I like a speech with a new idea or two in it. They are rare beasts, and I don't expect such a treat even when the politicians I most admire speak. Nick Clegg inched in that direction on Wednesday.

His theme was the corrosive impact of (Labour's) politics of fear on the prospects for a progressive politics in the UK. Clegg suggested that

it is a doomed strategy, and will prove especially fatal to what is left of the progressive promise of New Labour. The politics of fear will drive Governments in an ever more regressive, illiberal direction exactly at a time when progressive parties need to think beyond the paradigm of the traditional “big state”.

I agree with this, but don't think it counts as new thinking. Indeed it is familiar rhetoric. Few people follow through and puts some flesh on the idea. Clegg doesn't either, but he does say (and I am compressing the quote enormously)

Liberals...believe radical decentralization is indispensable to the creation of empowered citizens, to the dispersal and accountability of political power itself.

Yet there remains a challenge for Liberals to define devolution in a way which is politically compelling.

This at least faces up to the problem that it is not enough to make speeches about localism, nor indeed to make proposals for localism: it needs to respond to the issues about which people feel strongly. This might just be an impossible constraint (although I hope it isn't).

I think the implicit argument here is that decentralisation does not simply mean a bigger role for local government.

The most interesting passage - and again I don't think it tremendously original in itself - is this

disengagement from the political process does not equate to an indifference to political issues: the environment, the Iraq war, international development, animal testing and many other emotive issues now engage people from a range of backgrounds, and ages, in unprecedented numbers.

I do not intend to rehearse here the point made by many others – most forcefully by the Power Inquiry earlier this year – that political parties need to change, or die.

In the Liberal Democrats, the emphasis on improving and updating how our party works has been a theme which our leader, Ming Campbell, has rightly championed from the moment he was elected as leader.

How we formulate policy, how we bring people into the party, how we nurture greater diversity in our candidates, the methods we use to communicate with the electorate, the techniques we use to campaign at election time.

All must be strengthened and revamped if we are to thrive in an age where party political allegiances are looser and more fickle.

The inevitable tension which exists between the preferences and prejudices of party members – of all parties – and the growing pressure for politicians to reach out to the vast bulk of the electorate who do not identify consistently with any single party will, I think, increase rather than decrease.

Political parties which speak only to themselves will be given short shrift by an impatient, sceptical electorate intolerant of party political niceties.

It is anathema to many Liberal Democrats to say that we should question our policy heritage. But if we don't we certainly risk the fate of 'speaking only to ourselves'. So I hope Clegg will put this speech into practice.

Conservative Home are asking for suggestions for questions for a survey of members' opinions of David Cameron's first year as Conservative Leader.

There are some interesting and amusing suggestions. Pick of the bunch:

Is David Cameron's left-leaning approach:

1. Courageous, because he risks his career upon so great a re-positioning of the Conservative Party;

2. Cowardly, because it is so clearly an attempt to offer Blairism without its current greatest liabilty, Blair himself; or

3. Simply opportunistic, and likely to change when focus group feedback tells him that a move to the right is advisable or necessary?

Is out

The next General Election might turn out to be a battle between liberalism and authority. But are we ready for it?

I've just added three links to articles in this morning's newspaper, which sum up the intellectual challenge we face. (As they are there, I'm going to dispense with hyperlinks in this post).

First up is Jasper Gerard from the Observer (the Observer suffers from having boring Rawnsley writing the big comment piece - Gerard has brought a fresh approach).

His morning rant starts with Murdoch, and concludes on a more challenging note:

we have the business, and politics, we deserve. We buy the Brown/Cameron consensus. And just as they don't want us to stand up to tycoons, they deny us control of public services. Hence the Tories embracing Polly 'Pol Pot' Toynbee as their eminence grise; for despite her laudable crusade against poverty, Toynbee, like Labour and the Tories, would give us the services the state decides we need. This attitude has left more than half our secondary schools failing. Yet who threatens to boycott the taxman until ministers spend hugely increased revenue more wisely?

Just as customers should use market muscle to keep companies ethical, so they need power to run schools and hospitals effectively.

