What the Tories must do if they lose

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Sunder Katwala (London, Fabian Society): Moderator, we sent Sunder a brief description of a rude response to his important sweeping article on what the Conservatives should do now. Here is his response: Well, I wouldn't like it if I was them either. The question is what they have to do now. I find Tory commentators and bloggers tend to define adapting to modern Britain as being OK with civil partnerships or having a Muslim woman at the top table, but that is the easy bit.

I don't think there is anybody in the Conservative Party does not think we would be better off heading towards a state which takes 35% of GDP, and a different model of the NHS rather than a state sector which runs at 40-42% as now. Their great difficulty is that most still seem to think 'we are still fundamentally right, but the brand has got contaminated'. The Cameron speech today provides exactly that comfort for them. It is very hard for them to give up this idea of "less state = more freedom".

But, for all of the excitement of the conference they are not openly proposing to reduce the tax burden. So they are not facing up to themselves. This is what Labour finally managed, as I describe in my article, and what the Tories still have to do.

Recall that, though Margaret Thatcher placed a great deal of emphasis on this and shifted immensely the nature of the state and its distributional impact, she failed to roll it back or shrink it overall. Their problem is that Thatcher gave them an ideology that claims something different.

It is absurd for Tories, of all people, to say that not reducing the state sector is "too high a price to pay for power". Would Lord Salisbury or Winston Churchill ever have said such a thing? This is the kind of principle we on the left worry about. The point of conservatism is to be in power, for its own sake, and to stop anybody else from enjoying it.

Cameron, I think, is very much in that tradition. Perhaps it will take one more election but the logic of his position should be to offer a Scandinavian style accommodation with social democracy, and the chance to define a centre-right agenda within that constraint.

You can see this as a white flag. It would be a historic accommodation, like Churchill and Macmillan's acceptance of the mixed economy, welfare consensus and indeed role of the unions. Conservative conserve. They rarely get to turn the clock back. (Thatcher offers a beguiling counter-example, but it takes a crisis and she had the energy of the birth of ‘globalisation’.) Again, his speech offered this by implying that what was wrong is that Labour does not know how to run a society, even though it means well. This is not at all an attempt to overthrow the Labour approach. But the Conservatives remain unable to say this. I think it is the precondition of their winning a decisive election as Labour did in 1997.

If you lose four, you have to start to ask if you are getting something fundamentally wrong.

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