I listened to Gordon Brown’s first Prime Minister’s Questions as actual Prime Minister yesterday. If you put the substance of the “debate” aside (as the laws of contemporary British journalism require all commentators to do) then David Cameron made Gordon Brown sound a bit rickety. The good thing for our democracy is that, before most people made this judgment, they had to put rather more substance aside than is usually the case with PMQs.
But the challenge for a Conservative Party wanting to win the next election is much bigger than helping Cameron to claim Oxford Union-style debating victories. Many Conservatives are prepared to discard some of their beliefs if Cameron can lead them to victory. But Cameron doesn’t believe in anything. Despite our slightly different backgrounds, I can sympathize with Cameron on this. “Political science” is an oxymoron so I’ve acquired my views in this area by a process of elimination, starting with the things that are superficially appealing, but provably and obviously wrong—like Marxism or Objectivism—and moving onto subtler kinds of wrongness like multiculturalism and more elegant kinds of wrongness like monetarism. I’m not left with much, but I’m happy to fight for it.
Cameron is however handicapped beyond lacking philosophical commitment or philosophies to commit to: despite his debating tricks, he can’t even make a convincing case in the abstract, because he’s neither a swot nor a thinker. He can’t be bothered with the boring factual details and he can’t be bothered with that difficult argumentation stuff. Tim Worstall outlines a neat example today as reported in The Times:
David Cameron yesterday offered the music industry a unique deal—cut the glorification of materialism, misogyny and guns in hits and the next Conservative government would back an extension of the copyright on sound recordings from the current 50-year period to 70 years.
What’s happened here is embarrassingly obvious: Cameron has started with two lobbies: the music industry, which wants more money for old rope—and would be an excellent source of rich, glamorous, and stupid party donors; and the Mary Whitehouse brigade, which wants to stop people swearing and singing about sex, drugs, and violence on gramophone records—and would be an excellent source of votes. His way of reconciling their apparently conflicting demands—PARENTAL ADVISORY stickers are outdone only by charity record status as in-store sales boosters—is to trade one for the other.
As Tim points out, Cameron seems to have reached his policy conclusion without attempting to accumulate any relevant data or use them to draw logical conclusions. It is a triumph of political matter over mind. It’s the only kind of triumph he’ll be able to claim between now and the ever-faster approaching day when the Tories ditch him. And they’ll ditch him because he has strained so hard to be electable that he has become unelectable. Trying to sell the (wo)man in the street such simple old-fashioned bargains when the world has become rather more sophisticated will only keep you in business for so long. Just ask Fopp.
Couldn’t care less how little charisma they have as long as they come up with sensible laws/actions, or if they can’t do that, do nothing at all. Best PM we ever had was Alec Douglas Home, he did absolutely nothing that I can recall, he must have been good.
Cameron is totally blithering and if he is not careful will find he has lost all the once Tory voters without actually appealing to enough Lib/Labour/apathetic ones. Voters don’t want extremists but it really makes no sense to go for the middle ground when the other parties are already there. GB is starting to SOUND ok, however, this is the chap who kept promising to cut red tape while doubling the complexity of the tax system so I don’t believe a word of it.
PS Can’t quite see that cutting mysogyny and violence equates to MW. The evil old witch was notorious for having no sense of proportion and being more obsessed about the odd flash of tit than violence. Blithering would be quite right to curb some of the violent stuff in my view.
Shame about Fopp. Interesting for Rough Trade, too. I saw an article recently about how RT were flying in the face of reason by setting up a bricks and mortar record shop. One of their justifications was the success of Fopp, which, they said, showed that a record shop is still viable. I’d love them to succeed (especially since their new shop will be close to where I work), but I fear that Fopp is showing the way.
RT also claim that people will pay for expert staff. I would if I was buying a bicycle or a car, but as far as music goes I can be as much of an expert as the staff.
What? This post was about Dave? Hmmm … Boris for Mayor!
I know what you say about Cameron is true, but I really don’t think that such buffoonery makes him unelectable. He is an electable buffoon, and that makes him more electable than an unelectable non-buffoon.
Strictly speaking, I’m the kind of chap whose vote should be guaranteed for the Conservative Party, yet I’d not vote for Cameron in a million years. Then again, I’m facing a lifetime of electoral disappointment. I like people like this to be in leadership positions.
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