Listen? Or slash and burn?

By Diana Smith

In the run up to the general election I sent one of my friends to interrogate the nice conservative lady who was issuing leaflets in the square. She had learnt her lines well and was clear that it was all about quangos. They were going to fix the deficit, and create a great climate for taxpayers by ridding the country of all the unnecessary spending whilst of course protecting all of the essential frontline services that people like.

When Mrs Thatcher came into power, the story is that she dispatched her ministers to bring back all the stories of the waste that had occurred in their department, and they found, very quickly, that in fact there was very little, so they began long battles with the treasury as they were forced to cut essential spending instead. This is hard to do.

Andrew Rawnsley quotes a Tory minister:

“We all attacked ‘faceless bureaucrats’ when we were in opposition. They aren’t faceless anymore. They are people working in the department and they are nice people. They are people with children, people with mortgages to pay.”

The truth is clearly beginning to dawn on a number of Conservatives that many quangos actually have a useful function to perform, that cutting spending at the levels this government is saying it will is probably impossible, and would mean deeply damaging cuts to both essential frontline services, which damages real people, and to many services that the middle classes rather like. As approval ratings plummet, and the rumblings of widespread protests are being heard they are also getting the idea that cutting services is becoming deeply unpopular with the electorate, and that they will probably be a one term government.

Andrew Rawnsley also quotes a Lib Dem member of the cabinet on where opinion polls will be in about a year’s time. His forecast was:

“25-5. By that, he meant the Tories will slump to 25% over the next 12 months and the Lib Dems will collapse to 5%. This was not a frivolous forecast, but a deadly serious one.”

I think that different conservatives are reacting to this in different ways. Some MPs who perhaps like the idea that they could be re-elected, and do have a genuine belief in the idea that they should be a listening government, are hearing what their constituents are telling them, and are seeing the flaws in the direction they are taking. This can be seen in articles by Andrew Rawnsley and Tim Montgomerie. There are others, probably not MPs, and therefore not exposed to the effects that government policy is already having on so many individual people, who are taking the line that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to destroy the big state and trash all that Labour has done over the last 13 years.

The amount of damage that is done over the course of this parliament may depend on the degree to which the Lib Dems and listening Conservatives are able to moderate the policies of their slash and burn colleagues. This may come down to the extent to which we are able to see our political opponents as people.

If we can peel away the rhetoric, there is behind this the potential to listen to each other and find common sense approaches to some of the huge problems we are facing. We need to help our politicians to listen and to think clearly.