Finkelstein says that the "simple case for modernising" is that the Conservatives were crushed in 1997, 2001 and 2005. "The basis for modernisation was crushing defeat, underpinned by a long term decline. The basis is social change and political change that require a proper response...I am continually astonished by those who believe that essentially repeating the strategies employed in three monumental, terrible, dreadful defeats can possibly be a solution for the Tories."
I think Finkelstein is badly wrong here, in two ways. One is not deeply important, but is worth noting. The other is crucial. I shall explain...
Before I get into this, I want to note that I was absolutely, 100% in favour of changing our approach after 2005 (as I was after 2001 and 1997). In my view the serious debate was never about whether we should change, but instead how. The Editor says it was about the "nature of modernisation". I know what he means, though I don't think that's a particularly good way to put things. Not all positive change is properly described as "modernising". Be that as it may, I'm not interested in a semantic debate on this occasion, so let's just concede for now that we can call what I was in favour of "modernisation" (or perhaps, to distinguish the sort I favoured from the sort Finkelstein favoured, we should call it "modernisation*").
The first thing to note is that I consider it by no means obvious that our platforms of 2001 and 2005 - platforms with which I disagreed in many ways and which I certainly wanted to change after 2005 - would be doing any worse in the polls now than is the Cameroon platform that Finkelstein favours. Finkelstein writes as if voter opinions never change. He says: "At the last three elections Janet Daley and I both voted Tory. But it wasn't enough. Nowhere near enough. Next time the Tories need the support of people who voted Labour in all those elections....And to do that, the Tories have to make what Janet regards as slightly awkward compromises in order that she and I be joined at the polls by other people."
That is just wrong, Daniel. It simply isn't true that one must change one's argument in order to attract people that didn't vote for one last time. Another way to go, another possible route to victory, if one believes one is right, would be to continue to argue exactly the same thing and to be proven right by events, with the voters persuaded of the correctness of one's view. The voters can come to you. It is not obviously necessary that one must make "slightly awkward compromises" in order to be joined at the polls by them.
If the Conservatives had argued consistently that spending was too high and should have been reduced, and that Brown's public services reforms were failing and would swallow vast amounts of money with little real return, and that even though matters looked okay for now there was trouble around the corner, then such a platform - unattractive in the good times - might reap its rewards in tough times as one seemed to be vindicated by events.
In contrast, an approach of compromise, accepting the ground of one's opponents, promising to match Labour's spending plans, moving the debate away from economic topics and on to good time issues such as the environment or issues of human sexuality, just looks like a brute strategic mistake when the economy does indeed go bad and one has simply missed the opportunity to be vindicated by events.
That's point 1, Daniel. There's every chance that Hague's or Howard's platforms would be doing better, not worse, now. And in the Party those that favoured those platforms know it. They just don't agree with you that they would be unelectable now, even if they were indeed unelectable before. All modernisers (including modernisers*) should acknowledge this.
But it's only a small point. Because the key reason for changing ("modernising", if you must say that) was not that it made us more electable. It was that it made us worthy of being elected.
Now to the second, much more important point. This second point is about another group of your opponents that don't agree that they are unelectable: the set of people that represent the intellectual core of the Party (a group with whom I suspect Janet Daley is aligned). You write as if all of those that disagree with you have had their chance at an election platform and lost. But that isn't right at all. Almost as soon as the 1997 Election was over, the centre of the Party attempted to distance itself from its intellectuals. Virtually none of the policies of the Party in 2001 or 2005 were things that the intellectual core of the Party favoured. Consider the overall positioning. The intellectual core of the Party was both socially and economically liberal. The Party's policy at both elections was both socially and economically conservative. (Particularly economically conservative, in the sense of seeking to change very little about the way things were done.)
After 1997, the Party centre's constant paranoia was that it would go the way of the Labour Party in 1980. The result was all kinds of incoherence, and that the intellectual core of the Party never got to test its platform. The intellectual wing of the Party favoured a platform combining social liberalism and Euroscepticism with radical market-based reform of public services to serve the interests of the poor and those on modest incomes. So, where was the election at which we proposed to divorce the funding of health services from the supply of heath services? When was it that we offered these fully-tranferable education vouchers that could be used in the private sector? When did we argue for additional privatisation of anything? When did we say we favoured a two-tier approach to maintaining our membership of the EU? When did we argue for radical reductions in the scope of welfare, or the creation of a fully funded state pension (after 1997 itself - when it was by far our best policy)? When did we argue for our own measures to correct Labour's mess of the British constitution? More straightforwardly, when was it that we made radical market-based reform of public services to serve the interests of the poor and those on modest incomes the basis of our offering (as opposed to some small measures of this sort being felt obligatory-but-embarrassing and hidden away on page 57 of a document devoted mainly to immigration)?
I don't list these cases to contend that we should favour them now. My point is different. After 1983, the Labour Party's intellectual wing had had its go, had got to argue for the policies and positioning that it had always wanted, and proven itself utterly unelectable. That gave Blairite "modernising" an internal legitimacy/inevitability that Cameroon "modernising" has never had (and never will have). For the Conservative Party's intellectual core has had no election at which it got to argue for what it wanted and proved to itself that that couldn't win. We did not collectively feel that we were remotely arguing for what we really believed in in 2001 and 2005. Did you think we did, Daniel?
Virtually no-one else does. At the 2001 and 2005 elections the Conservative Party's intellectual core was told that it had to shut up and not make trouble because the powers that be knew how to win elections - that baseball caps and "Save the Pound" and "How would you feel if a Ukrainian asylum-seeker raped your daughter?" were much better ways to win elections than were arguing that radical market-based reform of the public services would serve the true interests of the poor. And we shut up and behaved ourselves. And the result was a disaster.
We never got to try our thing and we don't accept that we are unelectable. [PS - Please let's avoid painting this position as "The problem in 2001 and 2005 was that we weren't right wing enough." I don't accept for a moment that it's more right-wing to want to reform public services than to obsess about asylum-seekers and gypsies.]
That doesn't mean we don't want you and your thing to win - it's a darned sight better than Labour. But don't preach to us about unelectability. The Party's strategists have, over the past fifteen years, consistently been gratuitously abusive about how crazy they suggested the members were and how lunatic the intellectuals were, whilst getting just about every strategic call wrong. With the slightest bit of luck, even though they've clearly got the big call wrong again over the past five years - pretending to be the new Blairites as a cover for introducing neo-Burkean reform might have worked well if there had been an election in 2006; in 2010 it's just manifestly a bad call, and the fact that they can't see or accept that is not to their credit - even though they've got it wrong, Brown's epic errors will surely be punished and we will surely win with a large majority. But that's the country's luck, not the modernisers' good judgement.
