The British political scene wears an increasingly surreal aspect. If under Prime Minister Tony Blair the Labour Party has moved further to the right than would once have seemed conceivable, the Conservative Party led by David Cameron has begun to look improbably left-wing.
The assumption of a superficially leftist ethos by Cameron’s new-style Tory party was all but inevitable. For in its populist authoritarianism and pursuit of neoliberal economics, Blair’s New Labour Party has aped the Tory party fashioned by Margaret Thatcher to such an extent that it was only by appearing to strike out leftward that the Tories could hope to appear different. It was equally inevitable, perhaps, that the Tories would sooner or later find a leader who grasped how urgently they needed to rid themselves of their image as a party that was both uncaring and out of touch with today’s much-altered Britain. Cameron’s whole endeavor has been to persuade voters that his Tory party is new, dynamic and socially inclusive, one that bears no resemblance to the rump of aging Thatcherite “little Englanders” whose endlessly proclaimed hatred of the European Union did much to make the Tories unelectable during the past ten years. Like Blair, Cameron is acting on the dictum that while the right has won the economic argument, meaning the hegemony of the free market, the left long since won the cultural argument, meaning the triumph of the moral libertarianism bequeathed by the 1960s.
Cameron knows, however, that there is one totemic British public institution of which politicians can ill-afford to speak in connection with free markets. At last week’s Tory party conference, he made much of his party’s commitment to maintaining a publicly funded National Health Service (even if the reality is that key parts of the health service have already been irreversibly privatized). The father of a severely disabled child, he stressed that it was not so much that the NHS was safe in his hands as that his family is able to feel safe in the NHS’s hands. In the same speech, and to the unconcealed distaste of older party members, he emphasized that his was a party that blessed “civil partnerships”, marriages between homosexuals, and which positively celebrates the social diversity of 21st Century Britain. Here is the new-look Tory party: People-friendly, purged of nastiness and committed to remaking Britain as a country that feels good about itself.
Cameron’s efforts to re-invent and rebrand the Tories have been nothing if not energetic. With a background in public relations, the 39-year-old Tory leader was the ideal man for the job. A creature of the media times, he rapidly equipped himself with readily identifiable trademarks. Determined to upstage Tony Blair in terms of looking casual and approachable, he made a point from the outset of regularly appearing in public without a tie. He made a point, too, of cycling to work at the House of Commons, keen to portray himself as an environmentalist — an image subsequently spoiled when it transpired that his bicycle is routinely followed by an official car bearing his parliamentary papers. Now, Cameron has launched “Webcameron”, an Internet site on which he may be seen in his kitchen talking about politics even as he contends with the demands of modern “hands-on” fatherhood. By resorting to projecting his politics via the Internet Cameron apparently aspires to connect with Britain’s politically indifferent youth. He has even become associated with the bizarre catchphrase “hug a hoody”, “hoodies” being alienated and potentially violent young men who wear hooded jackets. Cameron’s Britain is a modern, caring, progressive country where no one need feel excluded.
Much if not all of this is fantasy politics. The novelist Will Self has memorably described Tony Blair as the political equivalent of an air guitarist and in Cameron the Tory party now boasts a professional air guitarist of its own, one whose riffs may be even more impressively theatrical but are every bit as unreal as those of the prime minister. For despite his pretensions to the contrary, Cameron is marketing a party that is perhaps less progressive and inclusive than was the Tory party of fifty years ago. Cameron himself was educated at that bastion of the British establishment, Eton, and so were no fewer than 15 of his shadow Cabinet colleagues. A Cameron government would represent the definitive reversal of the movement toward a less socially and economically divided society that Britain made during the middle years of the 20th Century; it would demonstrate that so far from being a meritocracy, Britain is so much in thrall to entrenched privilege still as to remain in many respects a feudal order, one where the many have not the slightest chance of competing on equal terms with the favored few. It is a measure perhaps of the decadence of British political debate that none of this is much remarked upon. The reaction by Cameron and his entourage to discussion of the blatant recrudescence of old-style Tory elitism is one of stifled yawns.
Their message, one that seems to be endorsed by much of the British media, is that at this hour of the day it really is rather boring to go on about that sort of thing. Those who protest against institutionalized inequality are seen as pathetic relics of a bygone era.
In terms of their disingenuous rhetoric and policies, there seems little to choose between Britain’s main two political parties, though Tony Blair’s circle is admittedly drawn much less from the higher social echelons than is that of David Cameron. Least of all are the parties distinguishable with regard to the “special relationship” with the United States, albeit that the shadow foreign secretary, the former Tory party leader William Hague, told this year’s Conservative Party conference that a Tory government would not follow the slavish attitude to the US of the Blair government. It has been a striking feature of both the Labour and Tory party conferences that they were addressed by guest US politicians, in the case of Labour by former President Bill Clinton, in the case of the Tories by the possible next Republican presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain, who talked up the Tory leader by making the ludicrous claim that in his youthfulness and vigor he recalled US President John F. Kennedy. It says much about the decline of British national self-respect that what would once have seemed extraordinary, the patronizing of the annual conferences of Britain’s leading parties by American politicians, no longer elicits comment; it is seen as something about which to feel flattered.
If the Tories are indistinguishable from New Labour in reflexively genuflecting to Washington, they are also hard to tell apart in their submissiveness toward Israel. Cameron has been studiously vague about many of his policies, but one of first acts on becoming Conservative leader was to address the Tory Friends of Israel group and affirm in unambiguous terms his party’s commitment to the security of the Jewish state. As it happens, Cameron is surrounded by Jewish Zionists, and just as Blair relied in no small measure on the Jewish Zionist businessmen, Lord Levy, as his chief fund-raiser, so Cameron is heavily dependant on Zionist backers. One of his own principal fund-raisers is the Jewish fashion industry tycoon, Andrew Feldman. For the moment, voters are chiefly aware of David Cameron as a genial figure who appears on chat shows.
Eager to ingratiate himself with the British public, he is not much given to discussing foreign policy — any more than was Tony Blair in the days when he was seeking office. What could prove damaging to Cameron, however, is that in adopting the trappings of Blairism, he has bought into a political brand that Blair’s foreign policy, with its Zionist bias, has played no small part in bankrupting. It could yet be the Liberal Democrats who benefit most from public disillusionment with Blair, with the result that there will be no clear-cut winner of the next British general election.
