When they go, the coalition won’t be able to send back a coherent analysis of their policies. Despite the small-state rhetoric, today’s mid-term message from the prime minister and his deputy shows that the Big State lives on
Today’s a day for whistling a line or two from The Proclaimers' Letter from America in the ears of the prime minister and his best buddy, Nick: ‘But you know our sense of timing/We always wait too long.’ David Cameron does have a peculiar sense of timing.
It’s not just, as the cynics of Westminster’s press corps are saying, that he could have snuggled out news of the resignation of the Tory leader in the Lords last week, not letting it get in the way of the coalition relaunch. It’s the political clumsiness of – for example – going ahead with big cuts to child benefit before you set out your plans for childcare support. Or announcing your commitment to housebuilding and expanding the stock after you’ve earned opprobrium for chopping housing benefit.
All that, you might say, is a matter of political tactics, and the coalition hasn’t proven adept; Cameron simply hasn’t turned out to have the gift of timing that marks out successful prime ministers.
But does that matter if he grasps and successfully sells a bigger picture? We know what he thinks it is: shrinking the state or, as he prefers to put it, adjusting the size of the national household, mostly by cutting spending. So, does his mid-term message endorse that objective, reinforce what is his big story?
Not really. The narrative runs something like this. We’re in dire straits; to eliminate the ‘horrendous mess’ (the phrase was David Laws’, a token of his perhaps permanent alignment with the right), the coalition is having to make painful cuts to social spending. But we’re expanding childcare and increasing pension entitlements and – details yet to be released – we’re going to make it easier for demented dad to continue to live in the property the family dearly wants to inherit when he dies.
Those are, I do declare, spending commitments. They send a message, don’t they, about the state in one form or another retaining its role as support, guarantor and backstop? OK, the Tories and their coalition partners favour the haves (pensioners included) against the have-not (recipients of working-age benefits and their children) but that’s a message about distribution. It’s not a story about pushing government out of people’s lives, so creating the space in which (so Tory theory has it) enterprise and self-reliance will flourish.
Sir Steve Bubb tells us the Big Society is effectively dead (though I thought we’d seen the undertakers’ take the coffin to the grave many month ago). The mid-term message from Cameron and Clegg tells us the Big State lives.
Of course it’s paradoxical. Their cuts are vicious but these tales of new spending on roads and grannies can only encourage the mind-set the Tories were supposed to be altering – one that looks to government for succour and support. Confused? You’ve every reason to be.
David Walker is co-author with Polly Toynbee of Dogma and Disarray – Cameron at half time, published by Granta
