David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, delivers his keynote speech to delegates on the last day of the 2009 Conservative Conference at Manchester Central on October 8, 2009 in Manchester, England. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s only hope is for either a significant economic turn-around or that Cameron will make a damaging campaign blunder. Brown hasn’t been helped by the recent news that the sight in his one remaining eye (he lost the sight in one eye as a teenager) is damaged.
Cameron had a reasonable Conservative Party Conference last week, demonstrating both that he could communicate effectively and that his new compassionate conservatism was focused, forthright and fiscally responsible, but not enough to worry the centrist voters.
While leaving policy details for the election itself, he did stress the major themes his party will pursue during the campaign: getting Britain back to work, reducing the size and cost of government, getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and tackling poverty. He balanced a government committed to austerity with one committed to compassion.
Most significantly, however, he offered a powerful and effective critique of the achievements of the Labour Government. He pointed out that since Labour came to power in 1997 the poor have become poorer; more young people are now long-term unemployed than at any time in Britain’s recent history; inequality is rising faster under Brown than it did under former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher; crime rates in poverty-stricken areas of Britain are rising; more schools are failing to meet standards now than did a decade ago; more patients die in hospitals of medical mistakes and infections than at any time in the last fifty years; and national debt (forecast to be £175 billion for 2010) is the highest since the International Monetary Fund (IMF) intervention in the last Labour administration of Jim Callaghan, which ended in 1979.
Britain’s finances are in a shambles and it is selling off assets and printing money.
He intended his powerful critique to reflect the difference between the rhetoric of the Labour Party—a party for the people—and the reality of its achievements and to point to his compassionate conservative party as the model for the future. While an intellectually convincing argument, unfortunately it does not reflect the public’s images of conservatives. Cameron has a massive task ahead getting this message across in a way that is not patronizing or open to attack.
The fundamental fact is, however, that the “new” Labour project initiated by former Prime Minister Tony Blair, Brown, and Peter Mandelson—recently parachuted back into Whitehall in a bid to rescue his former enemy Gordon Brown—has failed spectacularly.
Britain’s finances are in a shambles and it is selling off assets and printing money (now referred to as “fiscal easing”) so as to delay the inevitable increases in taxes and substantial cuts in public spending, which all major parties are committed to. In fact, deficits and debt will be defining British politics and social economic policies for the next decade.
Brown is adamant that he will not leave the Prime Minister’s office before the election, which many in the Labour party are now resigned to losing. The bloodletting will be enormous: Some 325 members of parliament will not be returning to the Commons after the election. 170 of them Labour members who are expected to retire, be forced to resign, or lose their seats. Labour is facing a decade or more in opposition.
The leadership race is already underway, although everyone is overtly supporting Gordon Brown. Ed Balls, currently Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, is a leading candidate as also is David Milliband, Foreign Secretary.
While Balls is a close ally of Brown, he is noticeably beginning to distance himself from the Prime Minister’s public policy positions. Milliband looked like a coup member earlier in the year, but backed off against significant threats to his political future by a rabid group of Brown acolytes.
But there is a growing view within the Labour Party that, in order to have a chance of rebuilding, they will have to skip the current generation and look to the next for a new leader. They have the time: No one will be looking to Labour for ideas and innovation for some time.
Stephen Murgatroyd is a consultant in innovative business and education practices with a Ph.D. in psychology. Copyright Troy Media Corporation.
