‘This is not Ted Kennedy’s seat. This is the people’s seat.” And with those two sentences, Scott Brown started to overhaul Martha Coakley.
I don’t know enough about the ins and outs of the Massachusetts race which ended so spectacularly this week. But looking at recent UK and US elections and campaigns, something has become increasingly clear: if you’re asking people to vote for you, then you campaign for change and you make that change sound radical.
Of course hopefully then you actually deliver on what you promise.
Oliver Letwin summed up the underlying thinking behind Conservative pledges at the Conservative Intelligence conference yesterday: decentralisation, accountability and transparency. I would argue that he needed to acknowledge that the first priority is also saving money but to be fair to him he did say that all their policies are designed to cost no more in the short-term, and less in the long-term.
The Economist this week has a great article about why the rise of the size of the state is unpopular. It’s not so much about the cost, but more about the reach that the state has into our lives. This will be hard to reverse – it’s all very well saying you want the government to do less, but think about all those people who want ‘something to be done’ about their pet issue.
But reversed it must be. I have long-argued that the Conservatives want to win power in order to give it away. I’m not sure how seriously anyone takes that as a proposition. Certainly if I talk to people about the Tories’ approach to, for example, the environment or ‘big business’ or any of the other areas where there has been a significant shift in emphasis, they generally assume it’s all about political positioning and that all will return to business as usual if they are elected to government.
What I think is not widely understood is this: that the people who are writing policy in the party are deadly serious about Oliver’s three principles. They are deadly serious in what they say. Yes of course some of it is finely calibrated for political effect – they are politicians after all. But they know that the only way to achieve the fundamental change needed in how our poor battered society, economy and politics operates is to deliver on what they promise.
So they mean what they say. And they must do their utmost to deliver it.
Related posts:
Nye Bevan famously said that, “the purpose of getting power is to be able to give it away.” One of the most striking aspects of many elements of the Conservative platform is that we plan to give power away – to patients; to parents and to citizens generally. Technology makes this, and providing the information to empower the citizen, far easier than it was in the past.
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