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  1. Politics
8 April 2013

Cameron’s vajazzling of the Tories is over. It’s back to being right-wing

The Conservatives' claim to be anything other than a predictably right-wing party is the real casualty of last week.

By Kevin Meagher

The net result of the past week is that something resembling a left/right binary seems to have resumed in British politics. Labour has launched a poster slamming the Conservatives for giving a generous tax cut to millionaires. The Tories have tried to tie the appalling case of Mick Philpott to a larger argument in favour of welfare cuts. 

For both parties, their tactics resound with voters. The Tories think they have tapped into a powerful public resentment at something-for-nothing welfarism, while Labour channels public distaste against the rich for not paying their share.

As is often the case, opinion polls show that both sides are on to something. But Tory strategists and commentators who think they have managed to lash Ed Miliband to Mick Philpott overstate their case. Liam Byrne’s sabre-rattling in yesterday’s Observer about enforcing a tougher contributory principle in the social security system, rewarding those who have paid into it, is easily understood by the public and leaves the Tories with the task of turning their bar-room rhetoric into policy. They are the government after all.

But Miliband’s enduring challenge in projecting his “one nation” politics is to bear the weight of public expectations – even ones the left doesn’t like – and carve out a new centre ground settlement around those concerns. Hence Labour’s decision to devote a recent party political broadcast to immigration. 

However, he needs to be quicker on his feet in doing so. Byrne’s intervention should have been made in last Sunday’s papers, before the Philpott judgement, not yesterday’s. (Despite spending the past 14 months doggedly making the case for the contributory principle, Byrne looks like he’s responding to events).

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Miliband needs to hold on to his base, marshalling the energy of those on the left who despise the government’s rampant inequality, without becoming framed by their outrage, which is simply not shared by most voters. He needs to be clearer that the Owen Jones’s of the left speak for themselves and not the Labour Party.

But the Tory claim to be anything other than a predictably right-wing party is the real casualty of last week. Cameron never fundamentally altered the nasty party, he simply vajazzled it. It exposes his deep flaws as a leader, a lack of strategic acumen and an inability to put in the spadework that real change demands.

The resurgence of one nation Toryism he initially promised (his huskies and hoodies agenda) has now been scuttled by the imperative of fending off UKIP and restoring equilibrium to his increasingly fractious backbenchers, as David Talbot noted on The Staggers the other day.

So talk of “the big society” has faded to a whisper. Measuring happiness is passé when your rhetoric is actively seeking to sow division. While, most damningly, claims that “we’re all in this together” ring even hollower in a week where a millionaire Tory Chancellor sought political advantage in the deaths of six children.

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