New Start with Cameron?

cameroncampaign.org

For political parties, the election of new leaders can sometimes be a rather messy affair.

The Conservative Party in the UK hasn't been spectacularly succesful in chosing its leaders during the last decade. The individuals that have been there with obvious leadershipb potential - a Kenneth Clarke, a Michael Portillo - have all been sidelined, and one has ended up with individuals that have all been heading for failure.

There are numerous reasons for this, but one has been the split in the party over the issue of Europe, and the obsession of its more nationalist wing with getting anti-Europeans to the top and putting this issue forward as one of the most important.

British public opinion might not be the most enthusiastic on European issues, which is hardly surprising if one sees the vitriolic anti-Europen line taken by some of the key media of the country. But they do not want to see their country isolated in Europe, and they don't want antik-European sentiments to dominate the politics of their country.

Accordingly, the strident anti-European line has taken the Conservative Party from the one failure to the other.

Now it's in the middle of a new leadership selection process. It's an elaborate affair. First, a series of votes among the Members of Parliament produced a list of candidates that was eventually narrowed down to two. And now the 300 000 members of the party will vote by ballot in order to choose between these two. The winner will be announced on December 6.

The clear frontrunner at the moment is David Cameron. Young, untested and open on most issues, he seems to embody the hopes for a fresh start. He's seen as the Conservative version of what Tony Blair once brought to a Labour Party going nowhere.

On Europe, David Cameron is more open than most. It's simply not been that much on his agenda. But there is no reason whatsoever to believe that he will portray the party as negatively on these issues as some of his successors have done.

On Thursday of the coming week the two contenders David Cameron and Dave Davis are scheduled to meet directly in a TV duel. That's a first in British politics where duels of this sort don't even happen in general elections.

At the moment it looks as if David Cameron has established a solid lead in the campaign. We'll see if that duels will change the situation.

But all together there seems to be an element of new life in and new hope for the Conservative Party.

If nothing else, then the United Kingdom at the very least needs a better opposition.

New Start in London

It was hardly a surprise that David Cameron emerged the winner when the members of the Conservative Party of the UK had to choose a new leader. Simply speaking, they wanted their own Blair, and with 67% voted for Cameron as the new leader.

His task is to make the Conservative Party a party that can once more be elected and that can govern. That was what Blair did to the Labour party after its turbulent years in the wilderness. Since then, he has won three general elections and seen off no less than four leaders of the Conservative party.

But the success of Blair has at the least to some extent been the result of the self-destruction of the Conservatives. After the Thatcher and Major years it descended into a wild Euroscepticism and tendencies towards imperial nostalgia that effectively made ikt unelectable.

A modern person in Britain simply couldn't be a Conservative during these wilderness years.

The task of restoring thre fortunes of the party is not a small one, and it will take its time. That the election of Cameron was announced the same day as Chancellor Brown had to announce that the UK economy will perferm significantly less well than he so confidently had predicted adds to the feeling of change in Britain.

David Cameron comes to the position after only four years in the House of Commons and no experience whatsoever of governmental responsibility. He is the least experienced new Conservative leader ever, and significantly less experienced than Blair was when he took over Labour.

But in reality he has been along in politics for a long time as political assistance, speechwriter and aide. He knows the political trade as well as anyone. Whether he will master the art of governance must however remain an open question.

So far he has steered clear of any more detaileed policy pronouncements. He clear wants to take the sharp edges of the imsage of the party.

In a most unwise concession to the fanatical Eurosceptics he has indicated that he wants the Conservative members of the European Parliament to leave the EPP group and line up with more marginal and in some cases outright strange groups. We'll have to wait and see what happens with that. A Conservative party that claims to be a serious governance alternative in one of the most important member countries of the European Union can't really deprive itself of influence in Europe.

We'll have to wait and see. I'm just leaving Brussels for London, although I will be back here in the evening in order to be ready to address different Balkan issues tomorrow.

The Conservative Party - Our Key Challenges

Quick Impact in the UK

It was expected that the leadership change would give the UK Conservatives a boost in the opinion polls, but it seems to have come earlier and stronger than most expected.

