Interesting New York Times Op-Ed on Cameron's manifesto ...

[non sociopath skin]

... from American right-winger Ross Douthat.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/opinion/19douthat.html?th&emc=t

Interesting that he says Cameron as being more in the American Republican tradition. And that he seemingly has severe doubts about the UK electorate buying the package or Cameron implementing it ...

The Skin

[Dutch]

1. He strikes me as having no real grasp of Cameronism whatsoever

Or British politics in general, for that matter- note he can't even spell the name of our governing party correctly. The idea of Cameron as a beleagured, principled reformer is laughable, and he leaves out the small matter of the "sainted" Thatcher being the main architect of our over-centralised state. And where to start with the idea that the Conservative desire to eviscerate the state is somehow new? The only difference with Cameron is that he tries to cover it up with this airy, meaningless "big society" drivel- that's hardly a substantive change, and its more of an attempt to invoke old-fashioned county Toryism than Nixonianism (although I think the author overstates the difference- trust a Republican nutbag to see old-fashioned Tories as fluffly bleeding-hearts).

The Tories always talk a good game about empowering local government, and always do the opposite in practice, and Cameron would be no different, as I suspect all but one regular poster here would probably agree- witness his blithe willingness to further erode what planning powers local government has left with his schools plan (I strongly suspect the author didn't). As for the contention that Cameron is in the Republican tradition- well, there is some truth in that, but no more so than for the previous FIVE party leaders. But I guess the author hasn't really been paying attention since the fall of Thatcher.

And as for his doubt's about the public buying it, well, anyone can read an opinion poll.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Yeah, I was under the impression that local government is to be bypassed under Tory plans

'decentralising power' seems to mean:

"The manifesto encourages parents and charities to set up new academy schools"
ie cutting out the county/etc. responsibility for schools

"pledges to give people the power to veto council tax rises through local referendums"
ie decreasing the power of elected councils by second-guessing them (and it doesn't seem possible to have a referendum to increase council spending, does it?)

"promises communities the right to buy their local pub or post office"
Well, might be good, but I'd ask what is the 'community' if not the parish council or equivalent?

"it promises directly-elected police commissioners to hold forces to account"
OK, that's an election; a BBC interviewer pointed out that one elected person in charge may tend towards grandstanding and Robocop measures; when they suggested to a Tory that the police authorities could be directly elected instead of made up from councillors, and that would mean more of a consensus on policing than with just one person, they ummed and ahhed, and didn't have an answer. Because they really want an "I'm tough on criminals" chest-beating exercise to develop from this.

On health:

"Decentralise power, getting rid of target-led culture and publishing healthcare providers' results. Introducing payment by results system for GPs and other health services"
This seems to contradict itself. Isn't a "payment by results system" a "target-led culture"?

"Doctors and nurses to get more decision-making powers. Independent NHS board to allocate resources and provide commissioning guidelines. Power for GPs to commission local health services"
Notice this comes along with "Cut Whitehall policy, funding and regulation costs by a third, saving £2bn a year by 2015, and save a further £1bn by cutting quangos". But they want a brand new huge quango to control the NHS.

Other:

"Councils and police to get powers to shut shops or bars persistently selling alcohol to children and to charge more for late-night licences to cover policing costs "
Ahh, this really is an extra power for a council!

"Social enterprises, charities and voluntary groups to deliver more public services aimed at tackling deep-rooted social problems"
The problem with taking provision for things out of local council control is that coverage becomes patchy. What if no one volunteers to deliver the public services in a particular area?

"More flexibility for councils on business rates to encourage growth"
That's genuine decentralisation.


Overall, not "a dramatic transfer of responsibility — for schools, hospitals, police forces — to local governments and communities", if you ask me. Apart from 'communities' being a nebulous "what I want it to mean" word.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. A review of Philip Blond's Red Tory, on which Cameron seems to have based 'The Big Society'

It doesn't make me warm to Blond's ideas, though I think the reviewer's attempt to make a connection to fascism may be a bit of a strain.

