Daily Mail, October 14 2002

The Tory bloodletting continues. Attempts to end the furore over the reported proposal to expel Lord Tebbit from the party were dashed yesterday when Tim Yeo, shadow spokesman for trade and industry, disowned the peer and Michael Portillo poured scorn on the Tebbit camp’s ‘voices on the side’ (the words pot and kettle spring to mind).

The Tories are fighting like ferrets in a sack. Iain Duncan Smith is trying to bridge the gap between the warring factions of modernisers and traditionalists, otherwise known as ‘niceys’ versus the nasties.

But this battle is actually being fought on the wrong territory. For neither traditionalists nor modernisers have properly understood the opportunity offered them by the threat known as Blairism.

Indeed, most Tories don’t think Tony Blair is a threat at all. They think his greatest crime is political cross-dressing. They moan that he has made off with the conservative wardrobe, leaving them without any eye-catching clothes.

But Blairism is not a conservative creed. Beneath rhetoric cunningly aimed to placate middle Britain, it is nothing less than a revolutionary attack on freedom and parliamentary democracy, which seeks to remodel the family, the nation state and even human nature itself.

Yet most Tories do not appear to grasp this. Traditionalists tend to dismiss Tony Blair as a vapid and cynical spin-merchant, whose ideas need not be taken seriously. And as the former Tory adviser John O’Sullivan has correctly noted, the modernisers who surround Duncan Smith have actually swallowed wholesale the Blairite view of the world -- that Britain has become ‘Dianafied’.

They think that to win again they must follow suit. Hence their obsession with the party’s appearance, with being touchy-feely and ‘inclusive’; hence their promotion of minority politics, lifestyle equivalence and the victim culture.

The Tories think they lost the election because they weren’t Dianafied. But if anything shows they really are utterly out of touch, this is it. The reason they lost power was because they were so incompetent. The public understandably concluded that the Conservatives couldn’t run a whelk-stall – an impression merely compounded under William Hague.

The Tories have nevertheless correctly identified that Labour’s own incompetence now makes it vulnerable. Accordingly, they have come up with a potentially lethal line of attack over the government’s failure to deliver improved public services.

For it is not only failing here in competence, but in its core goal to help the poor. It is the poor who are most damaged by failures in schools and hospitals; it is the poor who are trapped by being unable to buy decent education or health care.

The public services will only deliver if they are decentralised. And that must mean giving leverage to parents and patients who must be able to escape failing provision. That is why the Tories’ proposal to give people money to buy the education of their choice is a really powerful idea.

It’s why giving all [ital] hospitals freedom from political control -- as opposed to the government’s limited scope for foundation hospitals -- is similarly right (although subsidising 60 per cent of private health care is not [ital]a good idea, since it leaves out those who cannot afford to pay the remaining 40 per cent).

Radical decentralisation turns on power being given to the people over their public services. That’s the lesson from the neighbourhood programmes in Easterhouse, Glasgow (which so impressed Duncan Smith) and all the other places where communities are being rebuilt by the grass-roots, in the teeth of endemic obstruction from Whitehall and town hall.

If the Tories can muster the courage to develop the principle of public service free from central control, they will have Labour on the run. For although the government is now talking the language of decentralisation, it will choke on its sun-dried tomatoes before giving parents or patients leverage over the system.

Even a properly developed public service agenda, though, would not be enough. Promising better delivery is essentially about process, not principle. To win hearts and minds, the Tories have to be angry. And they can only be angry if they grasp that Blairism is not a ‘nice’, cuddly, inclusive doctrine but a deadly threat.

The biggest threat it poses is to the nation and to democracy itself. For Labour deeply, viscerally believes in supra-national institutions and values. It thinks –fatuously – that ‘globalisation’ has made the nation state redundant. Hence its obsession with human rights law, the International Criminal Court and the European Union.

All these things are progressively draining power away from the British people and the parliamentary process. What greater cause can there be than to defend democracy against such a threat? Yet the Tories, paralysed by their divisions over Europe, are lamentably failing to articulate this most profound anxiety and

anger of the British people.

They have also become so obsessed with the need to offend no-one that they are in danger of losing the plot completely over Labour’s war against the traditional family. Of course it is right to emphasise that Tories are not in the business of attacking or demonising individuals.

But that should not mean effectively endorsing the doctrine that anything goes, the position towards which David Willetts dangerously strayed when he told the conference that the party would now support all types of family.

For if the party really is to support and encourage fatherless, fragmented or unstable households, it will merely condone and connive at yet more emotional harm to children, more violence between adults, more mental and physical ill health among women and men. How can this possibly be construed as helping the vulnerable?

Moreover, the Tory conference gave a platform to claims about the family which were misleading, manipulative or simply untrue – the hallmarks of victim culture politics. It heard from Willetts, for example, that many single mothers were abandoned. Well, some undoubtedly are; but most divorces are initiated by women who have not been abandoned.

Kate Green, director of the National Council for One Parent Families, told the conference that most lone mothers had never set out to bring up children on their own. But mothers who initiate divorce proceedings are doing precisely that. And single mothers by choice are the fastest growing group of lone parents.

Even worse was to come when the women’s aid activist Sandra Horley was given the platform to announce that 90% of domestic violence took place against women. Such a claim is simply astounding, when the research conclusively shows that women in such incidents initiate violence as much as men.

The Tories are making the terrible mistake of confusing care for the vulnerable with the culture of victimhood. In fact, victim culture actually harms the vulnerable by excusing, minimising or denying harmful behaviour.

Duncan Smith is right to draw a line under the Tories’ past association with selfish individualism and lack of responsibility. But his greatest asset is his integrity – and victim culture is based on lies.

The Tories need fire in their belly. They will only get it once they brush the stardust from their eyes and realise that the Dianafication of politics is not nice at all, but very nasty indeed.

Posted by admin at October 14, 2002