Med Labours beslutning om at holde fast i juggernauten Gordon Brown, tyder det meste på en sejr for de britiske konservative ved dette års parlamentsvalg. I så fald bliver Tory-partilederen David Cameron den næste premierminister. Men hvad er hans ideologiske observans egentlig? Er han en Thatcherite i fåreklæder? En “compassionate conservative”? Noget helt tredje? Det altid læsværdige britiske Tory-ugemagasin The Spectator siger i denne uge i en artikel: “None of the above”. Inderst inde består Camerons politiske filosofi af … ingenting (stort set):
“Once more, search parties are being sent out to look for David Cameron’s big idea. They will return empty-handed. For the truth is that there is no big idea. However much social responsibility, the post-bureaucratic age or progressive conservatism might be talked up as the ‘big idea’, they are not it. Rather, they are a set of classic conservative insights updated for the 21st century. Cameron is not an ideologue but rather that very English, very Tory thing: a principled pragmatist. …
Baroness Thatcher was never as ideologically rigid a politician as legend has it. But she could still, as leader of the opposition, turn up to a meeting and slam a volume of Hayek down on the table and declare: ‘This is what we believe.’ Her convictions were strong enough for her to push through a radical budget in 1981 that outraged conventional opinion — so much so that 364 economists wrote to the Times to denounce it. She was at war with conventional wisdom. Cameron will have no equivalent intellectual driving force when he contemplates the emergency budget the Tories will have to deliver if they win power.
A Cameron premiership will be a test of the utility of traditional English conservatism. If its insights are not sufficient, Prime Minister Cameron, pragmatist that he is, will become more ideological. That is the paradox of his pragmatism. But if Cameron succeeds on his own terms, if he is the prime minister who guides Britain out of this new spiral of decline, there will not be a creed called ‘Cameronism’. To create an ‘ism’, you have to believe in ‘isms’.”
Og hvad skal man så synes om dét?