This time there are no ifs and buts… I thought David Cameron’s speech was fantastic, I thought the tone was right and the content was right. In my last piece I said that I’d hoped for some left over sausage and received a stale old dog biscuit in its stead – well David Cameron gave me a full English breakfast. Perhaps I should set up a Facebook group to that effect.
Over the last couple of years I have felt that the solutions being offered to society’s problems by the Conservative Party were simply more of the same failed big state solutions, yesterday Cameron outlined answers to those problems that were, as I had hoped for, distinctively centre right. Actually I’d say that they were slightly more right wing than that, but it would be churlish of me to complain.
However my criticism of the Platform 10 site has been that it is too sycophantic to be interesting, and now listen to me raving like a besotted schoolgirl; so I should strike a note of caution. Some of the policies unveiled were particularly attractive to me; as a former Council Leader I was excited by the pledge to remove all central government auditing of local authorities, and as an economic liberal I was shocked (but in a good way) to hear a pledge to privatise the welfare benefits system. My only worry is about how these things would be implemented and how we would face down the inevitable criticism of the consequences of these policies.
Last time I actually went to conference I went to the very first Policy Exchange fringe meeting, where a debate began about central government control of local government. I have long been on the side of letting the electorate judge their local politicians at the ballot box and argued as such; I was considered (plus ca change) to be dangerously right wing. The argument was put that could we really stand by and watch while our Labour voting cities spiralled out of control, spending money they didn’t have? Could we really stand by and watch while two adjoining councils offered substantially different qualities of service – the postcode lottery multiplied by 10? So the question remains do we have the guts to live the consequences of the policy announced yesterday? I hope so.
If I’d realised that this was what modernising the Conservative Party was about, I’d have been an uber-moderniser long ago (come to think of it maybe I was, but just didn’t realise). Cameron’s speech was a call to arms for a different way of governing Britain and it was pleasingly, surprisingly, sound.