That means giving them the choice to 'buy' health and education. Reflective politicos - Alan Milburn, Orange Book Liberals, David Davis, Tony Blair sometimes - realise this. But Brown, Cameron and their friends in big business would rather face a flipper from Shane Warne on a turning wicket than a questioning consumer. A barmy army suits them, but an intelligent one? Can we confound their cynicism? That is the real Test.

Personally I find the idea of choice interesting. The practicalities often look unattractive though. Our proposals in terms of allowing pupils to take different corses in different schools don't inspire me (partly the thought of all those bus trips). A system of allowing pupils to compete to take part in specialist courses at different locations strikes me as easier to organise and more effective.

William Keegan has, I sometimes think, been saying the same things and using the same photograph for the last quarter of a century. He has also been quoting Galbraith - but today I want to quote Keegan quoting Summers quoting Galbraith:

Summers invokes the wisdom of Galbraith declaring, 'In the US, the political pendulum is swinging left. The best parts of the progressive tradition do not oppose the market system; they improve on the outcomes.' He adds: 'Galbraith was right when he observed: "All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership".'

All of this is leading to Will Hutton's article on Cameron. Hutton once seemed to be simply a New Labour chorus girl, as far as I am concerned. My firend and colleague forced me to change my views with this article.

Today Hutton has been looking at Cameron's "leftward" drift. and what he finds is that Conservatism does not provide the intellectual tools for the job:

So to the nub of his problem. The intellectuals from whom he might borrow to give his intent some ballast - Amartya Sen or John Rawls - are liberal. Nor have Conservative intellectuals done the necessary spadework. In Britain, for example, liberal conservative journalist Simon Jenkins makes a good case for reasserting the local against the bureaucratic centre in his highly readable Thatcher & Sons, but how that might address, say, low birth weights eludes me.

Former chair of the Tory party, Maurice Saatchi, in a recent pamphlet vacuously praises 'the free and independent' individual and the Enlightenment ideology that inspired the American Declaration of Independence as the source of Conservative ideological renewal. Sadly for Saatchi, the Enlightenment emphasised enfranchising every citizens' capabilities along with his/her political rights.

If Tory intellectuals are broken reeds, the Conservative press and commentariat are largely unreconstructed Thatcherites pouring bile over what Cameron is trying to do. Conservative businessmen, in the most pro-business climate since the 19th century, in a mad depiction of reality imagine they have no defenders. Recreating liberal conservatism against this background is an uphill struggle; it may even be impossible.

It is a good argument - even if I don't agree with the lot of it. In fact I think Cameron is less liberal than Hutton imagines. There was in with all the rubbish of Thatcherism a small grain of liberalism in the idea that individuals mattered, and classes did not. Cameron has rejected even the little liberalism available to him in his party tradition. His project is not liberal conservatism but - if anything -tory paternalism.

And that is the dilemma of British politics. We need liberal solutions. Cameron hankers after some sort of liberal programme but comes from the wrong tradition. We come for the right tradition, but are shy of using them. Liberals, we have nothing to lose but our timidity...

Cameron's big argument is that he is popular - even if the Tory brand is looking worse for wear. His narrative has been that he is "new", popular with women, a change. There is something unlikely in this claim. Cameron seems to be the Tory from central casting. And he seems to have modelled himself on Blair . But the argument has impressed some of the press.

Let's start by saying that the Tories under Cameron are doing better than under Howard. On average they have been about 4% higher during 2006 than in the equivalent period in 2005. Anthony Wells has identified two points at which the Tory fortunes improved: the election of Cameron; and the relatively good, relatively well-spun Tory local election results. But when you are comparing the two years consider the other factors too.

Labour had a honeymoon period after the General Election. Many voters seemed to think they had been sufficiently punished by losing Hornsey and Wood Green, Cambridge, Manchester Withington, etc (to name a few random Labour losses).

Liberal Democrats managed to generate the occasional unfavourable headline between December 2005 and February 2006.

And Labour have suffered more from their cash/loans for peerages scandal than have the Tories. (It is the job of a Conservative Party to ensure rich men get honours. It should be the job of Labour to stop it happening.)

So you can ask yourself whether the Tories have done all that well in the cirucmstances. And my answer to that question - for some time now - is that Cameron has had a press to die for, but a more muted response from voters.

