Duncan Brown
Sarko and Carla: a bona fide pair of "hot rabbits"?
When 24-hour licensing was introduced in 2005, the government said it wanted Britain to imitate the “continental” drinking culture, where everyone sipped half-pints at café tables and the virtues of moderation were imbibed with spritzer at the age of five. That is a complete fable, says Jim Pollard in the forthcoming issue of Prospect, available on 25th March. The drift has been in the opposite direction: in Paris, le binge drinking est bien arrivé—and it’s because the French are increasingly imitating us.
It’s only the latest, Pollard says, in a long line of English imports ranging from pop records to corporate brands to street slang. And this shift is beginning to affect people’s private lives too, wrote Lucy Wadham in a previous issue of Prospect. When his last marriage to the long-suffering Cecile broke down, Nicolas Sarkozy was attacked over his lack of “pudeur” (a word part-way between shame and modesty) as he pandered to the press: an Anglo-American tactic that went against the grain of the Fifth Republic’s Catholic origins.
However, all the French coverage of the recent alleged Bruni/Sarkozy dalliances isn’t necessarily a sign of the French media becoming more like the British in its appetite for celebrity scandal. Rumours that Sarkozy’s liaison with his ecology minister has been invented to salvage his reputation as a “sex dwarf” (in the face of being cuckolded by his man-eating wife) point to an undiminished gulf between French and English attitudes to sex.
We have no concept of the chaud lapin: the very idea of a prime minister sleeping with a member of his cabinet would make English blood run cold. But for the French, such news can be bundled together with Bruni’s liaison as “extramarital affairs” as a face-saving measure. Meanwhile, the English-speaking internet resounds to a dwarf joke about Sarkozy that David Cameron made in September. We’re not identical yet.
Robert Hazell
In early February David Cameron launched “fixing broken politics,” with big promises to strengthen parliament while also returning power to people and communities. The three flagship policies he outlined to do this all look attractive at a glance, but begin to look more politically perilous the closer you examine them. And all may come back to haunt him.
The first is to reduce the size of the House of Commons by 10 per cent before the end of the first Tory term, which means removing 65 MPs. This will require a review of all constituency boundaries, as well as streamlining and accelerating the usual slow pace of such reviews, risking accusations of gerrymandering. Whether Cameron can persuade 65 of his fellow MPs that they must do themselves out of a job is another matter. Two thirds of the cuts could be made to fall in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, where MPs have reduced workloads post devolution, justifying a “devolution discount.” Such a ploy would lose Cameron very few Conservative MPs. But he is also a staunch defender of the Union, and such a strategy could boost separatism. So it is most likely that the cuts will fall evenly across Britain. If so, 53 of the 65 seats would be in England, and most will be Tory ones. That will not endear him to his own backbenchers.
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David Willetts
The trajectory of modern society often seems to be heading towards greater social fragmentation. This trend of atomisation, captured by the Conservative cry of “broken Britain,” may seem unstoppable. But it is not inevitable, in large part because of our human instincts for co-operation. Belief in the durability of this instinct has been called social responsibility or communitarianism. I think of it as civic conservatism, an approach given powerful voice by David Cameron’s “big society” argument: that our need for freedom and opportunity must be reconciled with the equally important human need for belonging and commitment.
This idea has deep roots in traditional Conservatism, not least for its links to the historic institutions of church, profession and regiment. But as those links and institutions weakened after 1945, so my party lost a whole set of understandings about how institutions could be a force for good. Now we need to rediscover this, drawing on research in neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and behavioural economics; tools that help us understand how humans interact and institutions are built, but also offer the possibility of helping social co-operation to flourish without resorting to Labour’s default positions of idealistic altruism or coercive state power.
Social co-operation is clearly a good thing and it is easy to call for more of it. But that does not get us far. The crucial thing for politics is to understand where co-operation comes from and how it works, without just appealing to our better natures. This remains a Conservative notion. A good place to start is Richard Dawkins and the selfish gene. The doctrine was formulated with precision by the great biologist JBS Haldane: “I will jump into the river to save two brothers or eight cousins.” Now it has been tested with an ingenious, if rather odd, experiment reported in the British Journal of Psychology in 2007. Participants knew that the longer they remained in an uncomfortable ski-training-type position the more money would be given to a beneficiary. The closer they were genetically to the beneficiary, the longer they held the pose.
