Comments on: In bed with Polly Toynbee

By: Fred Argy

Fred Argy — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 22:11:19 +0000

Thanks for your piece Don. I too find Cameron a very interesting person – more like the ‘small l liberals” we once used to have in this country and that I greatly admired.

By: Don Arthur

Don Arthur — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 22:06:40 +0000

Jason – David Willetts has also painted Cameron the heir of Disraeli. In a speech in Feb this year he said:

Today I want to focus on one particular episode – the Party’s years in the wilderness in the mid-19th century, and its recovery under Benjamin Disraeli. You might just see some relevance to the challenges we face today, set out so well by David Cameron in his speech on Monday …

…Disraeli saw as clearly as any Tory squire what was wrong with the brutal market economics of the Manchester school. And of course he himself flirted with all the medievalist hostility to modernity in the culture around him. But he escaped from mere nostalgia for a rural past: he turned this into a programme for tackling social conditions in Britain’s major cities. He made the elevation of the condition of the people the great Conservative battle cry. He meant by this first the inclusion of the working classes within the pail of the constitution. But he went further to mean active social reform.

By: Don Arthur

Don Arthur — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 21:41:24 +0000

I’m guessing that David Cameron won’t actually mention Toynbee by name.

By: Jason Soon

Jason Soon — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 21:40:03 +0000

Aha!

I wrote a piece on this at Catallaxy before the Great Server Crash where I made the point that the Tory party had moved from Gladstone to Disraeli based on a speech of David Cameron’s that I dissected. And I was getting pilloried from pillar to post for over-intellectuallising a mere speech.

And here I see someone from the Tory party actually mentions Disraeli.

Thank you, Don.

By: Andrew Norton

Andrew Norton — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 20:39:01 +0000

“Blogger Chris Dillow asks, “of the countless intelligent egalitarians he could have mentioned, why her? Why not invoke instead, say, John Rawls.”

Maybe because lots of people have heard of Polly and few people have heard of Rawls?

By: Nicholas Gruen

Nicholas Gruen — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 13:31:39 +0000

A classic example of ‘the power of one’. One leader, one party or whatever. The Thatcher, Howard, Hawke, Keating, and Blair Governments – all had massive impacts on what was perceived as the ‘centre’ of politics. They dictated where the debate was. Personally I prefer where Blair’s taken things (Iraq excluded) to where Howard has. (Actually Howard hasn’t taken us anywhere much in terms of policy because he doesn’t care for it much. But he’s taken us a long way culturally, and a long way into a policy vacuum where there’s no real momentum to government policy and the agenda rolls along without much foresight or even real commitment to getting a bit of good policy done – subject of course to the realities of politics).