An opinion poll in the Sunday Telegraph today puts the Cameron Conservatives ahead of Labour and on levels where they haven't been for more than a decade. And there is another one in The Sunday Times with more or less the same result.

"We seem to be at the dawn of a new era. There is much work to be done but this is a great start", said the Party Chairman Francis Maude.

A good start it certainly is. And the fact that the appeal of the possible Blair successor Gordon Brown looks like declining adds to it.

Much certainly much work to be done. The Cameron approach so far is stronger on style than on substance.

And on the important European issue, he has started by creating a major mess for himself, his party and his European friends.

Telegraph | News | Cameron's election gives Tories lead over Labour

Liberal Conservatism

I promised to come back to David Cameron as well after my comments on - and praise for - Tony Blair.

On September 11 he delivered a speech on foreign affairs that has been much commented upon since.

That's primarily because his phrase that Britain should be "solid but not slavish" in its friendship with the United States. The swipe at Blair was difficult not to understand.

But there is far more to the speech than that.

In fact, he makes a rather interesting attempt to distinguish his so called liberal conservatism on international affairs from the so called neo-conservatism that has been doing much of the running in the Anglo-Sachson world in the last few years.

And its worth reading.

I particularly liked the way he looks at the struggle against terrorism around the world:

"Part of the problem we have encountered these past five years is that the struggle has been perceived - as the terrorists want it to be perceived - as a single struggle between single protagonists.

The danger is that by positing a single source of terrorism - a global jihad - and opposing it with a single global response - American-backed force - we will simply fulfil our own prophecy.

We are not engaged in a clash of civilisations, and suggestions that we are can too easily have the opposite effect to the one intended: making the extremists more attractive to the uncommitted

This is not to deny the connections between terrorist activity in different parts of the world.

It is simply an appeal for us to be a little smarter in how we handle those connections.

Our aim should be to dismantle the threat, separating its component parts, rather than amalgamating them into a single global jihad that simply becomes a call to arms."

I think this is entirely correct - and the difference between much of what is dominating on the other side of the Atlantic is profound.

It is by dismantling or disaggregating the situations, and then dealing with them one after the other, that we have the greatest possibilities of making progress.

Lumping them all together in one big battle to which we also give the description "war" probably serves Usama bin Laden better than it serves anything else.

The David Cameron restyling has certainly been about style to a very large extent.

But the speech on foreign policy showed interesting and important substance as well.

Towards Post-Blair Britain

With new flights serving London City Airport from Stockholm, the distance to London has suddenly been somewhat reduced.

Good. Although it's still shorter from Stockholm to Moscow than fram Stockholm to London.

The politics of the United Kingdom is distinctly in a mood of transition. New Labour is fading, and it might well be that New Conservatives are rising.

There was a telling little piece of information from Tony Blair's press conference in Armagh. It was the one on Northern Ireland that I have written on earlier.

Just before the press conference was to start, it was suddenly decided to block over all the Exit signs that are normal in any room used for public gatherings.

Why?

Well, of course to prevent a clever photographer from getting a photo of Tony Blair with the Exit sign immediately above him. For certain - they would have tried.

That's the big issue at the moment: when will Tony Blair hand over to Gordon Brown?

Everyone expects it to happen well within a year. Reports are already talking about people in the Cabinet talking more to Brown that to Blair. The Prime Minister isn't quite a dying swan, but looks increasingly like a dead duck.

This naturally has implications for all sorts of issues. In Washington they will be thinking about the implications for Iran policy. In Brussels they are thinking about a whole series of other issues.

What will it mean if the New Labour of Tony Blair is replaced with more of Old Labour in the form of Gordon Brown?

At the same time the New Conservatives under David Cameron are continuing their extended honeymoon with the media. Opinion polls have weakened slightly, but four months is a very short time.

The Cameron crowd is deliberately thin on policies. Too thin, it is beginning to be said in circles that count.

But the ongoing Spring Meeting 2006 could partly change that.

One has descended on Manchester in order to try to demonstrate that the Conservatives isn't only a party for the rural foxhunters and the wealthy suburbanites, but also for inner city people. There are local elections coming up May 4th, and in the last ones the Conservatives didn't manage to win a single council seat in Manchester.