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Anne McElvoy
Who knows what David Cameron really wants? The advance of the New Conservatives has been a master study in ambiguity. This occurred to me recently when Cameron got into hot water on his tax and marriage plans. I interviewed him a few years ago for a programme about the rise of a new political generation.
Spontaneously, he emphasised marriage as a “core value for me… something I just happen to believe in and will support.” Along with most of the Tory party, I assumed this meant he would restore the recognition of the wedded state to the tax system. Cometh the moment, the groom is strangely reticent. The practical problems are tricky—what happens to Afghan widows or deserted wives?—while money is too tight to mention. So it emerges that the hitched among us are not to be materially better off under Dave.
Even on the economy, it’s not clear what a Cameronian Britain would be like. He has styled himself as a hungry deficit hawk and sent his shadow chancellor George Osborne on the attack as an instant budget cutter. No sooner had we braced for this onslaught, however, than the message changed to major cuts being unnecessary in the first year of government. He opposes (or seems to) cuts to the army, thus winning support among those who understandably resent fighting wars on a shoestring. While other bits of defence are not protected on Cameron’s list, overseas development, oddly, is.
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Peter Kellner
The bombardment has started, and the air is already thick with claims, polls and analyses. To arm yourself against error and ignorance, here are seven pillars of electoral wisdom for the 2010 general election.
1. To win, the Tories must carry the north, not just the south
It is widely believed that Conservative support in Scotland and the north has haemorrhaged, yet that David Cameron must do particularly well in the northern half of Britain to win a convincing majority. Neither fact is entirely true.
Across Britain, Tory support was 10 percentage points lower in 2005 (33 per cent) than in 1992 (43 per cent). Over the same period, Conservative support also fell in northern Britain: in Scotland, by 10 points; the northeast, 14; the northwest 9; and Yorkshire and Humberside, 9. Only the fall in the northeast, the smallest region, stands out. So while the Tories have ceded ground in the north, this began in the 1960s and 1970s when the Tory Protestant working-class vote declined in places like Glasgow and Liverpool, as class overtook religion as the most important issue for voters. This trend has been exacerbated by a growing economic divergence between north and south. Nonetheless, the Tories won their largest (1983) and least expected (1992) victories after this north-south divide opened up. And while they must make gains in the north to win, there are plenty of seats within reach. Thirty-four Labour seats in England’s three northern regions would fall to the Tories on an 8 per cent swing. If the national tide flows to David Cameron, enough northern seats will change hands to give him victory.
The Tories’ larger problem is that they need a lead of around 10 percentage points in the popular vote for Cameron to secure an overall majority of just one. Compare this with Labour in 2005, which enjoyed a comfortable majority with just a 3 percentage point lead. Why? The main reason is that, even after the latest boundary changes, Labour seats tend to have fewer voters, and lower turnouts, than Tory ones, so Labour on average needs fewer votes to win a seat. Also, the last three elections have seen widespread anti-Tory tactical voting. In 2010, the first factor will still apply; one of the more intriguing questions is whether anti-Tory tactical voting will unwind. Even so, the electoral geography is stacked against the Conservatives.
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William Davies
Bold moves: but can the Tories deliver
The news that the Conservative Party intend to facilitate greater employee ownership in public services is one of the boldest policy announcements of David Cameron’s leadership. Labour has already thrown scorn on what appears to be political cross-dressing, and the left-leaning twitterati have pored over the proposal for inconsistency and policy naivete. But what evidence is there out there on the viability of such schemes, and how likely is it that the Tories could deliver this successfully?
