It’s hard not to like UK Conservative party leader David Cameron. On the face of it he’s a very nice man: clever, personable, young; an iPod-loving, soaps-watching Head Boy who appeals to grandmas and skateboarders alike.
Call-me-Dave smiles a lot, his wife is pretty, he makes all the right cuddly noises, he talks about caring and sharing and children and the internet and the NHS and his disabled son and is swiftly becoming what many of his antediluvian colleagues would call ‘the housewives choice’.
Under Cameron the outward, media-facing aspect of the Tories has changed drastically – these days they even have a British Asian (I’ll leave others to dispute which of those descriptors takes precedence) party vice-chair.
This and their more principled, dare we even say liberal, stands on torture and civil liberties have won them many admirers amongst the non-aligned and Labour-loathers alike, as have Cameron’s own carefully calibrated public statements on Blair’s Iraq excursion.
He’s good on his feet too: even I’ve caught myself egging him on against Blair at Prime Minister’s Question Time. (video)
So far, so according to plan:
Party bosses want people to recognise, approve of and ultimately buy the Cameron brand first.
They will then glue that branding all over the old Conservative Party and, so, transform it into something the public will like and vote for again. It’s called brand extension in the trade.
All this niceness and market manipulation has led the Tories to poll consistently higher than Labour when voters are asked which party they’d vote for in a Cameron v Brown contest, something that common wisdom would’ve formerly have dismissed. But apparently the Tories are no longer percieved as the Nasty Party – indeed they’ve become so nice that some of their more rabid shire Tories have decamped to UKIP.
But is there really change? Is Cuddly Dave just the palatable froth on top of the same old poisonous brew of Thatcherite free marketeers, neocon wannabes and bigoted Little Englanders as before?
In short, is Cameron lipstick on a pig?
Let’s look at foreign policy. The Tory party is as hawkish, belligerent and in thrall to the illusory ‘special relationship as they ever were. Doesn’t really square with the new emollient Cameron image, does it?
Tories back US action on Iran
By Colin Brown, Deputy Political Editor
Published: 10 January 2007
Liam Fox, the shadow Defence Secretary, has backed hawks in the White House by calling for “nothing to be ruled out” to stop Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon.
Mr Fox gave the clearest signal yet that the Conservatives would support military action, including the use of nuclear strikes by the US or Israel, to halt the alleged production of a nuclear weapon by Iran.
“I am a hawk on Iran,” said Mr Fox. “We should rule absolutely nothing out when it comes to Iran.
“They are notoriously good poker players and it is a very high stakes game they are playing.”
His remarks follow reports in the USthat Israel is ready to use nuclear “bunker buster” bombs to knock out the Iranian nuclear plants.
But let’s give Cuddly Dave the benefit of the doubt rather than immediately cry hypocrisy. Maybe Liam Fox is a just a loose cannon. Maybe the disconnect between public utterances and policy means Cameron has lost control over his his historically backstabbing party’s policy and shadow cabinet (if he ever had it) and they’re all going off half-cocked in the media.
But no. There is no disconnect on policy and no difference between Fox’ and Cameron’s foreign policy views.
Neoconnery is Conservative party policy and Cameron policy too according to Dr Brendan Simms of the Henry Jackson Society , who ought to know it when he sees it:
[…]
His close allies and contemporaries, the new shadow minister for housing, Michael Gove, his shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, and Ed Vaizey all describe themselves as neoconservatives.
The new shadow cabinet is a clear sign of the way the wind is blowing on foreign and security policy. Some Conservative leaning observers had wondered whether Cameron might resile to classic foreign-policy “realists”, such as the sometime foreign ministers Sir Malcolm Rifkind, and Lord Hurd. Both of them had strongly opposed the Iraq war. In fact, Cameron recalled the former conservative leader William Hague – who was and remains an unyielding supporter of the war – to the front bench as shadow foreign secretary. Rifkind thereupon resigned his shadow post as work and pensions secretary in a huff.
In terms of the American party-political spectrum, all this places Cameron well to the “right” of most Democrats and many Republicans, who have gone cold on the Iraq war, but well to the “left” of the President himself. The closest match with Cameron is probably Senator McCain, whose staunch support for the democratic transformation of Iraq, and principled stand against torture makes him the least bland of American politicians. By contrast, the Democratic mainstream, and even its left-liberal grass roots, is now firmly “realist” in its scepticism about the democratic transformation of the Middle East. This means that if the British Labour Party goes the way of the Democrats, which is by no means certain, the best hope for progressives in foreign policy on both sides of the Atlantic will be on the (party-political) right.
Anyone who votes Tory in the coming local, Scots and NI Assembly elections on the grounds that they’re not Labour and Cameron isn’t Brown is being wilfully blind. All the obfuscatory talk in the media – that the Conservatives have no policies yet, that Cameron is a nice man but an unknown quantity – it’s all PR spin meant to mask the Tories’ real agenda.
Cameron is no cipher. He’s a known quantity; a rightwing libertarian hawk who is committed to the same imperialistic, ‘freedom’-spreading principles as Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and all the other architects of the destruction of Iraq and promoters of worldwide cultural war.
Cameron’s not the lipstick on the pig, he’s the pig’s lips.
Read more: UK politics, Tory party, David Cameron, Local elections, Neocons, Middle East, Iraq, Iran
