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Tuesday, March 27, 2007

The extinction of choice

The excellent Dispatches documentary on Channel 4 by Peter Hitchens about David Cameron confirms what many have long suspected. There is no substance behind Cameron's Conservative reformation, nor even behind Cameron himself. The only motivation behind the new Conservative Party is the desire to win. The competitive instinct is not in itself a bad thing - except that politics is not football. Winning is not enough.

It will hardly come as a surprise to many that Cameron's conversion to greenery and hug-a-hoodery is a new departure. Hitchens uncovered some statements by Cameron in 1996 advocating that offenders should be forced to do hard physical labour, possibly in "distinctive overalls". The new style Cameron states that he is proud to support civil partnerships for gay couples; the old style Cameron campaigned for the retention of Section 28. Hitchens made the telling comment that the David Cameron of 1996 would probably not be allowed to be a Conservative candidate in 2007 with such expressed views.

It's not that people are not allowed to change their minds. The question to ask is why the change of view - and is it sincere, or merely a device to gain popularity, and crucially, electability. Michael Gove MP gave a spirited defence of Cameron's integrity, pointing out that it is sometimes necessary in politics for people to set aside their own views in order to join wholeheartedly in a political campaign. But is this what Cameron has done? And how can we tell whether the "real" David Cameron is the 1996 or 2007 vintage?

The point is that we can't, and it is not in the interests of Team Cameron for us to find out the truth. The reality is that a political party pursuing power for its own sake cannot afford inconveniences like political principle. If the Cameroons finally commit themselves to something concrete it will be that much harder to move on to the next bandwagon: and so we have all the focus on image and the desperate attempt to create the illusion of substance. It is interesting that the two key figures in the Cameronite reform of the Conservative Party are actually PR men: David Cameron, and his adviser Steve Hilton. New Labour may have been built on red-hot public relations, but at least the PR people were at one remove from the politicians: in the New Conservative Party, image and substance are one - or none.

So where does this leave British politics? Hitchens is clear enough that the effect of Blairism on British Conservatism has been terminal and the result is the extinction of choice from British politics. The existing political parties no longer represent the people they are nominally supposed to represent: the political class is alienated from the people.

The solution is obvious.

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The extinction of choice