The Guardian view on blue-collar Conservatism: Tory tanks on Labour’s lawn
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Version 0 of 1. Blue-collar Conservatism: you may never have heard of it before the first Tory cabinet for 18 years assembled this morning, but according to the prime minister it is by its tenets of helping people who can to get on and offering support to those who can’t that he wants his government to be judged. David Cameron the moderniser has already been round the block once, but this is a different kind of modern. Where the first was intended to distance the party from Thatcherism without entirely disavowing it, blue-collar Conservatism is an attempt to recapture some of its spirit while parking Tory tanks on Labour’s lawn. If it works, it will be farewell to “shy Tories”, voters embarrassed to admit they are backing the Conservatives, because they will become the values party. Mr Cameron’s new government is hand-picked to illustrate Tories as ordinary people. The proportion of privately educated cabinet ministers has fallen from two-thirds to less than half. A third are women. Of his ministers, one, Robert Halfon, has a disability. The family of Sajid Javid came from Pakistan, and that of Priti Patel from India via Uganda. Diversity is one important message. The words about delivering the policies and programmes to enable everyone to have a chance of living a good life – the phrase which Mr Cameron used as he welcomed his new cabinet, and which first echoed through the party’s manifesto launch a month ago – is another gesture of intent. But when so much of what Mr Cameron promised five years ago faded from view like the early morning mist, there is an understandable scepticism about what will be delivered this time. Modernisation 2.0 is a signal of a determination to capture the territory on which successive Commons majorities can be built. It is being driven not from Downing Street, but from George Osborne’s Treasury, already the architects of the idea of a northern powerhouse based in Manchester, rebalancing the economy and devolving power away from London (a project that now has its own minister). Osborne proteges abound, from business secretary Javid to the new deputy party chairman Mr Halfon. In the last parliament, he was the chancellor’s parliamentary aide, champion of “white van” concerns about petrol prices and high hospital car-parking charges. Now he will be shaping policy more widely. To stack up, blue collar Conservatism has to be more than a collection of populist policies. Its declared ambition is to provide the underpinning for Mr Cameron’s notion of the good life. The distinction between it and Labour’s election offer is in the emphasis on success as a matter entirely of personal effort. Superficially, it has much in common with the first proposals from the current contenders for Labour’s leadership, Chuka Umunna and Liz Kendall. But the new business secretary Mr Javid’s first interview suggests deeper faultlines. Stringent proposals for strike legislation that will hobble public sector unions, intimations of an impending attack on the BBC – these are not the pledges of a government which values the role of civic institutions in promoting social justice or which understands that social justice requires more than individual prosperity. Nor is “fairness” the same as tackling inequality or the dysfunctional structures underlying it that economists increasingly see as a threat to recovery. For now, though, with their new mandate, this is the agenda the Tories are in a position to deliver. Labour must take note. |