To Battersea Power Station for the launch of the manifesto.
If you squint, you can see the Tory battle buses in the middle under the cranes… It was all relatively flat after the booing at the Labour launch yesterday – everyone on best behaviour. It was Prime Ministerial, it was serious, it was focused.
The Little Blue Book of the Big Idea is a lovely thing to look at. But we’re not in a design competition; we’re in the business of thinking about how our country can work better. I’ll go into the details of the manifesto later (though I don’t think there are any policies we didn’t know about) but the point of it is that today’s Conservatives are ready to win power in order to hand it back to the people.
Emblematic of this new approach was the very presentation of the manifesto. Inviting people to join the government is a masterstroke – the best way to encourage people to take part is to persuade not to force them. I’ve been skipping between news channels this evening, and there’s a definite curiosity in the reaction vox pops. Some people are against the idea of handing power back because they think it’s the government’s job to deliver everything; some are against it because they think it’s likely to lead to divisions between people; some are against it because they don’t think anyone will bother. But there are plenty of people who – even now, even with all the stultifying barriers to doing any of this that currently exist – want to work together to make their lives better.
What is key to understanding how this will work, though, is that underpinning all of this is a radically different approach. Channel 4′s Gary Gibbon asked a great question at the launch about whether people would really abandon their telly and their garden – David’s reply was one of the clearest expositions I’ve yet seen about why and how politics needs to change.
This is, in political terms, quite a risk. It would have been far easier to just sit back and let Labour flounder and collapse under the weight of their own problems. The changes that the Tory party has undertaken and the work that has been done on thinking through a coherent and radical programme to address the imbalances in our society have been vital to ensure that this is a long-term programme to start to fix the problems we have.
As I’ve argued before (though in completely different circumstances), institutions are what shape a nation. Our civic society used to be an incredibly strong and inventive third pillar in our country. But it’s been pushed around and crowded out by an over-mighty state and an over-mighty free-market. What the Conservatives are proposing is not laissez-faire (despite what Labour and the Lib Dems seem to think). It is nothing short of revolutionary in how it wants to enable and empower people.
Of course, like all manifestos and political promises, it is all only words at the moment. But given the chance, I think my prediction that a David Cameron government would be the most socially radical that any of us can remember might be able to come true.
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