Old warriors are being brought back under the flag.

Michael Heseltine was once the darling of the party and the not unlikely successor to Margaret Thatcher, although it did not work out that way. But his credibility when it comes to inner city issues is beyond doubt.

He's now leading the charge in Manchester.

But when looking at what's happening within both parties, one can not avoid the suspicion that the post-Blair era now slowly starting will be a more inward-looking one in the politics of Britain.

And that's not necessarily good for the rest of the world.

Essentially Global

Passing by London on my way back from New York was a good opportunity to get up to speed on the transformations underway on the British political scene.

The Labour party has just finished its conference in Manchester, and the Conservatives are only days from theirs in Bournemouth.

Tony Blair is leaving - although probably not until May of next year or so - and Labour is challenged by the new Conservative leader David Cameron.

His ratings might be fairly low on the British scene at the moment, but I persist in seeing him as one of the both best and most interesting major political leaders in terms of making speeches.

And his farewell in Manchester was certainly not exception to that rule. It's worth reading in its whole.

But here I'll just quote at some length what he said about how the challenges of politics have changed during the last decade. From being essentially national, they have now become essentially global:

The scale of the challenges now dwarf what we faced in 1997. They are different, deeper, bigger, hammered out on the anvil of forces, global in nature, sweeping the world.

In 1997 the challenges we faced were essentially British. Today they are essentially global.

The world today is a vast reservoir of potential opportunity. New jobs in environmental technology, the creative industries, financial services. Cheap goods and travel. The internet. Advances in science and technology.

In 10 years we will think nothing of school-leavers going off to university anywhere in the world.

But with these opportunities comes huge insecurity.

In 1997 we barely mentioned China. Not any more. Last year China and India produced more graduates than all of Europe put together.

10 years ago, energy wasn't on the agenda. The environment an also-ran.

10 years ago, if we talked pensions we meant pensioners.

Immigration hardly raised.

Terrorism meant the IRA.

Not any more.

We used to feel we could shut our front door on the problems and conflicts of the wider world. Not any more.

Not with globalisation. Not with climate change. Not with organised crime. Not when suicide bombers born and bred in Britain bring carnage to the streets of London . In the name of religion.

A speech by the Pope to an academic seminar in Bavaria leads to protests in Britain.

The question today is different to the one we faced in 1997.

It is how we reconcile openness to the rich possibilities of globalisation, with security in the face of its threats.

How to be open and secure.

I would hope that every major political leader in every European country would be ready to spell out the nature of the tasks ahead in the same way.

The World From New York

As work continues with setting up the new government in Sweden, I'm heading for New York later today.

It's the centennial anniversary of the Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce there. Big thing.

I'm there primarily for an interesting seminar on different global trends on Wednesday. Together with Richard Holbrooke I will try to make some sense of what's happening on the global stage.

But then it's back to here rather quickly.

Otherwise this is the week in Europea leading up to the parliamentary elections in Austria and Bosnia that I have written about, as well as the local elections in Hungary in the middle of the turmoil there.

And then there is the Labour Party conference in the UK with the final conference performance of Tony Blair - to be followed by the Conservative conference next week with challenger Cameron.

Next week is not only the week of the formal change in Sweden, but also of important local elections in Georgia as well as the parliamentary elections in Latvia on October 7th.

In the United States the members of Congress have left Washington and gone campaigning for the November mid-term elections. We seem to be witnessing a slight rebounce in the support for the otherwise somewhat beleaugered Bush administration.

There will be a lot to discuss in New York.

Which Way Britain?

British politics these days is all about when Tony Blair will step down and hand over 10 Downing Street to his long-time rival Gordon Brown.

At some time he is likely to do that. And the evolving conventional wisdom in London - for whatever that is worth - is that it will happen within a year from now.

But no one really knows. It is highly likely that he hasn't decided himself but is thinking of different options. And it is highly unlikely that he has given a firm time for the hand-over to anyone.

So it's really all speculation at this stage.

