Cassilis

In the summer of 2005, a few months before he secured the Tory leadership, David Cameron gave a speech at Policy Exchange in which he said that his party would stand “for compassion and aspiration in equal measure”. In December of that year, in his acceptance speech, he called for “a modern and compassionate conservatism which is right for our times and our country” and committed his party to improving social justice. The following summer Jesse Norman and Janan Ganesh published a book called "Compassionate Conservatism: What it is, Why we need it" which set out the historical precedents for a Tory party interested in social advance and the conditions of the 'many not the few'.

Despite these fairly clear ‘statements of intent’ (all 2/3 years old) and the countless opinion pieces & speeches on the same topics since then it seems the Labour party fundamentally misjudged how serious Cameron was about this realignment. Time & again it was rejected as false or nothing more than political positioning - ‘compassionate Tories? Give me a break’ was the standard response.

But as Norman’s book made clear anyone with a basic grasp of political history knew Cameron was tapping into a long-standing conservative tradition, one that actually has more precedence in the party’s history than the Thatcherism that had dominated since the late 70’s. But the more vocal on the left lacked that historical knowledge – history for them went no further back than the miners strike, removing school milk and mass unemployment. Consequently once valid criticisms of hard-right conservatism were levelled blindly at a Tory party that no longer espoused that creed – on some things they even joined in the criticisms.

And this is still going on - the left are allowing their prejudices about the political right to blind them to what’s really happening. Witness the shamefully personal and abusive attacks on Boris in the final days of the Mayoral campaign (which even riled Guardian readers to complain) or the idiocy of Labour campaigners donning top hats and tails in an attempt to make class an issue in the Crewe & Nantwich by-election. There’s a very real ‘they just don’t get it’ feel to many of the Labour responses to recent events, not dissimilar in fact to Tory tactics in the mid-90’s. This disconnect is all the stranger because Labour had their own ideological journey – when Blair & Brown were fresh new faces many on the right discounted their conversion to a pro-business, market-friendly outlook as posturing that wouldn’t survive once in office but they were wrong.

The ideological shift in modern conservatism is every bit as real and acknowledging that is a must for Labour. As Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford pointed out in the Guardian at the weekend:

David Cameron's new Conservatives are staking out ground that once belonged to the left, talking about a social recession, taking the ideological initiative, hungry to win. Look at some of the right-wing think tanks and you discover a profound shift in Tory thinking. It seeks a break from Thatcher and Hayek. The project is significant: to build a basic emotional connection with the people. Last week's results suggest it is beginning to work. This new pro-social, compassionate Conservatism is intellectually backed up by a focus on fraternity. The left, they argue, is wrong to think fraternity is another word for equality. And the Thatcherites are wrong to think that liberty will take care of fraternity. Fraternity is about society, wellbeing, and relationships. The Labour government, it argues, has failed because it has abandoned the fraternity of ethical socialism in favour of state management. The government's response has been woefully inadequate

Those who’ve suggested all is not lost for Labour may have a point and there are still some important debates to be had here. One thing that would definitely make team Cameron uncomfortable would be a full on engagement with Labour on the specifics of some of these social issues - the Tories are slowly fleshing out what this shift means in policy terms but they remain vulnerable on that front. But if Labour continue to ignore the reality of this, to push the line that this is all smoke and mirrors or fake positioning then Cameron, and those of us who wish him well, will laugh all the way to No. 10.