Look What My Tory Did!

After recent moves to reposition themselves on the issue of poverty, it is hard to see what the latest Conservative online gimmick Sort-It, following on from the infamous WebCameron, is supposed to achieve. Describing the impulse to spend on credit as 'the tosser inside' manages to offend both traditional Conservative supporters who find the language repulsive, and younger voters to whom the message is supposed to appeal and persuade. They may have had considerable success in beginning to shake off the image of being the 'nasty' party, but they still have much further to go before their advice, which indeed addresses a very important issue in contemporary British society, looks anything other than opportunistic and patronising. Employing a Silvio Berlusconi look-alike to prance about in garish garb does not 'do something about' the problem of debt as Conservative Leader David Cameron claims - it is hard to see nearly enough young people first finding www.sort-it.co.uk and then being persuaded by it to make anything but the tiniest of dents in the short-term debt which holds them back - but rather succeeds in recasting the Tories in the image of paternalistic 19th Century politicians lecturing the working classes on the evils of drink.

The third postulate of special relativity

As expected, Conservative Leader David Cameron today highlighted the Tories' shifting attitude to poverty - now seen as relative rather than merely absolute - and even suggested some of the potential outlines for the relevant eventual Tory policies. Cameron argued that the Conservatives needed to 'stop treating poverty as an issue for government, and start treating it as an issue for society'. Borrowing the traditional language of Labour, he called for 'an element of redistribution' in economic policy, but his main emphasis was on tackling the issue at its supposed roots, such as mental health problems and drug addiction. This heralded the latest in a trend across the political spectrum to call on the 'Third Sector' - voluntary organisations and social enterprises which comprise that part of society which neither falls within the 'public' or 'private' sectors (and are supposedly better placed than either to meet some of society's needs) - to play a greater role in addressing these factors. But of course, the wait continues for what exactly such Tory policies will entail.

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.