This is borne out by the MORI poll in the Observer this morning. The article comments that

David Cameron's satisfaction ratings among British voters have plummeted lower than Tony Blair's, a new Ipsos Mori poll reveals, raising fresh questions over whether his rebranding of the party has worked.

The article spells out just how profound the doubts are

The revelation that only 25 per cent of the electorate consider themselves 'satisfied' with Cameron's performance as leader of the opposition - rising only to 45 per cent among Tory voters, down from 60 per cent in February - will be a blow to his inner circle, given that it suggests a similar trajectory to his failed predecessors Howard, Iain Duncan Smith and William Hague. The most common reason for dissatisfaction was lack of clarity about his policies.

Damagingly, voters who previously approved of Cameron are now starting to turn against him, according to Mori founder Sir Robert Worcester. 'David Cameron's sliding satisfaction levels are comparable to his predecessors,' he said. 'Since his election as Tory leader, nearly all the "don't knows" who have made up their minds have decided they are dissatisfied with his performance. This month there has been a shift, and he is beginning to turn off those who had thought they were satisfied with the job he's been doing.

In recent weeks there has been much attention given to Cameron's apparent success among women. The main stimulus was the last Populus poll. This showed overall figures of Conservatives 36%, Labour 33%, and Liberal Democrats 20% - so a modest lead for the Tories. But the figure for female voters was much more striking: Conservatives 37%, Labour 31%, Liberal Democrats 20%.

So is Cameron attractive to women, or does he put men off? Anthony Wells went through the figures and suggested that it might be random:

if you look at the gender breaks in Populus’s polls there is no obvious pattern, it bounces up and down from month to month. Back in April the Conservative lead amognst women was also 6 points higher than amongst men, but come July the Tory lead was 8 points higher amongst men.

ICM’s gender splits don’t show a steady pattern either - in their October poll male and female voting intention was almost identical, but in their two previous polls the Conservative lead was far, far larger amongst men than women. In their last poll for the Sunday Telegraph the Conservatives had a 15 point lead amongst men and a 2 point lead amongst women. In their September poll for the Guardian though, the Conservative lead was 10 points higher amongst women.

He went on to suggest that YouGov's figures show a fairly steady gender gap. And Mike Smithson on Politicalbetting used this to conclude "the Tories have made almost no progress amongst men since November 2004 which should be worrying for the party."

I haven't much confidence in YouGov. It has shown a divergent pattern over the last year from the more authoriative converntional pollsters (ICM and Populus). There must be a possibility that its panel is either being infiltrated by the parties, or that simply being on the YouGov panel means that people pay more attention to politics than the rest of us.

And this latest poll also contradicts the view that Cameron has unlocked the female vote for the tories. MORI shows that "attempts to woo women and young people with initiatives such as promising tax relief on childcare, recruiting more female MPs or sympathising with hoodies appear to have failed, with the two per cent rise in Tory support since the general election - when Michael Howard was in charge - coming mostly from men and the middle-aged."

But Cameron is not a bloke's bloke. You can't picture him turning up in a white van to move out of Number 11 the way Kenneth Clarke did.

Don't take my word for it. We added a link to Tory blogger Ellee Seymour recently (ok, I know she's not a bloke). Here is what she says about Cameron

David Cameron now needs to focus on getting more votes from men, who may not buy his line about “hugging a hoodie”, however well intentioned it is. He needs to appear tougher and become a man’s man.

Amanda Platell took a similar line, arguing that

what is becoming increasingly clear is how utterly out of touch Cameron is with the harsh realities of life for millions of families in modern Britain.

Surrounded by a coterie of rich metrosexual advisers, the Old Etonian has proven yet again how staggeringly insulated from the real world his wealth, privilege and background have made him.

While we are the subject, this clip on Cameron the clothes horse won't have won over every White Van man. (It even seems his face counts against him with some people).

Labour bloggers at The Daily reckon that the isue is rather that Labour are losing female support.

Maybe Yougov are right, and Cameron is doing better among women than men, but the evidence that he holds a special attraction to voters (as opposed to sections of the press) is weak. And the Queen's Speech was a reminder that Cameron still tends to fluff the big occasions in the House of Commons. His reply to the budget was the shortest and most insubstantial reply in history. The television cameras captured a man ill at ease, turning to his own benches for support, and with his timing awry.

