David Cameron gave a speech in Tooting, London on Monday, “Our Society, Your Life,” and the conservative press was unimpressed.
Cameron spoke of his political philosophy, the idea that there is such a thing as society, it is not the same as the state. The idea is one of social responsibility.
Social responsibility means that every time we see a problem, we don’t just ask what government can do. We ask what people can do, what society can do.
And he drew a dividing line between the Conservative Party and Gordon Brown’s Labour Party. “We believe in social responsibility, he believes in state control.”
That’s all fine and good, says The Daily Telegraph.
Mr Cameron’s philosophical generalisations are certainly compelling and could provide the basis for effective opposition, and the next few months will require specifics and the hard-headed resolve to defend them.
But are the specifics important, or is it the atmospherics? The nasty truth is that political parties win because the voters are ready to throw the other party out. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in the United States it was because the voters were utterly fed up with Jimmy Carter and they decided in the last week of the campaign that, despite the reputation Ronald Reagan had as a bomb-thrower and a flake, that they would give him their votes.
Maybe all David Cameron has to do to win the next election after 10 plus years of Labour is to seem like a safe pair of hands and let voter fatigue do the rest.
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