He likes Radiohead, puppies and has a bicycle. David Cameron could be one of this site’s core readership were it not for the fact that he is in a political organisation that is likely to take power within the next couple of years. Or maybe our luck will change too. Some version of this will be in the next issue of Socialist Resistance.
Tory leader David Cameron should be expected to know what he’s talking about when he calls something “backward looking, divisive and xenophobic”. Those are, after all, the very values that his party has been celebrating since 1834. Though this time he wasn’t discussing some of his own members’ flirtations with General Pinochet, the BNP or UKIP. It was his judgement on Labour’s abysmal electoral challenge in Crewe and Nantwich. The choice of adjectives is revealing because they all project the new “compassionate Conservatism” which Cameron is very successfully using to exorcise the ghosts of Margaret Thatcher and John Major.
It looks almost inevitable that the Conservatives will win the next General Election. Boris Johnson’s victory in the London mayoral election, Labour’s poor local election results and the Tory by-election victory have shattered the party’s self-confidence. The local election results were its worst in over forty years with only 24 per cent of the vote as opposed to the 44 per cent won by the Conservatives.
New Labour is going out of its way to present itself as the authoritarian, anti-working class, pro-rich, pro-war party. Simply by being a nationally known organisation with an electoral infrastructure, being vague on what it will do when in power and criticising the government the Conservatives were bound to see an improvement in their elections results and public profile. Recent events have exceeded their expectations and Cameron has now announced “death of New Labour”. He is now claiming that his party has built a new political coalition to reach out to the mythical middle England. He also asserts that in recent elections “thousands of people who have never voted Conservative before have come across and put their trust in the Conservative party.”
One can raise an eyebrow at the use of the words “trust” and “Conservative Party” in the same sentence but it is beyond dispute that some former Labour voters are now voting Conservative, many more just are not bothering to go to the polling station and others are looking for an answer from the fascist BNP. But at this point it seems clear that the Conservative successes are not due to the party developing a programme to match Thatcher’s neo-liberal attack on the working class on behalf of British capital. Gordon Brown is already doing that. Charles Moore writing in the Daily Telegraph summed it up by saying that when people look at the party now “they can no longer find anything much to put them off.” As an endorsement from a friend that is pretty feeble but does nicely with a comment on the well regarded Conservative Home website that “this new Tory policy vacuum sucks up votes”
Rather than the rebirth of the Conservative Party we are watching the slow motion death of the Blairite and Brownite Labour Party, a party that has implemented an anti-working class, neo-liberal programme since 1997. The old gut hatred of Toryism is a receding memory. For many younger voters Thatcher is as distant an historical figure as Neville Chamberlain and, as we saw with Boris Johnson’s victory his party has been able to hold onto its core vote, mobilise new layers of support and attract former Labour voters who see no reason to reward the party of government at the ballot box.
No serious minded person can doubt that a Cameron government will be every bit as “backward looking, divisive and xenophobic” as Gordon Brown’s. Even his Tory fans are pointing out that he is not staking out an ideological line between the two parties but contents himself with rhetorical flourishes on tax, the environment and modernity. His triumph is as much the work of New Labour as of his own party.
Liam redux 
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