and has to be extraordinarily clever in its treatment of financial regulation.

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There are three features of modern politics which mean the old party can flourish. 

(1) A new but fissured politics

The political genius of David Cameron is to have seized the most important single fact of change which lay before him.

For a hundred years, politics has been trench warfare between upper and lower classes, capital and labour, salary and wages, property and poverty, dissidence and dominance.

Tony Blair played several of those themes but helped us abandon others. Cameron has gone further: he has ripped up all the remaining class and collision understandings.

Of course, we now face the challenge and opportunity of a fissured politics in which issues will not be readily herded into neatly opposed platforms.

I can see at least one solution and I have argued for it over several years. It is that MPs will be elected and operate as candidates of this or that party but with an understanding of a range of issues on which they will not be party loyalists.

It is a nice idea that the country is basically centre-right or centre-left and that whoever captures one or other of these can then rule. Under such a dispensation, the extremes of left and right would be lively outliers and perhaps have their own flanking parties. In fact, I think, the country is composed of individuals who hold within themselves a multiplicity of views, and parties look like having to accommodate this degree of fissure. 

The Tories are more obviously, naturally and philosophically a broad church of pragmatists than any other party and should thrive in this era.

(2) Making orderly government out of disorderly politics

David Cameron’s biggest electoral mistake was to fail to emphasise an appreciation of the need to re-establish the institutions and habits of representative democracy. His coalition arrangement now makes it far more likely that he will be forced to operate a serious Cabinet, deploy a reinvigorated Civil Service, and surf a far more lively Parliament.

This is all excellent and in a deeply Conservative tradition of loving the business of government within the habits of mind of an evolving constitution. 

(3) the long Conservative moment

The Conservative party is a device to run a capitalist country which is tolerably fair, free and traditional. It usually loses power because its administrations get tired, arrogant and argumentative. I mean that is a natural party of government, but rightly can’t be given a monopoly of power. The worst hazards it faces are those of single party government and are less likely to afflict multi-party arrangements. 

I have no idea how the future will work out, but I think the country is ready to hear about some version of Conservatism, and David Cameron has found most of the right one.

Looking at politics now, it is Labour and the Lib-dems who have the greater problem in finding a narrative. Of course, it is true that the Tories, Lib-Dems and Labour face rather similar problems in working out what their core vote is and how much their “natural” supporters are an advantage to them.

The good news for the Tories now is that their party has a rich capacity for jiving different narratives, and generating new versions of old ones. It has always found people who get the story mostly right, and it just did.

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I am almost sure the country is in better political and constitutional shape than it has been in my adult lifetime. The political class is in terrific form. There’s a new tone about. The right is free of Thatcherite stridency. The left has elements of Foot-ite Leveller crunginess, but that’s looking like a dying or anyway a minority trope. Caroline Lucas seems a better sort of green than most we’ve seen.

Today, Sunday 9th, we have heard excellent things from John Rentoul, Nick Cohen, Lord Owen, Michael Portillo, David Blunkett. Nick Clegg will with luck match the open-mindedness of David Cameron and has already set an amazing precedent by inventing the Clegg doctrine of the “people’s mandate”, or the “moral mandate” for minority parties in hung-parliaments. The new parliament may be more lively and serious than we have seen for decades. Sure, Labour will face a colossal identity crisis, and the right ought almost to be able to sympathise.

We have probably come to the end of a ghastly 20 years for the right. Our natural party, the Tories, messed things up until giving David Cameron the leadership. (UKIP bled away some of the poison at the price of some electoral damage.) We had to grind our teeth whilst New Labour only governed well, when it did, almost by chance, granted its total failure to play Westminster and Whitehall with any dignity.

True, I think David Cameron has made some colossal mistakes, and not least in failing to make sure he was seen as wanting an entirely different style of government to New Labour’s. Still, as Michael White almost suggested in his TLS remarks on my latest book, Mr Cameron’s Makeover Politics, he may well have plenty of chances now to be an amazing Prime Minister.

If he blows it, someone else may succeed in his place. I mean that the political culture is not likely to fail us.

I am  also hopeful that an entire generation of comedians and broadcast commentators – at least their drearily dissident, and childish, carping style – will also get swept away.

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Thirty years ago, the British accepted with some complacency that  six million Lib Dem voters got a rotten deal representationally. In an age of pick ‘n’ mix consumer choice and identity politics that looks less and less sustainable. Whether in hung parliament negotiations or electoral reform, we are likely to accord the Lib Dems more power in future. The wheels may fall off their wagon as we do so, or it may gather speed.

The Lib Dems face a fascinating dilemma. People like Simon Hughes say the country has a centre-left “progressive” majority but in the next breath has to accept that it has just given the centre-right a clear lead.  

From 2005 to 2010 David Cameron tried to make his party look like the Lib Dems. He succeeded and it is possible to argue that he rescued the Tory vote. But it is also possible to argue that he threw away votes too by seeming too Blairite to head a decent government. Anyway, the Lib-Dems slightly increased their vote too.