But that speculation is itself is creating a new situation. The Labour party is seen as increasingly divided at a time when the Conservatives are coming back. And Tony Blair is starting to look like something of a dead duck.

His political energy looks undiminshed to an outside observer - but his political powers are very clearly in decline.

Many are making comparisons to the situation when Margaret Thatcher was forced from her leadership position in 1990. It was, as Gordon Brown pointed out last week in a comment that was widely interpreted as a push for an early transition, an "unstable, disorderly and undignified" exit, which come to haunt the Conservative party for many years.

The two great questions hanging in the air is first what the Blair era has really achieved and second what a Brown policy would really mean.

Margaret Thatcher left after eleven years of solid achievements. She wasn't my cup of tea in every respect, but that she took Britain from decline to a new start is today obvious to all. She made Britain into a robustly competitive nation.

Tony Blairs greatness as leader was that he accepted the Thatcher revolution and carried it into the Labour party, thus creating New Labour. If there was a Blair revolution, it was primarily a follow-up. Britain - well, overall - stayed on track.

Where Gordon Brown stands on the different issues is less clear to me.

He has presided over a rather solid expansion of the public sector and a stealth increase in taxation. That's solidly Old Labour. But he often preaches the virtues of deregulation and open markets. That's obviously New Labour.

And on Europe it's all very unclear. He's a man who loves to go to Washington and buy the latest books. I'm all in favour of that. But he's also a man that only occasionally turns up at European Union meetings, and then far more to lecture than to listen. That doesn't give influence.

The centre of gravity in the Union in terms of foreign affairs has already moved from London to Berlin. The German presidency during the first half of 2007 will obviously be of key importance - it's towards the end of that we will also see a new President of France.

But without an active approach by London not very much can be done anyhow.

There are certainly big European issues that need to be addressed. The important debate on future enlargement. The necessity of getting some sort of treaty on institutional reform. The commitment to review the budget. The need to deepen the single market.

Is there a Brown policy that differs from the Blair one on issues like these?

It will be important to watch the British transition in order to get some sort of view of where its politics might be heading.

There is still time - perhaps until his 10th anniversary of entering Downing Street a year from now - left of Blair.

There are some important issues he needs to tackle. A solid energy policy - most probably a new British push for nuclear power. The continued wrangling with Iran. And reform of the pension system.

But then then there will probably be a few Brown years. Policies? Well, that's the question.

After that, it looks increasingly likely that there will be the Cameron years.

BNP Against The World

Today is a day of celebration in Great Britain - it's the Queen's 80th birthday. And there is little doubt that she is a genuinely popular and respected monarch.

Otherwise it's politics as usual. Conservative leader David Cameron has been to Svalbard to show that he cares about global climate change. And Gordon Brown is making the rounds in Washington as part of both the IMF meetings there and his preparations to take over after Tony Blair.

But otherwise it's the run-up to the local elections on May 4 that are attracting increasing attention.

I'm not thinking about the obvious question of how well the newly re-styled Conservative party will do, although that will obviously be of some interest.

The real storý seems to be the rise in support for the ultra-nationalist and xenophobic British National Party. Some recent opinion polls indicate that up to a quarter of the electorate could consider voting for the BNP this time, although the actual figure will probably stay below ten percent.

That's still a horrific number. And mostly it seems to be traditional Labour supporters in traditional Labour areas that are contemplating to give their vote to the BNP. Less, I would guess, because they wholehearthedl support all in its program, and more in order to send a signal on these issues to Downing Street.

Great Britain is among the most open and tolerant European societies. London is the most global city of Europe. The diversity has been an enormous advantage to the development of the British economy and society.

Among wide sectors of British society this is both recognized and appreciated. Not the least the urban middle class has appreciated "its curries, carnivals, Ukrainian nannies, Bosnian cleaners and cut-price Polish plumbers."

And still there is the risk of a serious backlash in the local elections. Primarily in the rural areas or in the formerly solid working-class areas.

It's still not there, and hopefully the debate that the opinion polls have generated can reduce BNP support down to more marginal levels.

But it is a warning sign.

Our open world and our open societies can never be taken for granted. Their values must constantly be defended and anchored in every sector of our societies.