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Big Test
Yorkshire Post - 15
January 2007
Brown’s Britain. As the clock ticks remorselessly towards Gordon Brown’s appointed (or is it anointed?) hour the question of what Brown’s Britain will look like dominates political commentary. Will he seek to differentiate himself dramatically from his predecessor? What scope is there for a change in gear in dealing with public sector reform? And has Chancellor of the Exchequer Brown prescribed a strategy for future public spending which will prove to be an imprisoning strait-jacket for Gordon Brown Prime Minister?
All these are legitimate and pressing questions. But if the stakes in the Brown take-over are huge for the Labour Party they are, arguably, even bigger for the Opposition. 2007 may be the year (or half-year) of Brown. But it also a make-or-break year for David Cameron.
Cameron has had a remarkable year. He has put the party back into political contention by the ostentatious embrace of new causes which are both urgent and fashionable – the environment or, most recently, locally produced food. He has repudiated the part of the party’s legacy which most stuck in the throat of the electorate – the identification with personal and selfish acquisitiveness. Bit by bit the cult of “Dave” is growing as part of this new narrative about the party.
The notorious “A-List” of Tory candidates has had a bit of a bumpy rise (not least because it chose some fairly bumpy candidates) but it is leading to a much higher proportion of women being selected. And the money is rolling in at last: if the Tories demand that Gordon Brown call an early election it is not just for reasons of constitutional rectitude but because it knows that it can got the cash to go to war and Labour is deeply in debt.
And yet. And yet. The public wants to be reassured that the Tory transformation is more than skin deep. It is as if there are beguiling smells coming out of the Conservative kitchen but no-one is quite sure what the eventual meal is going to look like!
Of course Cameron is ready for this charge. The party has set up the machinery to develop policy- that is the next phase. In fact some big policy battles have been fought already. The most important has been the negative battle to stop the party chasing after Thatcher-style tax cuts.
And this takes us immediately to the central battle-ground of the next election. Gordon Brown will say that the Tory policy of sharing the fruits of economic growth between the public purse and the private pocket will mean catastrophe for public services.
Cameron cannot continue to finesse this battle. Either the Tories believe in a smaller state or they believe in nothing. And there are three good reasons for believing that the battle can be won.
The first is that the accusation that Labour has hurled money at the public services but has failed to get value for money is increasingly endorsed by the public. There has been huge dead weight in the increases in spending on the health service- new GP contracts, consultants contracts, wage increases – which have led to little perceptible improvement in services. By the time of the next election Labour’s 1997 claims that it would “save” the NHS will come back to haunt it.
Second the issue of tax is re-emerging. Stephen Byers, one of Tony Blair’s little Sir Echoes in the Labour party wrote a week ago that the burden of taxation could not be increased. Companies are queuing up to relocate their head offices to Switzerland or Ireland because of the growing burden of corporate taxation.
Third, many people are feeling the draught in the increases they face in meeting normal living costs. Energy price rises, council tax increases, food prices, transport fares– the actual cost of living index many ordinary people face is much more sharply on the increase than the official figures government uses.
So Labour’s charge that the Conservatives will hack public services and that they still stand for private affluence but public penury is no longer a winner – provided David Cameron can put forward a measured and convincing argument that he would extract more benefit from public spending and reduce the burden on the taxpayer in a way which recognises the still vital role of public services.
He has one huge asset working for him: the years up to the election will be dominated by the slow down in the rate of increase of public spending decreed in Brown’s comprehensive spending review. That will guarantee that politics will continue to be dominated stories about the health service in crisis. Hardly the background against which to pillory the Conservatives for lack of commitment to public services.
Cameron has another asset. There is no escape from the fact that the public does not warm to Gordon Brown. I have been struck in my own constituency of how frequently this distrust is voiced- not at Tory meeting but in the queue for the lunch-time panini or the supermarket check-out. It may not be noble and it may not even be fair. But it is real and it matters.
So this is the year of trial for David Cameron. Gordon Brown will throw down the on the issue of the role of the state and the primacy of public spending. This argument won the election of 1997. But now its hour could well have passed. Cameron’s task is to put in its place a model of state empowerment and personal responsibility which will prove the key idea for the new political generation.
© Yorkshire Post
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