Dont Rag On Britains Tories - Road to the Middle Class

Much of the Tories’ "modern conservatism" consists of reassuring voters about what it won’t do. It won’t dismantle a failing national health-care system. It won’t disavow failing public schools. It won’t resist higher tax rates on the "rich." Beyond this bold agreement with the status quo, the party has refused to articulate its own agenda, lest any part go down badly with voters.

Well, OK. But the Tories have promised to bring in a version of the Swedish school-choice system, which lets almost anyone set up a school and get government money. That’s pretty radical in my book. And they have promised to do something about welfare, because it destroys families in so-called “sink estates,” the British equivalent of public housing.

But beyond that, Britain isn’t the United States. It doesn’t have a conservative movement.

Look at it this way. After eleven years of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and New Labour, there still isn’t a grass-roots anti-Labour movement in Britain. Everyone is as mad as hell, but nobody has done anything about it.

In the US, the Tea Party movement got off the ground within a month of the inauguration of President Obama. Candidate Obama was careful not to frighten the horses when running for election. But ever since the election he has been demonstrating that he intends to implement everything dear to the hearts of liberals.

If you were a politician, the difference would really drive your political strategy. In the center-right US the problem for conservative politicians is how to keep the conservative movement from scaring the moderate women into the arms of the nanny state. In Britain, where there are two center-left parties, the problem is how to win elections in a center-left country with a center-right political party.

American conservatives can learn a lot from British Conservatives. The Brits have done quite a lot of work on necessary reforms to the welfare state (excluding, admittedly, the untouchable National Health Service). Their education proposal is more radical than anything proposed in the US.

But in the US we have a movement, a genuine conservative movement, that seems to refresh itself at every dip in the political cycle since its emergence in the 1960s.

The British Tories should be so lucky.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.