Samizdata

The Tories have opened up an almost 30 percentage point lead over Labour in the latest opinion poll in the Daily Telegraph. The opposition party is now polling over the 50 per cent point, the highest it has been since the heyday of Margaret Thatcher. An interesting point, as no doubt the jaundiced readers and contributors to Samizdata point out, is that the Conservatives have achieved this on the basis of remarkably little actual policy detail of their own, apart from stuff about changes to inheritance tax. In the early years, Tory leader David Cameron spent most of the time aping the mushy centre-ground noises of Blairism, with a strong, and possibly even sincere, attachment to notions of environmentalism and socially responsible corporations, the latter stance being a socialistic, or possibly even fascistic doctrine that is at odds with the notion that businesses should be run to serve the interests of those that own and run them.

All that has changed, and changed utterly. For a start, we do not hear much these days about the environment from Mr Cameron. Worries about global warming, at a time of economic fear and after a run of crap UK summers, do not cut it any more. The fact that mean global temperatures have actually dropped over the past 10 years is proving a bit of an awkward one. And the Tories’ economic mistakes of the early 1990s – joining the European exchange rate mechanism – are now far enough in the memory to no longer be as toxic as they once were.

Brown’s reputation is in ruins; his massive spending, raiding of private sector pensions and hideously complex tax changes have come back to haunt him. His creation of a semi-independent central bank no longer looks so clever given that he shifted the Bank of England’s inflation target to a different, and easier to hit, measure a few years ago, hence arguably stoking credit growth by an additional degree. Yes, some of the global credit crunch is outside of his, or indeed Britain’s control. But Brown sought to claim much of the credit for the fat years, so he cannot complain about getting some of the stick for the lean years.

As a side observation, a lady whom I met recently and who knows Cameron told me that he was a total shit. He would feign interest in a subject for about five minutes and then lose all interest. Not a good sign.

Update: The Taxpayers’ Alliance has a good and brutal report on what has happened to the UK economy during the Brown years, which will be available tomorrow. The Tories, if they had any intellectual fire-power, should be producing such reports. The TPA has held the torch for the cause for small government during a period when the Conservatives seemed barely able to mention the words “tax cut” without immediately rushing to tell people that they had no desire to be so cruel and nasty as to actually cut the size of the State. The TPA puts that party to shame.