We are approaching the end of Cameron's first year. More and more people are going to be asking why Cameron is not doing better. At some point soon they are going to stop blaming his party, and start blaming him.

Being Cabinet Minister for Farmers (under varying titles) has not been a comfortable task for most of the people who have held the post since 1997. Margaret Beckett held the job between the General Election of 2001 and the local elections of 2006 - and had a softer ride than some of her predecessors.

This is not to say that she provided inspirational leadership. One sticky moment was provided by her appearance before the European Parliament in July 2005. A few weeks earlier, Blair had made a barnstorming speech to a plenary session of the Parliament, talking his way out of trouble, and raising expectations of reform of the Common Agricultural Policy. Beckett - scarcely a novice, with four years in the post - had nothing to say. This was sad news for those of us who have heard British Governments talk of the importance of CAP reform for the last few decades, and fondly imagined that it might have some plans to hand.

Let us be charitable though. It was still early to upset farmers after foot and mouth. And a reform was already on the way to implementation: the single farm payment,

This was supposed to replace a number of individual schemes (special beef premium, suckler cow premium, area aid schemes) and replace them with a single payment (essentially based on how much farmers used to get). This was billed as "breaking the link with production" (rather like the MacSharry reforms of the 1990s - indicating that they represented a further step in that direction).

The new reforms had been agreed in June 2003. England (not Wales nor Scotland) had opted for the most complex scheme (dynamic hybrid in the jargon...) and the shortest timescale (for the 2005 harvest). The combination of complexity and haste contributed to the RPAs failure to meet deadlines (a point Lib Dem MP Roger Williams has made in Parliament). A further problem was provided by the plan to combine the changeover to the new scheme with a drastic cut the manpower of the Rural Payments Agency, the executive agency responsible for paying farmers.

(This may turn out to be typical of Gershon targets: the aspiration to cut costs is is admirable, but the approach is often to introduce new IT systems. The UK public sector has rarely been successful in this).

The failure to set a minimum payment threshold meant that the RPA found itself having to hancle claims from another 14 000 "farmers". this increasd the number of beneficiareies to 116 474. Setting a minimum payment level of one hundred pounds might have reduced the number of claims by 16%.

Again, Lib Dem Rural Affairs spokesman Roger Williams has done his research:

“It’s staggering that the Government’s botched single payment scheme has resulted in a payment of just one pence. It cost infinitely more just to process this application. The faulty IT system alone cost £450 per claim! Why waste time on negligible claims when many farmers are still suffering from delays to payments that affect their livelihood? I’m not surprised Tony Blair told the new environment secretary the payment process must be 'improved'. David Miliband could start by ensuring plots of land the size of a postage stamp don’t get reimbursed for sums not worth the cost of the stamp."

So the failures in the implementation of this scheme (and as the NAO - in a report some see as less than transparent - point out, it was a massive failure) go right to the top.

Blogging Minister Milliband has not mentioned the issue on his blog for some reason. But he has made a statement in parliament expressing regret

I would like to reiterate the apologies I have offered to farmers on behalf of my Department, and my commitment to remedy the problems. Today I can report progress under the 2005 Scheme, and plans for the 2006 Scheme. But the interim Chief Executive of the RPA and I are clear that much more needs to be done to learn the right lessons from the NAO’s recent report and to build on helpful guidance I am sure we will see in the forthcoming reports from the EFRA Select Committee, Public Accounts Committee, Office of Government Commerce and the Hunter Review.

and a modest commitment

Everyone wants claims paid in full as soon as possible. I understand that and the new management of the RPA are dedicated to build stability and predictability into the system so that full claims are delivered in an efficient and timely way. However, the interim Chief Executive has reported to me that he can not guarantee that the Agency can deliver full payments within the payment window for the 2006 Scheme.

He perhaps understates the scale of the problem: farmers will need to be compensated for late payment, and there is a risk that the European Commission will claw back funds from the UK, both because the UK failed to pay farmers on time and because payment systems appear to be unsafe.

