News from the New Party

Thursday, January 18, 2007

Cameron's Tories: Neither conservative nor liberal

Economist Irwin Stelzer writes a blistering attack in the Daily Telegraph on Cameron's New Model Tories:

Cameron's ever-expanding list of hateful companies now includes supermarkets. Only a few more and he will have attacked every member of the Footsie 100, the companies that create much of Britain's wealth and provide many of its jobs. Rarely has a conservative party managed an agenda so hostile to the institutions that provide so many with their incomes. Little wonder that the City sees Brown, high taxes, regulations and all, as a safer pair of hands than Cameron.

...the Tories have abandoned three programmes that would lower the cost of living of many middle-class families. They no longer promise to relieve families of the crushing burden of Brown's taxes; they have doomed parents to pay taxes that include the cost of state-provided education even if they make no use of that system; and they have dropped their call to allow patients to take their NHS payments with them if they look to the private sector for health care, forcing these families to pay twice for treatment.

Stelzer's wholesale condemnation of Cameron's "business-smiting, greener-than-green Tories" is worth reading in full. It reveals the incoherence of the whole project, which is not merely un-conservative, but also illiberal. Let's hear no more nonsense about Cameron's "liberal conservatism", whether from his swooning supporters, or his right-wing enemies. There is nothing liberal about it.

The Cameron brigade's recent flirtation with Toynbeeism reveals the new Conservative Party in its true colours. By adopting the socialist conception of relative poverty, which does not exist, in preference to inequality, which does, the new conservatism implicitly accepts that the goal of "eradicating poverty" is to be achieved through the elimination of inequality. The history of the twentieth century is largely the history of the attempt to eradicate poverty by the elimination of inequality. These days even the Labour Party appears to have given up on that particular idea, which is a blessing given that in less fortunate countries the effort to carry it through resulted in the deaths of millions. Cameronism has misunderstood conservatism and adopted a form of socialism, by-passing liberalism altogether in the process. Little wonder, then, that the party has nothing to show for it other than a grab-bag of eyecatching ideas in a vain search for a common theme and a coherent vision of society.

Stelzer summarises the problem of British politics as "Britain's aspirational class, about to be crushed between the upper millstone of David Cameron's Tories and the nether millstone of Gordon Brown's Labour Party".

The cry for freedom is about to go up. The British people needs to be delivered from this particular pair of millstones. Clearly, we need a New Party.

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Cameron's Tories: Neither conservative nor liberal