Not to be outdone by the competition, David Cameron has lost his TED-talk virginity (Brown spoke last year). In a speech on his Big Idea of ‘people power’ Cameron seemed to be quoting from Citizen Renaissance saying “It is a post-bureaucratic age and the citizen/consumer is in charge”.
Developing the theme of his Big Idea, he spoke of helping people work out ways to be happy with less money. Returning to his progressive wellbeing-economics form of two years ago, he backed the Sarkozy findings on GDP and growth and said he planned to work with the French President if he gets into power.
He cited Daniel Kahneman and behavioural economics and remarked that more money – beyond a certain point achieved by most in the UK – brings no extra happiness. But then it all seemed to come unstuck when he went seriously off-piste saying “the real problem with inequity is between the bottom and the middle, rather than to worry too much about who’s making money at the very top”. As the Observer said of this, “If Cameron really believed in ‘enhancing the quality of people’s lives’ he’d find a way of harnessing this excess money rather than his current grand plan; dreaming up new ways of slashing public services”.
Indeed if Cameron had taken a closer look at wellbeing he would find that the uber-wealthy actually reduce the wellbeing of all the rest of us. They lock society into a keep-up-with-the-Jones’s hedonic treadmill in which we (and the planet) all lose out. The lesson here is you can’t pick and chose the bits of wellbeing theory you like and leave those you don’t. If Cameron wants a compassionate, progressive and innovative wellbeing/flourishing vision and narrative then he will have to buy the whole package or walk away.
Cameron’s ‘Compassionate’ Conservativism seems to come off the rails somewhat rather too easily. It seems he might want to tune in to ideas like Citizen Renaissance and Nudge but that he fails to grasp or be willing to grasp the reality of the thesis. When we live in a world of growing inequality and clear evidence that wealthy brings no extra wellbeing, it seems both immoral and myopic to miss the glaring truth that progressive taxation has a key role to play in improving the wellbeing of all.
We have said before Cameron is in search of a Big Idea and this still seems true. In December 2009 James Forsyth echoed this in The Spectator saying, “the Tories lack a central compelling message, despite having a well-developed policy portfolio”.
In an attempt to wash away the Thatcherite ‘nasty party’ epithet, Cameron has in the past nodded towards the Big Idea of wellbeing-economics and “there is such a thing as society”, but soon let the concepts slip back into the shadows. In this one speech he seems to have done the same thing. It’s also notable that this week’s ‘Never Voted Tory Before?’ campaign has zero mention of sustainability, climate change, energy security or wellbeing. Clearly these issues have fallen well off the party’s agenda and vision.
In a thoughtful recent New Statesman article, Dominic Sandbrook berated the politics of our age saying that above all, “one thing is missing, perhaps the most important thing of all: the big idea…there is little evidence that the general public has lost its appetite for big ideas”. And of Cameron he said “it is almost impossible to discern any genuine ideological vision behind the tree-hugging photo ops. There is no sense, for instance, of him being informed by perhaps the only genuinely innovative political idea of the past few years, Phillip Blond’s ‘Red Toryism’, which calls for a decentralised conservatism breaking with laissez-faire capitalism and favouring traditional values, local communities and small businesses”.
Ironically, whilst the themes of ‘death’ and ‘duty’ are said to be watchwords for Brown it seems ‘death duty’ is still uncomfortable ground for Tory politics. Last week the party had to recall posters sent out with ‘RIP-OFF’ and ‘Now Gordon wants £20,000 when you die’ emblazoned across them. This seems out of touch with both the ‘compassionate’ theme and with voters, 81% of whom want more money spent on health and 60% of whom still think Government has a role to reduce the gap between rich and poor. As Andrew Grice says of public views in the 1990’s and beyond in the Independent on 30th January 2010, “The country never really bought shares in Thatcherism and demand for higher spending and redistribution of wealth grew”.
As Andrew Rawnsley said of Cameron in The Observer this weekend “David Cameron himself is not always a consistent Cameronite. When projecting himself as a compassionate, centrist Conservative, he promises to protect the budgets for the health service and overseas aid while expressing an interest in tackling poverty and inequality. Wearing the face of the traditional Tory, he sticks with the policy to make cuts to inheritance tax which would be of most value to millionaires”.
Phillip Bond and I plan to look at these issues in a report for Phillip’s ResPublica. In the meantime here is one Millionaire that perhaps Cameron should listen to.
