Compassionate conservatism's finest hour

Just read today's Guardian, which leads with Conservative MP Greg Clark's calls to modernise the Tories' 'Churchillian' approach to the Welfare state. In a policy paper set to be endorsed by Tory Leader David Cameron on Friday, Clark, a shadow minister focusing on poverty within the Conservatives' comprehensive policy review, labels increases in relative poverty in the 1980s a 'terrible mistake'. By the early 1990s Britain's Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, stood at a record high of over 35%, having risen from under 28% in 1984. This mooted shift in Tory social policy is the latest attempt of the reinvigorated Conservative Party under Cameron to claim at least the language of the centre ground, following celebrated posturings as champions of the environment and the NHS.

Do such manoeuvrings merely signal the continued convergence of the main British political parties towards a supposed 'centre-ground'? If one looks at the purported goals of the parties, than perhaps the answer is yes - but that is no bad thing. For as Greg Clark himself said, 'poverty is too important an issue to leave to the Labour Party', and the same could be said of the environment or indeed the nation's health. That there is substantial agreement on what the goals of politics should be facilitates rather than hinders an active debate on how to achieve them. For now the Tories have woken up to the areas of social policy which left them looking an aloof elite, we can for the first time hear how an instictively small-government party would approach traditionally big-government topics. After all, the Gini coefficient rose during the present Labour government's first term in office before its recent fall. The appetite for concrete Conservative policy is whetted more than ever.