I’m busy with the day job (got to earn a crust, you know), but I did make time to watch David Camerom on the internet yesterday.
The first thing I thought was odd was the sight of George Osborne and William Hague behind Cameron, peering over his shoulder at the unwary viewer in a rather unsettling way, as if to say “here’s me and my army”. Cameron himself is smooth and as soft as butter wrapped in silk, Hague and Osborne, to put it mildly, are not. I spent much of the speech fascinatedly watching William Hague nodding solemnly to a renunciation of the values of his leadership of the party.
However, such things are trivial. It’s the content that matters. Here I think there is a gulf between those who love the style and poise of Cameron (of whom you will find many in the media) and the more difficult question of what it all actually means.
The high point of Cameron’s speech was his passionate denunciation of the management of the NHS. Cameron recounted the story of someone who had been treated terribly by the NHS and whose story had been met by a byzantine response about complaints procedure. Voice cracking with emotion Cameron said “Four ways to complain but no way to die with dignity. By God, we’ve got to change that”.
I don’t think anyone would disagree with the intent.
However, we should also remember that David Cameron’s policy is to devolve more power to hospitals and to practices. His belief is that it should not be the responsibility of the Central NHS to set standards or targets to ensure that patients are treated in particular ways. So in a future Tory Government, if someone were to recieve poor treatment there would be no central direction given to prevent such problems. Not so much “By god we must change that” but “by god we must not”
The same conflict of instinct and policy occured in the section on education. In one paragraph Cameron demanded freedom for teachers to teah and heads to lead. In the next he said that he would declare war on the educational establishment. So you’re free to teach, just as long as you teach in a way in which the Secretary of State wishes.
I think this strange duality hung over the whole speech.
I want to set you free to do what I say.
I want to punish bankers by not regulating them.
I will not offer bribes except the ones we told you about yesterday.
We must take tough, unpopular decisons but I will not mention or refer to what they might be.
So I thought Cameron failed in everything bar the stylistic and positioning sectors of his speech. That might be enough though. The media seem so keen on his repositioning that they seem disinclined to point out when the solution do not match the prognosis.
However, there was one section that I thought was intriguing. It was the rhetorical attempt to link progressive ends to conservative means. I think that is a pleasing political phrase, and one that could resonate. However, it leads to the whole question of whether particular conservative means actually would achieve progressive ends.
In the sections on domestic policy Cameron was only able to set out his desire and hope that they would do so. Let’s be frank, giving a tax break to wealthy parents, reducing inheritance tax and freezing council tax will do little or nothing to keep poorer families together, no matter how devoutly the leader of the Conservative party might wish that it will.
This is not just po-faced criticism. There are Conservative policy proposals that could meet that test. Increasing the lower level of the income tax threshold (so long as you restructure higher rate taxpayers so the benefit goes disproportionately to basic rate tax players not high earners) You might think of others*
Yet where Cameron could commit himself to these strategies he conspicuously did not. Perhaps he felt that he didn’t have the money (though he does have the money for inheritance tax, married tax and council tax). He did however apparently commit himself to high speed rail, though he tied it in to a frankly strange decision to throttle Heathrow.
So here’s my take on Mr Cameron’s speech. He might will the ends, but for a man with a plan he seems strangely confused when it comes to the means.
*Welfare reform also meets this test but the Conservative party’s actual policies on Welfare reform make no sense, as they aim to save money, which wouldn’t happen.
7 Comments
October 2, 2008 at 4:05 pm
“David Cameron’s policy is to devolve more power to hospitals and to practices” but -
They can’t square the circle between devolving power, maintaining standards and avoiding the dreaded “postcode lottery”. Of course they can’t, it can’t be done. Labourites should write and write again to their local papers to expose such conundrums in the over-simplification of something as complex as running a health service.
And as for putting doctors in charge of the NHS – most of those that I know would struggle to run a proverbial whelk* stall. They’ve been trained in medicine not in management or administration….
*have you ever tried a proverbial whelk? You should.
October 2, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Just on the trivial presentational stuff for a mo – I actually found myself feeling a bit sorry for Hague and Osborne. They had to sit with their appropriate backdrop faces on full alert for over an hour…
Also, Cameron seems to have just the slightest of nervous tics. After he’s finished saying a line (more with the ‘earnest’ or ’serious’ passages than the knockabout stuff), he often purses his lips, half-biting the bottom one – sometimes the tip of his tongue darts out a little too. See
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7646660.stm
Someone tell Rory Bremner!
October 2, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Brian – But we allow policemen to run police forces, teachers to run schools. Why not doctors?
Come on Hopi – surely the pie in the equality of Browns speach last week – some sort of internet, which has been promised before and not delivered, and free theatre access – is this a vision of a progressive future?
And with regards to IHT, you would not expect them to have announced it this year, in these straitened times, but they can hardly go back on their previous announcement.
Finally on unpopular decisions, the Labour Government have hardly covered themselves in glory in this respect. If there was no problem, and it was the right thing to do, for the governement to realign car tax levels and realign tax system to abolish 10p tax rate, how come they have changed their policy because it was unpopular.
October 2, 2008 at 8:03 pm
I think thats fair-ish really allowing for you jaundiced attitude. It is a balance but you continue to utterly misunderstood the relevance of IHT ( until Labour can ‘get’ what it meant to the hoardes of ordinary people who hated it they will continue to be strangers in much of England ).
I suppse its a lot to ask a Labour spinner but not everyone in the country starts with the assumption that all the money in the land belongs to the State.
October 2, 2008 at 11:02 pm
Chris, – I thought it was that we currently don’t allow teachers and policemen to run things – and that this was a terrible shame?
As regards to Brown’s speech there’s a difference. Brown was talking about fairness and making announcements that whatever one thinks of them as policies are intellectually consistent with his agenda.
cameron was talking about progresive ends being important to him, then underlining them with either an absence of policy or with proposals that would have entirely different results. We’ve seen this political technique before, by the way. It was called compassionate conservatism back in 2000.
Newmania- I agree with you that there were a lot of people who were worried about IHT on their homes, but I submit to you the thought that most of them have had their concerns met by the raise in the threshold to 600k. There’s little or no benefit ingong further.
October 3, 2008 at 10:29 am
Re teachers being allowed to run schools: would these be the same teachers caricatured as loonie-lefties by the Tories throughout the 1980/90s by any chance? Remind me; which party set up OFSTED under that charmer Mr Woodhead to make schools do as they were told?
And it doesn’t seem that Sir I. Blair was left exactly free to do his own thing by his new “hands off” boss…
October 3, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Hopi – it does depnd on what you class as progressive.
In the end I think that you can only judge the results once you have introduced something and as it is likely the tories will get in then we will probably see if they can make a success of things.
My point about policemen and teachers is that they become Chief constables and headteachers – they used to do the job but don’t anymore – they have progressed to management. Whereas in the NHS these is a level of managers who have not got clinical experience in all cases. Whilst this in itself is not bad, it all depends on the person. If they are the type of person who can empathise with people then all very well, but a box ticker could be very demoralising.
I enjoyed your piece as you explain the view from the section of society that doesn’t get Cameron. How big that is we won’t know until an election, but I think all the leaders speeches were written well enough to encourage their own supporters, but unspecific enough to convert anyone. I enjoyed both Clegg’s and Cameron’s speeches and found Gordon Brown’s speech intensely dull and annoying in it’s vacuuousness. This probably reflects my own politics more than the relative merits of any of the speeches.