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Santa
Local Government
Chronicle - 10 December 2007
For David Cameron Christmas came in the second week of October: the announcement of the non-election made Gordon Brown into Santa Claus overnight. From that moment political presents have been showered on the incredulous but raucously grateful Opposition benches.
For the Liberal Democrats Santa came in the unexpected shape of their acting leader Vince Cable: the Northern Rock crisis and fear of a housing market melt-down played straight into the hands of a former chief economist of Shell. The problem for the Liberals has been explaining how a leadership race could omit the party’s strongest performer – a cheerful illustration of the party’s propensity to turn an asset into an embarrassment.
And what about Labour? They can’t get this particular Christmas over soon enough: the authority of a leader who promised they would be “home by Christmas” with a newly-minted mandate from the electorate, and the prospect of frustrated Tory blood-letting is melting away like a snowman in a thunderstorm. Labour MPs feel angry, uncomprehending, battered and deeply ill-at-ease. Gordon Brown arouses many sentiments but when did anyone forecast that by the end of this year we would see the emergence of the most dangerous sentiment of all – pity?
The mood of the parties this Christmas is certainly very different. Yet if each party leader were to write an utterly honest letter to Father Christmas and make an utterly private New Year resolution I suspect that the texts would be strangely similar. For the real question each party now needs to ask itself is the most basic question of all: what are we for.
We knew what Mrs Thatcher was for: she stood for the creation of a liberal market economy with a decisive change in the balance between collective and individual action and responsibility towards the individual. We know, I think, what Tony Blair stood for: he sought to marry the Thatcher economic model to the traditional social democratic promotion of social justice. The main means to achieve this were the modernisation of public services and step-change in their funding and direct support for low income groups.
But we do not yet know what is the purpose of Gordon Brown, the purpose of David Cameron or, for that matter, the purpose of the Liberal Democrats under their new leader.
The problem is the most acute for Gordon Brown. There has been a Brown project ever since the famous Islington dinner with Tony Blair to divide up the Labour empire. But the persistent question now is whether there was anything more to the project than to get Gordon Brown into Downing St. The summer’s sunny promises of a new style and a new content to politics have been swept away in the political blizzards of autumn which have left the Prime Minister looking wounded, enfeebled and alarmingly helpless. He talks of vision, but vision is more than a pile of policies: it is a theme or narrative which stitches policies into a simply understood purpose.
David Cameron has the same need. Gordon Brown has given him a little time but not much. The dramatic crash landing of Labour under Brown has put the pressure on him. The voters may well have decided, or be on the way to deciding, that they want that lot out: but they are in urgent need of being given a reason to want the other lot in.
Cameron is making progress: the oft-ridiculed somewhat contrived symbolism of exercises like the polar sledge trip or “hoodies” speech have earned him the ability to address critical issues like immigration without being accused of falling back into the embrace of hard-line activists. But he also needs to define a purpose which will fuel a premiership. Not localism; not devolution; real state-shrinking decentralisation: could that be it? We do not yet know.
The Liberal Democrats no longer enjoy the easy pickings which came from the Tory abandonment of the lush valley-bottoms of centre-ground politics. With Cameron competing on civil liberties and wooing public service professionals they must answer that same remorseless question: what are we here for.
So all three face the same existential challenge. Their letters should reads the same: “Please Santa, help me to discover who I really am and the ability to project my mission to the people I exist to serve.”
© Local Government Chronicle
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