Cameron’s Crank
Jonathan Raban
Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix it by Phillip Blond

...
Behind the smokescreen of jargon and false logic, what Blond is really saying is both simple and depressingly familiar. Red Tory is like a 300-page Sunday sermon, preached by an autodidact country parson whose shelves are stuffed with old blue and white Pelican books on subjects like modern psychology, literature, sociology, government and economics, which the parson (in civilian life, Blond used to be a lecturer in theology) believes must hold the key to the alien and ugly civilisation he encounters on his parish rounds. We have sunk, Parson Blond says, into a condition of ‘rootless cultural relativism’, godless and cynical, in which there is ‘a pervading lack of daily joy’. He blames the Bloomsbury Group, especially Lytton Strachey; the disillusioned war memoirs of Graves and Sassoon; the ‘self-hating cultural elite’ of John Osborne, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin; the libertarian narcissism of the 1960s; Paul Watson’s 1974 BBC series about the Wilkins clan, The Family, ‘reality television’ in general and Big Brother in particular; the Bloomsburyite economist J.M. Keynes (whose name Blond revealingly pronounced as ‘Keens’ in a televised debate that I watched on the internet) and the pernicious laissez-faire doctrines of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School.

Once upon a time, long before the Industrial Revolution spoiled everything, it was different: Britain had an ‘organic culture’, a ‘vibrant agrarian culture’ with a ‘prosperous and relatively secure British peasantry’. In the good old days, everyone went to church, of course, and religion supplied the ‘transcendent idea of the good’, whose absence in our sorry, secular society is the root cause of our national misery. What we must now do, the parson says, is somehow resurrect the ‘British culture of virtue’; we need ‘a civil society built around the practice of virtue and exploration of the good’. For a start, schools must provide ‘education into the good’, but we ‘cannot have a moral society without a moral economy’, and it’s on the matter of the moral economy and the ‘moral market’, and how they might be achieved, that Blond’s sermon builds to its utopian climax.
...
In the new virtuous Britain, the banks will be small and many, each rooted in its native town and region. Companies will be ‘social enterprises’, owned by their employees on the model of the John Lewis Partnership. Wealth will be redistributed so as to ‘recapitalise’ the poor. Trade guilds, upholding ethical standards of practice, and community associations of every kind will flourish. Companies will no longer seek the destruction by takeover of their rivals, rendering monopoly obsolete. Ownership, and the power that goes with it, will spread from the top downwards, and from the centre out to far-flung local communities. The tyrannous state will shrink as it surrenders most of its functions to charities and co-operatives in which every member has his own financial share. A spirit of rediscovered mutuality will sweep across the land.
...
Cameron badly wants to win the election, and a big idea, however tainted its source, however underexamined and ill-thought-out, is a useful thing to brandish at the electorate, especially if it provides a cloak of nobility and ‘ethos’ for the old Conservative ambition to take a cleaver and sunder the connection between the words ‘welfare’ and ‘state’. Stripped of its obscurantist rhetoric and foggy sermonising, Red Tory issues a moral licence to government to free itself from the expensive business of dispensing social services and to dump them on the ‘third sector’ of charities, voluntary organisations, non-profits and the like. It won’t make Britain a more virtuous, civil, courteous or moral society. It certainly won’t restore us to that happy state of grace and comity in which, apparently, we all lived in medieval times. It won’t please Phillip Blond, who, in a recent article for Prospect titled ‘Why Cameron Shouldn’t Lurch to the Right’, berated the Conservatives for reverting to their ‘vestigial Thatcherite instincts’ when faced with narrowing poll numbers, and accused them of reneging on his (and the Distributist League’s) project of ‘recapitalising’ the poor to create a ‘popular capitalism for all’. It won’t even meet with much approval down in Ambridge. But it ought to make Lord Tebbit’s wintry face crease into a smile.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n08/jonathan-raban/camerons-crank

[Anarcho-Socialist]

3. The author makes the mistake of trying to match up the intricacies of UK politics with the US'

Cameron is more in the British neoliberal will-say-anything-for-votes tradition which Blair successfully utilised. The sound and style of British Toryism and US republicanism are miles apart.