I'm not the first commentator to remark the the Conservatives post-Blackpool have started to demonstrate a real appetite for ideas - and a much greater confidence in talking about their ideas. Today at a seminar co-hosted by the Centre for Policy Studies, exploring 'the role of the state in the post-bureaucratic age', the Party showed this confidence, which I hope will prove infectious. Our key speaker was David Cameron, taking up the narrative which he first explored in his speech to the Google Zeitgeist conference about the failures of the bureaucratic age and the new, more limited role for the state in the modern era - an era in which individuals expect to have much more freedom and control over their own lives and are no longer content to accept what the state tells them they should have.
More than half of the Shadow Cabinet also spoke, many of them with evident enthusiam for de-centralisation, handing power back to individuals and communities, and finding practical solutions to the problems created by top-down government. Nick Herbert's session stood out, both for Nick's compelling analysis and Grant Shapps' pithy contribution; Caroline Spelman raised the key question of how, in a de-centralised state, do you respond to the pressure on government to guarantee minimum outcomes? In fact, the seminar asked more questions than it could attempt to answer, but was none the worse for that - because the intellectual drive which ran through those questions showed a new seriousness about the power of ideas. Let's have more of it.
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