I authored a Demos pamphlet on alternative ownership models last year, and while I’m more concerned with ownership pathologies in the private sector, the report looks at the potential and precedents for employee ownership in the public sector too. Here are three sets of questions thrown up by this morning’s announcement:
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James Crabtree
Comrade Dave gives power to the workers
Oops, he did it again. Having spent years giving the impression of being all “grand narrative and no radical policy,” David Cameron is on a roll. He recently announced plans to publish every government contract, a genuinely radical change. And now he has announced something even more daring: giving all public sector workers the right to take over the body in which they work (reaction from Conservative Home is here, and Phillip Blond’s original idea proposing something very similar to this is here. ) Three thoughts:
The media are on a Tory crisis trip, which looks increasingly odd. The Guardian, unless I’m missing it, haven’t written this up. (George Osborne was on the Today programme talking about it.) Very odd, especially given how yesterday Toby Helm wrote in the Observer that Cameron was beset by a “growing sense of crisis.”
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James Crabtree
- from Webcameron to TEDcameron
Last night Prospect’s arts and books editor Tom Chatfield and I were lucky enough to be part of the 200 or so people packed into Bafta’s auditorium for the widely trailed “secret” Cameron TED talk. Three reflections.
1. People are missing the radicalism in his open contracts announcement. Cameron last night committed to publish the details of all government contracts. Not just IT contracts, which no one noticed they pledged to do in their IT paper before Christmas. ALL contracts. Every contract any contractor signs with a government department. Cleaners. Train operators. McKinsey being paid to write most of the Dhazi review. McKinsey running large chunks of Northern Rock. All of it. Here is the pledge:
A conservative government will publish all government contracts worth over £25,000 for goods and services in full, including all performance indicators, break clauses and penalty measures. This will enable the public to root out wasteful spending and poorly negotiated contracts, and open up the procurement system to more small businesses.
It’s a bit confusing, because this looks like their existing announcement (to publish all government spending lines over £25,000). But it isn’t. It’s new. I can only imagine what the CBI think about this. (UPDATE: see end of post for more on CBI reaction.) It is, if delivered in this spirit, a genuinely radical transparency measure. Imagine the fuss this is going to cause when everyone who didn’t get the contract pores over each detail, and asks difficult questions? Imagine how much easier it is going to be for outside bodies to track public money—think PFI projects—to see if they are on track, and also to use FOI to track progress? Interesting stuff.
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Dan Hancox
Tomorrow’s leaders: the Conservative Future Christmas party back in 2007
“What annoys me,” says a toff, “is your perception that the Conservative party is full of toffs. I mean, do I look like a toff?” he asks, apparently rhetorically. He looks like a toff.
This isn’t how I normally spend my Saturday nights: deep in the trenches of class war, spilled champagne underfoot, the bloody theatre of conflict that is Piccadilly Circus raging heedlessly outside. In a fit of misguided journalistic curiosity, I went undercover to the Conservative Future Christmas party in early December. I wanted to see the next generation of Tory leaders do their pre-emptive general election victory dance. And I got to see it. Be careful what you wish for.
The toff in question wears a thick blond mane, an open-necked striped shirt and a ruddy burn-tan straight off the slopes. He is addressing his incredulity not to me, but a cheery young Asian guy—normally a Lib Dem, he said—who had joined the hooray of aspirant Conservative MPs smoking outside The Warwick to talk politics.
The group proceed to argue about whether Michael Howard or William Hague was the more tragic loss to the party leadership; both massively underrated, they say. “But don’t you like David Cameron as leader?” the rogue Lib Dem asks. “Don’t get me wrong, Cameron is… necessary. But George Osborne: now he’s the bloody man,” one of them replies, supported by a cascade of floppy-haired nods.
When I arrive at The Warwick at 11pm the party is already dense with shirts tucked high at the waist, and the bar’s low-lit basement a sea of tilted wine glasses. Louis from Bristol stumbles towards me, clinging on to an empty bottle of red wine like his life depends on it. He doesn’t look a day over 18, but he knows he’s had more than enough of Labour, he splutters, exasperated. “If we don’t win this time!” he barks in my ear, “if Kingswood doesn’t go blue! Well…” he’s too horrified to finish the thought, and instead pulls out his Blackberry and types “IT’S TIME TO GO BLUE” for me in capitals.
