David Cameron annoys me; or, The gap between rhetoric and voting
Posted by Anna Bull on February 26th, 2007
To be fair, David Cameron would annoy me simply by being a Tory. But his pronouncements on family life last week managed to up the ante somewhat.
According to Cameron’s measured analysis, families are in ‘deep trouble’. . Luckily, he wants to help. Not for nothing is Cameron an ex-PR man. His rhetoric is impressive: “The first test of any policy is: does it help families?†“Let us have no more grandstanding about the exclusive importance of competitiveness in business.â€
I don’t believe his rhetoric. Conservative government is first and foremost about lower taxes and freer markets. In the words of Ulrich Beck, ‘the ultimate market society is a childless society’. The market makes no room for children, valuing only individuals as they can contribute to profit-making, requiring them to be mobile and committed to their employer. Is Cameron really renouncing the central tenet of Conservative government in favour of providing families with possibly a living wage?
Let’s have a look at his voting record: Against
- introduction of two weeks paid paternity leave
- extending maternity leave
- family friendly hours in parliament
- increasing maternity pay
- working tax credits and child tax credits
- the right to request flexible working
…and the list goes on. The rhetoric quite simply does not match the record. Why are people taken in by him?
On a lighter note, Frank Field MP has said in the Mail on Sunday that “Allowing Gordon Brown into No 10 would be like letting Mrs Rochester out of the attic.’ I like a man who knows his Bronte.
Filed under: davidcameron, ukpolitics on February 26th, 2007
Could I just ask would you oppose a Tory even if you agreed with their policies, or at least some of them, purely because of the political label that is attached to them? You make it sound like a pre-requisite for disliking them. If so does that not reflected a close-mindedness which Torys are themselves so often accused of possessing? Having said that I agree here that family rhetoric spinning out of the mouth of Cameron does come across as flimsy given the lack of policy behind it at present.
Combinations of the words ‘bones’ and ‘flesh’ have been in massive surplus since Cameron took over. As far as policy is concerned people seem to think he needs to put more flesh on the bones. More generally though he seems to need bones in the flesh. Most people, when talking about Cameron more generally, would agree - except of course for the Mail who got it all a bit wrong. I share the blogger’s worry that when it comes to hard promises these bones won’t be a very good fit for the flesh so far, maybe a bit like shoving wolf bones into sheep flesh… but that’s a whole different line of metaphor.
Anna, you just pre-empted my David Cameron post. Grrr…..
But good job.
Billy, first of all the Tories have very few explicit family-friendly policies, unless you count cutting back the child tax credits scheme which I certainly don’t agree with. They are trying to appear family friendly while keeping their market-driven wolf-clothes on underneath. (sorry Matthew stole your metaphor! but its a good one)
However even if they did have family friendly policies I would still oppose them as I object to their narrow and prescriptive definition of what a family is. By suggesting that one form of family is ‘normal’, all others are labelled as deviant. I don’t think our society can be in a position to discourage potential parents from bringing up children just because, for example, they are in a same-sex relationship, as we already have an ageing society and someone needs to bring home the bacon once we’re gibbering into our tea and muffins.
Sorry Liz - go ahead and do your post anyway, I’m sure you would have plenty of insightful things to say which I haven’t!
Just one thing. If you’ve we have a problem with an ageing society, you’re not going to improve demographic trends by encouraging same-sex marriages. Food for thought.
Haha. You’re quite right. What the world needs is more children! Or maybe higher levels of immigration from the developing to the developed world. I have no idea at all which I’d pick. And you’re just as totally correct on another point, if we didn’t let gay people marry each other, they would otherwise be off having babies somewhere!
hmmm Billy you might be shocked to hear that lesbians do have children!
So, rest assured, the ageing populations of the first world can be saved by lesbians and sperm donations. (unless there is another method I need enlightening on.) As for the dearth of family friendly policies in the Conservative party, the family flexible working hours policy, may show a lack of flesh to skeletal ratio, but doesn’t add up to your claim that the Conservatives don’t do family or children.
