Ah, Tony Blair’s speech in Sedgefield last week, wasn’t it marvellous? Like Aslan returning to Narnia… What I liked most was the bit about how the central question in any election is “which party gets the future… the way the world is changing and can be comfortable in it.” If you look across the range of Tory policies there isn’t anything that addresses the long-term shape of the post-financial crisis economy or how Britain will negotiate an increasingly multi-polar world. For Cameron’s Conservatives the priority is not what lies ahead, but to go back and undo everything they don’t like about modern Britain.

Insofar as anything unites the policies that dribble out of Conservative HQ – some are just too opportunistic to assimilate into any pattern – it is the aim to go back, shovel up, unpick and reverse. On foreign affairs, their priority is to settle old scores with Brussels. On social policy, the obsession with marriage shows they have yet fully to come to terms with social changes initiated in the 1960s. Their much-hyped education policy has degenerated in to a stream of quaint pronouncements about how children should learn about kings and queens like they did in the Olden Days. Headlining their planning policy is a quixotic war against Tesco and more powers for nimbys. The ultimate symbol of the Tories’ desire to freeze society and shackle it to the past is the importance they attach to protecting inherited wealth. It was the subject of their first major tax announcement and is now overriding aim of their proposals for care for the elderly.

David Cameron has tried to present as a Big Idea the “the Big Society” – transforming “broken Britain” through a renewal of community activism. In this drive, Cameron has associated himself closely with Phillip Blond of the ResPublica thinktank. Blond argues in his book ‘The Red Tory’ that both left and right have failed to prevent the domination of Britain by the twin forces of the market and the state, resulting in a society blighted by empty hedonism, family breakdown and welfare dependency. Echoing Cameron, Blond says only autonomous organisations can protect the individual from the tyrannical market-state.

But the Red Tory/Big Society agenda doesn’t stack up and is not as radical as it pretends. For one thing, Blond’s depiction of Britain as a civic vacuum relies on him just ignoring the plethora of opportunities for civic engagement that exist – from youth justice boards to school governing bodies and local charities. Similarly Cameron gushes about an army of citizen missionaries renewing society, while treating the genuine popular activism, whether it’s the unions or his party’s grassroots, with high-handed contempt.

The key to this tendentiousness and inconsistency is that it isn’t a serious analysis of modern Britain at all but a repackaging of obsessions that have haunted and blinkered reactionary minds for centuries (individualism, mass-production, the “moral disorder” of the working class). Blond’s book is just another dirge for a lost, imaginary England* where people didn’t demand universal entitlements but meditated gratefully on their organic and richly-textured lack of entitlement. His and the Conservatives’ lamentations on our “broken society” reveal less about modern Britain than they do about their own inability to accept or relate to it. They love how they imagine society used to be and fantasise about restoring it but what they can’t do is to like real people and the way they choose to live now. You can’t face the future if you haven’t even reconciled yourself with the present.

Warnings that Cameron will take Britain back to the 1980s miss the point. Whatever you think of Thatcher, she admired ordinary people, wanted the state to reflect their aspirations and to equip them for a future that she tried her best to anticipate. Blair was similar, but Cameron is exactly the opposite. He would lead a headlong charge into the past, into irrelevance and against the grain of modern Britain.

*(He thinks 1750 was when the rot set in, by the way)

Photo: wallyg 2006