The conversation stalls as the crowded dancefloor expands, annexing our little corner. A rugby-necked ranine steps up to the raised seating area above the rabble, having apparently decided his role is to lead them in party-political prayer. Beers and arms are held aloft. Two girls stranded somewhere in this sea of white men in blazers chant “New leader!” for what feels like an eternity over a pop soundtrack, and everyone puts their beers in, musketeer style. This devolves into a refrain of “Oi! Oi! Oi! Oi! Oi! Oi! Oi!”—which may not be a specific Tory policy initiative, but is delivered no less enthusiastically. This is all leading up to the sermon’s main event: a piece of hip-hop style call-and-response:
“I say ‘Conservative,’ you say ‘win’… Conservative!” “Win!” “Conservative!” “Win!”
Arms are round shoulders now, the couple trying to tango to Lady Gaga realise the hopelessness of their task and give up, and the chanting continues. It’s time for a break. Outside, David from Kensington and Chelsea, a calm, cerebral young turk in grey polo-neck, jeans and hiking trainers, is explaining the difference between Italian corruption and British sleaze to two Italian tourists, Luca and Joe. “So you’re all about to get elected in May then?” asks Luca.
“Well, not yet, but it’s called Conservative Future for a reason: we’re going to be in power in ten years!” says David, letting himself get momentarily carried away. “We don’t always say what the leadership wants us to, but that’s why we’re technically a separate organisation. We’re not personally going to be in power just yet. But give it ten years…”
Meanwhile, to my left, one young Conservative is explaining his scepticism about joining the party to two CF members. “I vote Tory—you know I vote Tory. I’m just not a Tory member. I don’t like parties.” He pauses. “Well, I like these kinds of parties obviously! God… can you imagine what a Labour version of this would be like?”
“Well,” his friend replies, “there’d be a lot more ethnic minorities for one thing.” “Oh really?” the other replies. “I thought the Labour party was trying to make itself seem more respectable!” They laugh awkwardly, seemingly aware that even as casual racism, it doesn’t really work.
I boggle slightly and head back inside. It’s 2am, and the surly Russian bouncer has stopped checking whether people have tickets for the CF party, meaning some civilians from the bar upstairs have filtered down to join watch the young Tories at play. A group of lads in Hoxton fins and sportswear stand to one side of the dancefloor and marvel, pint glass in one hand, the other defensively pocketed, as rotund young men strapped in by leather belts dance like their fathers to “Hey Ya.” Their hips swivel arrhythmically, fingers determinedly pointing at indeterminate parts of the ceiling.
For a political party that professes itself horrified that the pre-election debate is being framed in class terms, the young Tories seem remarkably fixated on the issue. “Sorry, did you just say I was a commoner? Fuck off and die!”—is the punch-line to one bit of drunken joshing between friends.
As I shape to leave, I hover for one last cigarette. Three new acquaintances are making idle smalltalk. “Tim is such a common name…” one of the smokers is saying. He checks himself, not wanting to offend the Tim in question: “sorry, not, you know, common… I mean ‘popular’.”
“Yah but your surname is Jenkins,” his friend says through a mouthful of teeth. “That’s such a butler’s name!”
“Jenkiiiiiiins!!” They all boom happily at once, summoning an imaginary servant and the ghost of Conservative past at the same time. The declamation falls away into the West End night, nullified by the bright lights of nearby Piccadilly Circus.
“Where’s Bollinger?” someone wonders, idly.
“Bollie? She’s left I think.”
Philip Collins
David Cameron could claim to be a Conservative, pure and simple. Often he adopts other titles, like liberal or progressive Conservative. But recently he has unwittingly adopted a new label: the confused social democrat. Cameron’s November 2009 Hugo Young lecture established inequality as a standard by which Conservatives wants to be judged—specifically the gap between the incomes of the poorest and middle England, not just the very poorest and the rich.
The lecture acted, in part, to correct the cartoonish depiction of the state that featured in Cameron’s address to the Conservative party conference in October 2009. He finally acknowledged the role of legislation in social progress—easy enough, as there are good examples of this during Tory governments, like the Factory Acts of 1819 and 1844. He also intriguingly refined his critique of the state. Where once he had been ideological in his criticism—the state cannot help because it is the problem—he was now historical: during the 1960s, Cameron claimed, the state just ceased helping. More important, however, was the desire to move his thinking further towards the left, saying: “we must use the state to remake society.” The only Miliband who disagrees with that is Ralph.
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