May 31 2007
Who is the heir to Blair?
Spin is such a misleading waste of time. I have read a great deal about how the Conservatives are now the true heirs to Blair, based on remarks by George Osborne. Yet when I talk to George, or hear him interviewed on the BBC, what he said was far narrower than the idea that we are going to inherit Blair’s policies and style and carry on with them.
I was relieved to hear George say, in answer to one question, that he could be in the studio all afternoon listing Blair’s mistakes and failures to deliver. Amen to that. There is no way the Conservative party can or should be heir to Blair’s wars, to his failure to reform welfare (the historic task of his first term) or his failure??to buy much progress in health and education with all the money he spent on them (task of second term). He gave us extra money without reform whilst telling us this could not work. We have no wish to be heir to his destruction of democracy, his failure to treat the Commons seriously, his botched constitutional reforms, his gift of so?? much power to the EU,his sofa soundbites and his policies made up for the cameras one day and quietly dropped on another.
The specific claim George made was about choice in education and health. Again, he prefaced it by pointing out that Blair himself undid the??hesitant ??moves towards more choice introduced by the Major government, before coming round to understanding that it was the only way to get some value for all the extra money being spent, and to respond to the wish of people to enjoy better treatment and higher quality education. Once Blair reached that understanding he found that Gordon Brown was a roadblock to reform, and found that enough of his own backbenchers were against it. As a result it took Conservative votes in the Commons to push City academies through.
??Tony Blair has all too little to show for his ten years of unprecedented power, based on his huge majorities in the Commons. There are only a handful of new Academies, and private treatment centres catering for NHS patients have only scratched the surface of what is needed. George is right that we need to do much more to reform these state leviathans, and open them up to new providers at the same time as giving all of us more choice within the free at the point of use framework.?? We need to link this to less spin, drawing a line under the Blair years when presentation triumphed over delivery.
John Redwood has been the Member of Parliament for Wokingham since 1987. First attending Kent College, Canterbury, he graduated from Magdalen College...
You have real problem here. You rightly denigrate spin and in so doing reflect the views of the majority of the electorate. However, your party is continually using spin and usually not very successfully. The message has got around now that Cameron does see himself as the heir to Blair. Now if he is serious and he really believes that he is the heir to Blair and all the other things that are routinely trotted out to offend traditional Conservative supporters, then why should these people vote for him? After all, what is the point of voting for an imitation of the party that they have waited for ten years to see the back of? If, however, this is no more than spin and a cynical strategy cooked up by his backroom boys, then why should voters, who are sick of lies and spin from mendacious politicians, support more of the same but now wearing a blue rosette? Either way, there would appear to be nothing to encourage anyone to vote for a Conservative party led in such ways by such a man.
I read that Andy Coulson, the ex-editor of The News of The World, who resigned after the royal phone bugging case, has been appointed your Director of Communications. What does that tell you about the future of spin in your party?
[Reply]
1. Has Osborne been sitting on you since, you have to explain what he said? Isn’t he like Cameron saying to whatever audience he has what they would prefer to hear?
2. Why be the heir to Blair, one of the worst PMs in history? Why not be ambitious and be the heir to Lady Thatcher, probably the best PM in history?
[Reply]
There are two audiences out there. One, the minority is interested in the detail of politics, and wishes to be intelligent about it.
The other, the majority is no longer listening, and only hears the occasional soundbite or sees the occasional headline. Cameron’s team address their comments mostly to the majority, and make their calculations about communication aimed almost entirely there, regardless of the impact on their own supporters. It’s as if they believe in the adage - ‘all publicity is good publicity’. Didn’t they follow the demise of Gerald Ratner, who also believed that to be the case, and debased his value in the eyes of the world? They need to be careful.
When Cameron addresses the small audience and goes into the detail, it sounds most reassuring. But the activist minority audience is much distressed by the media spin game. It would be nice if it would stop, but it is most unlikely to do so. Blair mastered the art. Conservatives must play the same game and win - sadly.
[Reply]
It is about time the ‘activist minority’ - of which I have been a part for nearly 30 years - stopped getting their political information from the tabloids or BBC Radio 4.
It might help if they read the actual speeches before leaping up and down in unrighteous indignation.
[Reply]
Those of us with an eye to fairly recent history may be concerned that we have been here before. After the 1945-51 Labour government (which did so much long-term harm to the UK)the Conservative party came to believe that what had been done was largely impossible to undo and therefore went on to accept the existence of the welfare state and nationalised industries as a fait accompli and as the consensual basis for all politics in the future. This consensus politics acquired the sobriquet “Butskellism”.
In reality this led us almost immediately into two decades (1959-1979) of steepish decline ended only by the abandonment of that consensus by Margaret Thatcher, after which followed recovery so effective that a conservative chancellor was able to leave the economy in reasonable enough nick to allow a hightax/spendalot Labour Chancellor to survive for ten years and three elections.
Now, faced with the political shift back to an ostensible willingness in the electorate to spend money on the welfare state on a scale unimagined even by the most optimistic socialist of the 1980s, Mr. Cameron appears to have returned to the sort of consensus politics that led us into such disaster before. Make no mistake, the bill for all this will eventually fall due, regardless of who is in power and one fears another period of inexorable decline must follow paying that bill. Why on earth have we learnt nothing from history?
Why do we have to ape everything that New Labour has done? I for one am extremely reluctant to vote conservative if what I am getting is simply a competent “conservative” execution of left-wing tax and spend policies. I would far rather see see some really radical proposals, for example, about reducing both the size and power of central government and a total rethink of a vastly overcomplicated tax system all. Instead I am being invited to vote for socialist policies to be executed by nice green tories. I am afraid that when the day comes I will just not be able to stomach it. I suspect many others will feel a similar distaste and stay at home as well.
On a more worrying note, the recent debacle over Grammar Schools makes one concerned that we may not even get a competent execution of labour policies. This has been a very poor effort, badly managed, muddled and, in the way Graham Brady was trashed to the press this week, very unattractive particularly as it has enabled people to contrast the way he was treated with the way Boris Johnson (who the snipers point out is also an Old Etonian etc.) and Dominic Grieve have been treated. This has raised serious questions about his competence and judgment. Not a good week to be off in Crete, I should say.
[Reply]
Dear John,
Will you be supporting the EDM 658 of Basic Pensions?
Reply: EDMs are never debated and have little impact. It is better to engage the Minister in the issue. I am unlikely to be signing the EDM
[Reply]