Can the Tories ever again get the right and the centre-right to coalesce under their banner? Come to that, can Labour ever get the left and the centre-left to coalesce under their banner? Come to that, will the Lib-Dems become a solid centre party, rather than a protest vote? There is a distinct possibility that when the Lib Dems have real power they will irritate people sufficiently to revivify support for a matching and opposed pair of centre right and centre left parties. 

I don’t think the parties’ leaders will get to choose very much about what unfolds in the medium term. We will almost certainly accord the third party more power. I have high hopes that parliamentarians (I mean individual MPs and peers) will gain authority, and I think they may use it toward fiscal soundness at least in the present crisis.  

I think in the very long haul, the statist welfare state is a dead duck. I think the country will then look more coherently like a centre-right country and that a party or a coalition which will look quite Cameronian will run things. I think it will be circled and harried by parties which represent, inter alia, various regions, civil liberty liberals, unionised socialists, and fundamentalist greens.

There are other possibilities. The country may stay wedded to a statist welfare state. Whether it does or not, Conservatives may still play an important role in running it well (as they often have done historically).

With or without a statist welfare state, Conservatives are likely to be very important in working out what sort of economic policy is workable, both in terms of efficiency and equitability.

I think the big opportunity for Tories – and David Cameron has ducked it for five years – is to build on his party’s reputation for sound government. New Labour delivered its policies in a very shabby way. This is the area where Tories can hit home, and play to instead of suffering from their reputation for pragmatism.

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Until Parliament sits, everything will look as though it’s a matter of leaders doing deals on the basis that they can deliver blocks of docile MPs who will vote according to party whipping. Good, we have to sketch in at least a temporary government and opposition.

But the real world of this Parliament will be more interesting.

Fact (1): The country has refused to back any particular party. This leaves it entirely open to individual MPs to open their eyes, get bold, and do the right thing.

Fact (2): All the parties promised to deliver unspecified pain to save the economy. This leaves MPs free to give their vote to whichever leader gets a decent programme together.

Fact (3): It will be Parliament and parliamentarians who will be seen to have failed if this country cannot now deliver a plausible economic policy. Conversely, this Parliament could go down in history as the one which rescued the UK’s small-g government and its economy.

Speculation: I imagine that the next government will be headed by David Cameron. His Tory MPs will be prepared to be pretty tough, if he is. I am pretty sure that enough non-Tory MPs will be alert to the nation’s need for firmness now. I’d be fascinated to see what argument might be adduced by those non-Tory MPs who don’t row in behind a policy of keeping a triple-A credit rating.

Back story

I am pretty sure David Cameron would have secured more seats if he had campaigned as a recognisable Tory type: a leader committed to good, sound, Cabinet government at the head of a stable team enjoying the confidence of a competent, professional Whitehall. Instead he decided on a Blairite strategy of presidential charisma. In short, as my “ romp through the intellectual traditions of British conservatism” Mr Cameron’s Makeover Politics (SAU, 2009) argued, he decided to seek power in the manner outlined in my Mr Blair’s Messiah Politics (SAU, 2006, and described as “acute and entertaining”  by Rod Liddle in the Spectator.)

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At this moment (tea time on election day, 6 May 2010) almost any outcome is possible. Let’s count the good things we can expect.

(1) A change of generation in parliament

The new lot may be clots. But they may well be independent-minded, lively, serious, patriotic, realistic, market-minded but compassionate and emotionally-intelligent.

(2) A period of slim majorities

We are in such dire straits economically that circumstances may provide the discipline which makes disparate parties, leaders and backbenchers work out sensible policies to follow and in ways which break old ideological and class moulds.

(3) An invigorated Civil Service

With luck, MPs and even ministers will understand that their role of oversight and direction requires and allows them to make sure that the Civil Service is celebrated as it generates good advice and guidance.

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David Cameron undoubtedly took a risk when he decided that the future of the Conservative party was to forget and even deny its history. True, all Tories can claim that they are pragmatist and not much more. So not being intellectual, not citing history, and generally giving the masses whatever they seem to want, is all thoroughly Conservative behaviour. Arguably, it is the heart of Conservative behaviour. Still, no Conservative politician has even been so breathtakingly cavalier in their approach.

Did it work? One can argue that when Mr Cameron embraced vapid centrism, he was doing a molecule-swap with the Lib-Dems and that Mr Clegg returned the complement. Using the gift of TV, Mr Clegg made himself indistinguishable from Mr Cameron. The centre ground suddenly looked very spacious and very crowded. Mr Blair suddenly had two political heirs, not one.

One can say that Mr Cameron’s approach courted a middling victory as a middling party. This was better, he thought, than going hammer and tongs for a full-blooded Tory approach which might have courted solid defeat. 

I argued in my book that Mr Cameron was right to modernise and detoxify and to understand that there are very few moments when the Tory right is electable and this definitely wasn’t one of them. That meant that he had to risk the crowded centre.

Even so, I think he made a signal error.

