Has Martin Kettle been brainwashed by Andy Coulson?

By Derek Draper

In his Guardian column today, Martin Kettle adds credence to David Cameron’s claim to be “progressive”. Well, Martin, at the risk of being “tribal” (something I’m rather proud of actually) can I ask you to respond to the following:

Which party’s flagship inheritance tax policy involves giving £1billion on the richest 3000 estates in the country? Not, note, to Sure Start centres or education or health but, literally, the nation’s millionaires.

Which party says it is against child poverty but has not made the commitment to actually spend money to do anything about it? Indeed which party’s leader told us, in a rare slip from his script, that we’d “reached the end of the road” of redistribution?

Which party refuses to explain how it will be cutting planned funding for apprenticeships, charities and much else? And finally, which party’s soundbite admonishes Labour for not “mending the roof while the sun shines”?

Well, the money we’ve invested in education mended plenty of roofs in the many constituencies where not a single new school was built under the last Tory government and where many are new today.

In a way we should be pleased. The Tories tactical desperation to be seen as progressive is a tribute to New Labour’s success in changing the terms of political debate. They know they cannot win as the Tory party of yesteryear so they present themselves as something different. But I fear they flatter to deceive.

In his own Demos-supported attempt to paint the Tories as the party of fairness, George Osborne quoted approvingly from what he said was a key text. Was it Polly Toynbee’s excellent book on wealth? No, their wooing of Polly has served its purpose. George had gone back to quoting Freidrich Hayek and lauding free markets and the minimal state.

Yesterday, Cameron talked about “fairness”, “opportunity” being green and feeling safe. Wow! I remember when Mrs. Thatcher said, in 1979, “Tonight we drink champagne, tomorrow we have work to do rebuilding the inner cities”. Take out the environment and she could have uttered yesterday’s platitudes. Can’t you see what they’re trying to do Martin? I tell you, and you tell me if you disagree: Cameron and Osborne would have sat happily in a Thatcher cabinet and no-one, least of all them, would have even labelled them as wet.

That is the key point that should matter to progressives. Not warm words and clever positioning but the underlying, dare I say it, ideology. The Tories hide theirs with appealing talk of social responsibility, charitable action and “nudging”. Behind that mask, though, lurks a hostility to active government that, in office, would result in a “rolling back of the state” just as comprehensive – and damaging – as that undertaken by Mrs. Thatcher, as Liam Byrne outlined here yesterday.

Now, Labour needs to make sure the state is sharper, smarter and more responsive. That is the vision that lies behind our reforms to the welfare system but the key difference is that we are engaged in reforming something we have faith in, not dismantling something we don’t believe in. It isn’t, as the Guardian has put it in the past a question of differing “methods”, accepting that the Tories “motives” are the same as ours. This is a naive, apolitical view of the world, and the Guardian was roundly criticised for that nonsense at the time.

Martin, if Guardian readers fall for your naive line – though I credit them with more sense – and we end up with a Tory government, I have no doubt at all that the result, after the rhetoric and gimmicks had faded, would be a smaller, less active state, money having been redistributed to the richest, with cuts in public services. Luckily you don’t have to take my word for it, the more the Tories are put under pressure on policy the more they revert to type.

It will give me no pleasure if one day I have to say “told you so” to people whose lives, frankly, won’t change that much under the Conservatives. It isn’t them but ordinary people living throughout the country, who will pay the price. People who rely on a strong government to protect them and provide them with chances and opportunities they’d otherwise be without, support that will, progressively, be stripped away under the Tories.

So, Martin, no, we don’t face a Tory party on the side of the “progressive angels” actually. But we do face some deeply cynical and opportunistic opponents. If we really listen – and allow ourselves to hear – the horror story is still there. It is a shame that some are being taken in by the friendly mask that currently hides it.

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