Writing off the Conservatives as “greedy capitalist market driven wolves” seems more a fantasy created to make the left feel morally virtuous than a reality. You seem deeply uneasy with free markets and profit making yet if I’m not mistaken this is precisely the model that New Labour has succesfully adopted from the previous Tory governments and which finds us today in the top 5 countries in the global GDP bracket. Would you rather we were grovelling to the IMF asking for economic bailing out a la 1970s?……
You seem to be caricaturing my argument. I didn’t say that right-wingers are greedy; on the contrary, while the left prefer for government social spending to be higher, the right (in the States at least) prefer to give more in philanthropy. It is the method I am questioning, not the moral. The issue I was pointing out is that the Tories are saying one thing and doing another.
Will, I’d be interested to hear your response to Matt Juden’s comment. Isn’t he right that legalising same-sex marriage should have no discernable impact on the number of children born, since gay people are still gay whether they get married or not?
And doesn’t that make the case for more immigration stronger still?
I’m afraid you’re guilty of propagating classic lefty bollocks. David Cameron is a Conservative. That means that when he sees something that could be improved he doesn’t instantly try to pass a law compelling people to do exactly what he wants them to. He uses persuasion, leads by example and generally treats people as adults.
Legislation is sometimes required but a wise politician uses it as a last resort.
“That means that when he sees something that could be improved he doesn’t instantly try to pass a law compelling people to do exactly what he wants them to.”
I wasn’t aware that was anything to do with being a Conservative. I think you’re probably trying to describe good government, something I’m absolutely certain the Conservatives have no monopoly on. And David Cameron is in Opposition, of course he won’t try and pass a law compelling people to do anything.
It certainly seems as though much of the criticism levelled at Cameron is some variant on the ’style over substance’ line. Sometimes the thrust of this is that he makes wooly pronouncements without any substantive policy to back them up, and sometimes the accusation is a more serious one of inconsistency.
As for the latter, which is kind of the thrust of this entry, I think it is worth remembering that there are lots of reasons why MPs will vote against legislation. Sometimes, of course, there will be a principled disagreement with the idea. Sometimes, party members are forced to vote in opposition to a motion by the whips (something which Cameron will have had to do before becoming leader). Sometimes they wish merely to register opposition to a rampaging government. Sometimes they may agree with the idea in principle, but be opposed to its proposed execution. Any of these could have motivated Cameron. While I agree that this is embarassing to him, I do not think it shows the kind of blatant inconsistency he is accused of. I don’t think I would cite Labour MPs’ websites as a particularly reliable source, either!
Furthermore, I don’t think it is totally impossible that he has changed some of his views over time. The Conservative party is undergoing a pretty painful centerisation (?) at the moment, and Cameron has realised that, just as the Labour party shed some of its more old fashioned mantras (the worst of the left: closed shop, clause 4, etc) in the earliy nineties, and adopted some new ones (the best of the right: market allocation, mentioned by Billy above), so his party has to do the same: drop its old fashioned right-wing dogma, and open its mind to some new ideas. There is still plenty of mileage in traditional Tory principles (of which family values has been one for a long time, by the way!), they just need to be pragmatically and effectively applied. Britain has a problem with an alienated and disaffected youth. I don’t, myself, have any difficulty with Cameron trying to solve it. I think he believes in what he says, and that we will certainly see the policies when the time is right.
Matt. legalising and encouraging same sex marriages are entirely different things. By all means legalise as they are. No-one was saying they shouldn’t exist. Merely that you can give financial tax incentives to mixed marriage families with children if you want to combat demographuc decline. Of course some would argue this is descrimination, IE. the social crusaders of the left. Rather you could vue it as an incentive to narrow the gap between imbalanced demographics. Governments have been doing it for centuries when faced with population problems such as in France or Russia. As for you immigration point. If I didn’t know you I might actually fall for that bait. To argue that you can rely purely on assimilating “immigrants” en-mass to plug the gap of an aeging society is a wholly irresponsible strategy to both the nations who win and lose migrants. You know that.
Will. You seem to have entirely missed my point. What I suggested was that noting at all to do with homosexual civil partnerships could have anything at all to do with the number of babies being born. Anna made things even worse for you by suggesting that, if anything, civil partnerships increase the number of babies being born by giving lesbians an extra stable environment into which to give birth to children. Gay people won’t happily trot off and get married to people of the opposite sex and have babies because you give them tax incentives. Nor will any kind of financial incentive somehow sway someone who’re just not quite sure whether to decide to be gay or not. This is just sillyness.
Whether you should incentivise straight people to do more concieving is quite another issue, as is immigration! In answer to your assertion, however, no, I don’t know that.
And if I can’t forget how to spell at 4am, when can I?