Cameron interview with Schama

Good to be reminded by this in-depth FT interview that Simon Schama, an insufferable presence on TV, remains a fine, properly donnish wordsmith. His views are still made-for-Bitchy Boys Club, but he does bring some historical perspective to a political discourse normally dominated by intellectual mayflies. Key extracts:

Cameron is hard to take against: easy in his own skin; unstuffy, intellectually curious, and, unlike so many Conservative leaders – from Pitt (both father and son) to Peel, from Churchill to Thatcher – conspicuously untroubled by inner demons.

. . . that Schama was able to identify - or does he mean, simply, that Cameron lacks a cutting edge?

Just as he seems to be casting himself as the heir to Churchill’s reforming Liberalism and Macmillan’s One Nation pragmatism, Cameron lets slip a comment of breathtaking lordliness. Of course he is concerned that the poor don’t fall below the safety net, but it should be understood that "if we don’t make cuts it will be the poorest who will be hardest hit by the failure of the economy … too much of [Labour’s attempts] was about redistributing money through the tax credit scheme, rather than trying to tackle the causes of poverty".

WTF is "lordly" about that? Even the Labour pukes now admit that they screwed the pooch on welfare dependancy. Of course Schama is a 60s lefty, but even so he really should not have written this:

Whether ["the Big Society"] is actually anything more than neo-Victorian cant about the citizenry (them what can afford it, that is) getting stuck in for the local good, I’m not at all sure. But he makes a spirited attempt to invest it with some human reality, even claiming it had always been part of the Conservative tradition to invite people to ask “What do I put back into society?” rather than just have them fork over taxes and let the elected decide.

That crack about the Victorians is so day before yesterday, as is the patronising bit of bad grammar that follows it. The Victorians built well - Britain still stands on the foundations they laid down, from railways to sewers to parks to schools and other public buildings. Lytton Strachey was a bitch, and his prissy sniggering still infects the leftism of people like Schama.  

But what can a good Conservative do about this sorry state, save hand-wringing and a call to voluntarism? I point out the difficulty for any government legislating behavioural modification. But the prime minister persists with his call to civic awakening for the common good.

Having just emerged from thirteen years of more "legislating behavioural modification" than in all previous governments put together, that little comment is remarkable not only for its hypocrisy but also because it completely misses the point. Such legislation is not "difficult" - it has been proved to be demoralisingly counter-productive. Greater voluntarism can only arise from the abolition of such legislation, not from new laws.

Schama just doesn't get it. Like most of his generation of leftist intellectuals, he refuses to accept what even the Labour party has conceded - Thatcher was right to say "There Is No Alternative" about the economy. Possibly Schama is right and British society is too far gone to bounce back as the economy did, but the international evidence is that nations recover quite rapidly once governments admit they are in a hole and stop digging.

It is said that on first encountering a screw in a baulk of wood, a primitive man would know no better than to apply ever-greater force to pull it out. By that standard Schama and the like are very primitive people indeed.