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Cameron the New, All Too Bush-Like Tory Leader

Although his campaign has been criticised for being light on detail, supporters predict he will bring the same grit shown in deflecting questions about his drug use to championing the “modern compassionate conservatism” he believes in and bringing the Conservatives back to power. ~The Daily Telegraph So David Cameron has (yawn) won the Tory leadership […]

Although his campaign has been criticised for being light on detail, supporters predict he will bring the same grit shown in deflecting questions about his drug use to championing the “modern compassionate conservatism” he believes in and bringing the Conservatives back to power. ~The Daily Telegraph

So David Cameron has (yawn) won the Tory leadership contest. Not that anyone was surprised by the outcome. The reason for it could be as simple as the fact that this was his first leadership race, while Mr. Davis is at least a two-time also-ran (well, actually, he simply did not run against Howard, but would have lost if he had). David Davis was undoubtedly the more serious and philosophically conservative of the two contestants (if that can actually be said about anyone in the upper echelons of the Conservative Party), but as in the last two races the proponent of William Hague’s rehashed Bushian “compassionate conservatism” has won the day on the mistaken assumption that the Tories are failing because they do not “care” enough and do not have a sufficiently superficial style of government like Mr. Blair’s. Conservatives in America made that mistake in anointing Mr. Bush, and after some initial electoral successes the GOP and the conservative movement are caught in the death-grip of the most liberal and statist administration this side of FDR. There is an alternative direction the Tories could have gone, but it would require the Tories to reconnect with the public in a way that no one in the Party wishes to do. It would require them to make a live, central issue of the literally burning question of immigration. That alone would not save them, but it would make them more interesting to people in the North and in the major cities most affected by immigration. It is an open mockery of Toryism that the Tories have allowed themselves to be less credible as defenders of British identity than the BNP (British Nationalist Party), but that is exactly what has happened. They can continue, as they have just done, to cling to an establishment consensus view that immigration is an untouchable issue, and they will continue to lose general elections. They have no appeal for urban populations. Coming out for radical immigration and asylum reform could possibly change that.

However, the “hideously privileged” Etonian Mr. Cameron can no more really relate to the British voter than Mr. Bush can understand the real concerns of Middle Americans. In the democratic age the surefire way to hasten the growth of managerial government and strengthen elitist disdain for the people’s concerns about immigration and crime is to appoint upper-class men to leadership positions, where they can atone for all the guilt they have learned to feel for their privileged status. After their last three leaders, which included two nebbishes and one incompetent, the Tories needed to choose someone who both had and appeared to have conviction. Instead, they chose someone who adamantly avoids the question of whether he used drugs in his youth. Sound familiar, Republicans?

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