If the Commission has found the RPA a difficult body to do business with, some farmers seem to have found it a nightmare. The NAO report is full of tales of farmers asked to provide the same information three times to three different offices, or sent multiple and inaccurate maps of the fields for which they were claiming subsidy. When these were corrected and returned, the next version would - apparently - arrive showing the same errors as before. Even the guidance provided to help farmers through the bureaucratic maze seems to have been no good.

The language was very odd: it was written by someone who does not know about farming but knows about government processes.

There were words used there that were quite unnecessary. Caprine is an example. Why not put the word 'goat'?

(Farmer quoted by the NAO)

Farmers were paid late, often too little, sometimes too late. Yet some were quite forgiving. One large.scale arable farmer told the NAO that "everyone in farming says that it has been a complete farce. However we don't blame the RPA. they just took on too much. It is the people who set it up who should take the blame."

Who has taken the blame? Well the director of RPA was removed in March, but was still on full pay (more than a hundred grand per annum, since you're asking) when last heard. Milliband has not suffered - but he arrived late in the day. As to his predecessor, an inability to master a brief, think creatively and deal with international affairs (so evident in her meeting with the Agriculture Committee of the European Parliament) did not stop Blair promoting Beckett to become Foreign Secretary in May.

Farmers were probably relieved.

The first of our featured articles, from the New Statesman gives the latest rumours on loans-for-peerages. According to Martin Bright:

"Cash for honours, loans for peerages, or just plain old-fashioned political shenanigans? Call it what you like, the Labour Party's ill-conceived scheme to raise a fighting-fund for last year's election campaign has already proved disastrous. Even before Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Yates of Scotland Yard presents his findings to the Crown Prosecution Service, the party is broke, its activists are demoralised and its future is uncertain."

That much we knew, I suppose. But the insider gossip is apparently that:

party officials now believe the loans scheme was dreamt up at a meeting attended by Blair and a tiny group of trusted loyalists: possibly just Levy; Jonathan Powell, the chief of staff at No 10; and the then party general secretary Matt Carter.

But the Labour National Executive is said to have been briefed at an early stage.

"Labour future" means Brown, of course (It is hard to see John Reid running a sufficient number of terrorism scares to find himself running the country.) The Telegraph reports that

Mr Brown's first 100 days will be modelled on New Labour's blitz of policy announced after Tony Blair was swept to power in 1997.

Plans include moves to strengthen the role of Parliament, to clean up party funding after the "loans for peerages" affair, to reduce the powers of political advisers and to outflank David Cameron on the environment.

As a sign of what is to come, it emerged yesterday that air travellers and owners of petrol-guzzling cars will be targeted for sharp tax rises in Mr Brown's Pre-Budget Report next month.

Separately, details emerged from a No10 policy document of a new contract between the state and citizen setting out what individuals must do in return for key services.

"Once upon a time there was a very poor family. Everybody in the family was poor. The father was poor. The mother was poor. All the children were poor. The butler was poor. The maid was poor. The chauffeur was poor ... "

So began the apocryphal essay on Poverty by a pupil at Eton.

Talking of which, David Cameron was interviewed on Today on the subject of Poverty this morning. The new view is that the Conservatives should be concerned about relative poverty, in other words the gap between the richest and the poorest in oursociety. On the face of it such a volte face should be welcomed. Traditionally the Conservatives' attitude to poverty, when they considered it at all, was that they should only adress basic needs such as food and shelter.

But Cameron is a different sort of Conservative: a liberal, kinder, softer, rounder, fluffier Conservative. One that is concerned with making society more cohesive by reducing the gap between those doing the best and those at the bottom. Isn't he?

Well, no, actually, he isn't. There in the interview (around 6:13 in) we have the slip that lets us in on the truth:

"The inequality we should focus on is the gap between the bottom and the middle."

That must come as a tremendous comfort to Cameron himself and all his friends in the City.

Possibly it is less comforting to the shopkeepers, deputy headteachers, matrons, foremen etc that he is trying to attract back to his party.

Peter has written elsewhere of how Boris Johnson accuses Polly Toynbee of epic hypocrisy. We suggest that he and his colleagues first remove the planks from their own eyes before criticisng the mote in hers.

