Critics on the right, and I include myself, have often charged the Prime Minister and those around him with lacking ideology. But since the beginning, it has seemed clear that this Coalition was a radical liberal government, determined to reshape and re-imagine the state and society. It has seemed intensely ideological; but as I read the text of David Cameron’s speech this afternoon, doubts began to re-form in my mind. I felt that I began to understand a little better what drives David Cameron and what his re-shaped society might look like; it concerned me.
Liberals like us have to accept that the liberal social and economic values that we believe in have contributed to the broken society in which we undoubtedly live. David Cameron is clearly grappling with those consequences and seeking the answer to them, and he deserves credit for that. But the picture that his speech drew of the society that he wishes to create, looked a little too much like the 1950s, like the society that existed before the two liberal whirlwinds of the 60s and the 80s changed Britain forever.
There were times when, although certainly more sophisticated, he was not too far away from describing John Major’s cycling spinsters and cricket on the village green. I began to wonder, is the Big Society a 21st Century response to the turmoil of the late 20th Century or is it simply a pang of nostalgia for a bygone age? Nostalgia for a society that Harry would recognise.
The changes which he described to the way in which the state should operate were changes that I approved of, but they remained methodological and not ideological. He admitted himself that by the end of this Parliament the government would be the same size as in 2006; power might have been devolved to local authorities and people might be more involved in decision making, but the state will not have shrunk.
He convinced me that over the next 5 years, this government will do many things that will chime with liberal Conservative ideologies, things I will be proud of and enthusiastic about. He listed many achievements in these first 5 months, which are ideologically sound and genuinely significant. But he made me wonder whether these things are happening only because of the financial crisis. Debt and necessity have become the mothers of invention, but without them, would the government really be so radical?