Clues to Cameronism
From the speech of 8 October and my bold:
The fault lies with big government. With their endless targets and reorganisations, Labour have tried to run the NHS like a machine. But it’s not a machine full of cogs. It is a living, breathing institution made up of people – doctors, nurses, patients. This lever-pulling from above – it has got to stop. With Andrew Lansley’s reform plans, we’re going to give the NHS back to people. We’ll say to the doctors: those targets you hate, they’re gone.The problems we face are big and urgent. […] Mending our broken society……because unless we do, we will never solve those stubborn social problems that cause the size of government to rise. Fixing our broken politics……because unless we do, we will never reform public services……never see the strong, powerful citizens…who will build the responsible society that we all want to see.
So if we cut big government back. If we move society forward. And if we rebuild responsibility, then we can put Britain back on her feet.
This weird circular almost-contradiction excites Freedland:
The only trouble is that Cameron’s argument left a yawning gap expressible in a single word: how?How exactly does a shrunken state create “a country where the poorest children go to the best schools”? Precisely what quango has to be abolished to ensure that Eton, Cameron’s alma mater, suddenly fills up with those living below the poverty line?
The Tories would reply that they have provided all the detail this week, and they have indeed not stinted on policy. But Cameron did not provide even a broad-brush answer to this question, unless he believes in an almost chemical reaction that sees a shrinking of the state trigger an increase in grassroots responsibility, with the latter painlessly filling the vacuum left by the former.
But the fundamentals of this ‘almost chemical reaction’ are implicit in the sentences I’ve excerpted. Our magical catalyst is Cameron himself. His answer is, Elect me! The gappy logic reveals a tribal understanding of politics whereby Conservative powers of mending and fixing, exercised in government, are exempt from the inevitability of failure of state endeavour that befalls every effort of the other side. Thus the conjuration of a strong responsible citizenry through the enlistment of the Conservatives to retrench the power we bestow on them; thus the ‘strong, powerful’ citizens whom Cameron is compelled to assure, under an earlier heading, ‘We will be there to protect you.’ A king responsible and strong will bring about a citizenry in his image. Cameron’s open incoherence leads me to suspect that ‘cutting big government back’ simply portends a redistribution (or recentralisation, if you like) of power from those of whom he disapproves to those he approves of – let’s hope, in that case, his friends are friendly. A conservatism I could respect would on principle of something very like original sin conceive humbly of its task as managing dissolution with order as good as our limited rationality can afford. Or something. Alas, in its unelectable place we meet Cameron with his Tory utopianism: if only you would elect me, his promise is, I would curtail the power of that office and its charges and our difficulties would (as though from a swollen snake) fall away. For him perhaps government indeed can cogently influence the governed, but only negatively – a dogma just as superstitious as his parodied progressivism and its metastasis of initiatives, targets and bureaucrats. From the phrasing it seems that Cameron can’t decide whether he thinks ‘big government’ must fail because of government’s intrinsic weakness or because of its intrinsic malignity. The reason is I hazard that ‘big government’ is his crude cipher for government of the left:
It was you Gordon Brown who designed the system of financial regulation that helped cause the financial crisis. […]That’s why we will give back to the Bank of England its power to regulate the City powers that should never have been taken away. [sic]
Did deregulation magic responsibility into strong, powerful bankers? Into Goldman Sachs? No – it might even have sapped it – but it was (citizens) the wrong kind of deregulation! The non-Cameron kind!
Update: Philip Collins has similar concerns: ‘Culture change doesn’t spring fully formed out of the ether’, he says.