I have just added a piece that can't be seen from the title page.

I don´t know why - but it is here.

Sorry for the frivolity, but I can´t stop laughing since I heard about the Tories buying their "ideas" in bulk from Polly Toynbee.

The Telegraph has one of those affected Boris articles:

of course she is a hypocrite; but by their deeds shall ye know them! Never mind the rhetoric of her Guardian column. In her actions, Polly emerges as someone who cares about securing the best possible chances for her own children, and in that way she is bowing before the strongest and deepest conservative force of all, a great and immutable fact of human nature, a truth of biology and motherhood compared with which a thousand hypocritical Guardian columns are nothing but chaff.

Then there will be those who complain that it is hypocritical of Polly to have her lovely second home in Italy, to which she doubtless repairs on so many cheapo flights that she has personally quilted the earth in a tea-cosy of CO2; to which I say, yes, it probably is wrong of Polly to keep calling for higher taxes when that would put such opportunities – for air travel to second homes – beyond the reach of millions slightly less fortunate than her. But never mind the hypocrisy: look at the fundamental Tory behaviour. At least she's renting the villa out at pretty keen rates. Good on you, Polly! You can't buck the market, as Mrs Thatcher used to say.

OK, not so funny. But the comments are better

Of course, it's not hypocrisy to spout greener-than-green tree-hugging baloney one day, then fly off in one of those environment polluting planes to Spitbergen to be filmed being environmentally concerned and right-on; nor is it hypocrisy to cycle to work but have your butler (sorry, chauffeur) drive behind with your briefcase and suit; nor, indeed, is it hypocrisy to big it up in the party of the family and then behave in a way that undermines all notions of family values... Accusations of hypocrisy have a nasty habit of coming back to haunt you, Mr Johnson, because as someone once memorably said, he that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her...
Posted by Richard Sympson on November 23, 2006 9:19 AM...

I was privy to the conversation that led to this recent policy change

David Cameron: Listen Greg, we need to reach out and reconnect to our base. Go read the conservative leaning blogosphere and find out the name of the commentator they quote the most.

Greg Clark: Then what

DC: If they get quoted so often, that is a positive endorsement and we must adopt the policies without hesitation.

GC: Right David, we'll do it.

Posted by John on November 23, 2006 9:25 AM

Boris - if I wanted a hypocritical control-freak in charge, I'd vote for the master, a certain Mr T Blair. The Cameron tories may be trying to ape him, but they make for a pale immitation.
Posted by Stu on November 23, 2006 10:32 AM

From Boris Johnson's column:

"Polly is the high priestess of our paranoid, mollycoddled, risk-averse, airbagged, booster-seated culture of political correctness and 'elf 'n' safety fascism"

Regardless of ones thoughts on the necessity or wisdom of a legislative programme to enhance personal safety, I resent with some vigour the "'elf 'n' safety" quip. I dislike the movement as much as anyone else, but this Eton, floppy haired, affected, ineffective, chubby, cheating, caricatured poppinjay chooses to use class as a basis for his attack.

Ooh how hilarious, some people can't say their 'h'! Do you know, some of them don't even have nannies, and one or two aren't even Oxbridge. Can you imagine?

Every now and then, Boris' guard slips and he's revealed for what he is. An elitist snob with nothing even approaching self-awareness. Is he just a bumbling fool, one of the guys, as his media appearances would suggest? Or in reality is he nothing more that a conceited little doughball of mediocrity who has built a career out of a pencil sketch of some imagined past? I have a suspicion that I know the answer.

Posted by Allen Simpson on November 23, 2006 11:36 AM

What a merry jape by golly!
Are you one of the extraordinarily high number of Old Etonians on the Tory front bench? Just which 'highly selective school' did Ms Toynbee attend?

Elsewhere the Spine has an amusing article and great graphic.

The boy Clegg played a blinder. You can catch it here (starts about 8 minutes into the latest programme).

The weakness in this advice is the weakness in most advice about taking on opponents: it assumes the opponents are rubbish (" they have an extremely small 'core vote', something like 2% of the population...they have very little core vote...").

But it isn't all stupid, and it might be worth keeping an eye on it. Don't leave a comment to tell him where he has got it wrong though.