The question on everyone’s mind after Ed Miliband’s speech last Tuesday was ‘what would David Cameron’s riposte to Ed’s “One Nation” be?’. Some suggested there would be a flurry of policy announcements this week to relaunch the government ahead of the autumn season. Others believed that Cameron would make a direct pitch for the ‘One Nation’ ground Ed had taken.
In the end Cameron’s speech did neither. Instead his speech was a passionate defence of the Conservatives’ record and a call to arms to build an ‘aspiration nation’, a Britain fit for the future.
The defence of the Tories’ record laid out by Cameron was one of the strongest seen to date. He championed the Conservatives record on the NHS, hailed the deportation of Abu Hamza, boasted that it was the Tories who were bringing the lowest-paid workers out of tax, and defended his government’s decision to ringfence international aid spending.
Cameron also defended his party’s economic record, saying that deficit reduction was the very foundation of his government’s growth plan. He pointed to over a million private sector jobs created in the last two years and low interest rates as evidence that his economic plan was working. He claimed that if we veered away from Plan A interest rates would go up and that would hit the economy hard. To rebut this I’ll simply quote the Conservative MP Mark Garnier who said this week that ‘the reason we have a low interest rate is because the economy is absolutely screwed’.
But the general problem with his defence of the Tory record was that, while it was a solid defence of the Tory record when viewed in the vacuum of the conference hall ,it bore little reality to the situation outside the hall. There was no mention of the double-dip recession, no help was offered the thousands of people in the country who want a job but cannot find one, and there was no recognition that borrowing is actually going up – by 22 per cent so far this year – under his government.
Cameron’s key appeal was to those who ‘want to get on’. He said that he wanted to get behind those who wanted to do well in life, that the Conservatives were on people’s side and would help them achieve their dreams. His offer to people was that they could get on in these tough times with ‘hard work, strong families, taking responsibility and by serving others’. Again the words are very warm but there was simply no substance behind them. They were words fit for someone in opposition rather than the man who is supposed to be leading the country.
This speech was also start of the drawing of general election battlelines. According to Cameron Labour is the party of one notion – ‘borrow, borrow, borrow’. He told the audience that Labour had racked up debts, wrecked the economy and asked people never to forget that. The economy is where the key battle over the next two and half years will be and Cameron knows that.
The speech when viewed in isolation was a fairly solid one. The only problem is the man we were hearing from was the prime minister. Instead of words about how to make Britain an ‘aspiration nation’ Cameron should be taking the action needed to create that. The reality that he didn’t want to admit today is that his economic plan has failed and his policies are the barrier to people getting on.
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Jack Storry is a Labour activist and Progress member. He tweets @JackStorry
you were very kind to him… same prescription that has let down millions over the last year starting with Labour while we were in the bubble. Aspiration Nation only works for the few and now they’re being asked to trust £9,000 a year to their aspiration – with no promise of its return nw the bubble is burst. The message to Middle England is surely “you have to be kidding thinking we’ll fall for that again”…
This was the speech of a desperate man. A man whose economic plan is unravelling before our eyes and plunging the country into a third consecutive period of recession. Like a cornered beast, his only defence mechanism is attack. The fact that he spent so much of his speech attacking Ed Miliband and Labour is a classic diversionary tactic to avert attention from his government’s string of incompetences. The other flanking tactic he employed was the “secondhand-car-salesman” ploy which is to claim the opposite of fact. “We are not a party of privilege”, “we are on the road to recovery” etc. His vision may be for an ‘Aspiration Nation’ – the reality is he is presiding over an ‘Expiration Nation’.