The Tories Are on the Right Path With David Cameron

The Tories Are on the Right Path With David Cameron (Wall Street Journal April, 22, 2009)

While I agree with Kimberley Strassel’s familiar proposition that it is incumbent governments that lose elections rather than loyal oppositions that win them (“The Tories Are No Example for the GOP,” Potomac Watch, April 10), to suggest that David Cameron’s Tories have not presented a coherent conservative case for government is highly inaccurate.

While many lesser opponents of Gordon Brown enjoy taking cheap shots at his government’s myriad policy failings, Mr. Cameron and his party have rather focused on the heavy lifting of developing a slew of detailed policy reforms, representing a manifesto as radical as any seen since Margaret Thatcher’s successful restructuring of the British economy (and beyond) in the early 1980s.

Mr. Cameron’s detailed policies include accelerated welfare reform (Britons who refuse to join a “welfare to work” program under the Tories will lose any right to claim a penny from the state), deregulation of charities whereby such voluntary groups, and not necessarily government, will deliver future public services. And, radically (for the U.K.), the Tories now insist on giving patients a choice of health-care provider, and on allowing local residents to hold referenda to vote down property taxes. Furthermore, Mr. Cameron has committed to increasing police powers of “stop and search” and has pledged to scrap Mr. Brown’s failed policy of early prisoner release. The fact that these solidly conservative reforms come alongside a deep policy interest in developing alternative energy sources (not least to increase Britain’s energy independence) is hardly philosophically incoherent as Ms. Strassel claims. In fact, I wish any political observer good luck in finding a more coherent, center-right manifesto, on either side of the Atlantic today.

As to whether or not the Tories are a model for today’s GOP, that’s a different question entirely. The very different electoral systems (and electorates) of the U.S. and the U.K. have always limited the transferability of manifestos. But good ideas are often in short supply — and so a dialogue between the Tories and all of their American friends should be welcomed as a means to improving future policy offerings on both sides of the Atlantic.

A. Sinclair Dunlop
Washington

(Mr. Dunlop is the Chairman of Conservatives Abroad, Washington.)

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