Here’s where I differ from almost all the commentary I see. I think David Cameron could have looked much more solid and quite different to Nick Clegg if he had played to some very old and worthwhile Tory narratives. I believe that the country carries in its head three Tory tropes: “Nasty”, “Nice” and “Sensible”. It’s the last which Mr Cameron could have drawn on.

He had five years in which to play to themes of Conservative good government. One of them could have buried the Curse of Black Wednesday (Labour loved the ERM too and anyway the economy took off soon after the crisis). Another could have thumped Labour’s charge of “Tory boom and bust” (a cycle which had been sorted out by 1997). And so on.

My tricky point here is that one did not have to defend Thatcherism (or any other Tory prime minister) wholesale. There was indeed no harm in putting some distance between modern Toryism and Mrs T’s exceptional and ahistorical version of the creed.  But it was an important mistake to be so frightened of the party’s back story.

When Gordon Brown in televised debate charges Mr Cameron with being about to usher in recession and unemployment on  a scale of the Tory tragedies of the 1930s, 1980s and 1990s we are hearing an old Labour message which is rendered all the more powerful by Mr Cameron’s having abandoned the basic Tory message: “Yes, we’re tough. We have to be. We always have to come in and pick up your pieces.”

We’ll see. In a TLS piece which discusses my book amongst others (“Is there a leader in the House?”, 28 April 2010), Michael White of the Guardian, suggests that Mr Cameron may well have the chance to prove himself the kind of Tory I would like him to be, in Number 10. It’s true, and arguably all that matters.

I still think that Mr Cameron could have got more votes, and a better mandate to govern, if he had laid out a solider message. Indeed, I fear (as I argue elsewhere and at www.makingbettergovernment.com) that his governing instincts may be as dangerously Blairite as his electoral instincts were.

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There’s a mass of guff about how social networking is transforming politics (Newsnight on Monday was a prime example, whilst today Iain Dale rebuffed the theories rather well). We should note that the real  impact of cyberspace will be to empower backbench MPs. What fun. In place of the mantras about People Power and disintermediation, the real beneficiary of Blackberry and Facebook may well be representative democracy. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/election-2010/7640143/General-Election-2010-This-was-meant-to-be-the-internet-election.-So-what-happened.html]

The May 2010 intake of MPs will have a unique opportunity. Their party leaderships are weak (and in two cases, nearly as inexperienced as they are themselves). Their party platforms are vague. Their constituents have no firm idea about what they are like. If there’s anything like a balanced parliament, every backbench vote will count. This adds up to an opportunity for the new MPs to perform a generational coup. They understand two very modern phenomena which will transform politics: personal branding and peer-to-peer networking. The social media generation ought readily to spot how the individual MP can be restored to power.

Being inexperienced, the new MPs should find courage in the idea that the political legislators’ proper role can be to work with the professional executive, not just boss it about and certainly not sneer at it or circumvent it. A certain modesty may become them and be the making of them. They are potentially the new meritocratic, public-spirited elite who can restore trust in politics and Parliament and produce a quite new quality of government.

We know Parliament has been crippled by over-mighty party leaderships. We know our brilliant Civil Service has been sidelined by an overly-centralised Number 10. We know the media has over-fancied itself as the scourge of the political system. This is a great moment for an inexperienced but savvy Westminster to insist that a case-hardened Whitehall lay out proper policy options for debate and decision.

This is a constitutional and political moment in which a new generation of politicians can make Parliament become something quite new. The new MPs need not be in thrall to the worst traditions of the discredited parliament, nor to the gangmaster power of the party whips. Above all, they need to insist that they are Edmund Burke’s “representatives” of their constituents, not the mandated delegates of a union conference; not party hacks;  and still less the social worker, nursemaid or ombudsman of every voter with a beef against the local or national state.

This is the parliament that can bury traditional class politics. It will be a parliament of indistinguishable, middle Britain types, mostly estuarine in tone in spite of some voices from all over the social scale. Many of the Tories will be rather Thatcherite. Apparently, a lot of the Lib-Dems will be quite lefty. I have no feeling for how New Labour the new Labourites will be, but I imagine there’ll be more flux than we have seen recently. There’ll be plenty to argue about, including ideologies, but few simple fault lines. Take it all together, and we may see the three parties fracture along new lines, as I discussed in my 2009 book, Mr Cameron’s Makeover Politics and the formula for Making Better Government (as my website of that name has it).

 The new MPs have several duties. Top of the list will be spotting and supporting whatever policy has the best chance of securing economic growth and reassuring the markets about Britain’s preparedness to pay down the national debt, sometime fairly soon. Second will be agreeing a pragmatic but honourable military policy in Afghanistan. Third will be developing a plausible policy for the future of the bottom 10 percent of society. Fourth will be the sketching out a long term policy for the future of the welfare state.

The country has faced all these sorts of issues in its recent history and we know that dealing with them will bend old hat party allegiances and identities out of shape. That doesn’t matter. The old parties have great histories, and have mostly abandoned them, for good and ill.

We are in new territory which will see new, often temporary alliances, getting built on the ruins of old ones. I only hope the young MPs know how lucky they are to be picking up the reins at this moment.

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