The Wardman Wire

One of my interests (and aims of the blog) is to encourage participation in politics as widely as possible. At least two of the three main parties have been talking about training, including media training, for younger members. The Liberal Democrats are talking about why their Leadership Academy should train everyone as they are all potential leaders.

Meanwhile, the Young Britons’ Foundation ran a training day at the Conservative Party Conference for young activists. Mike Rouse has kindly written an account for the Wardman Wire.

What makes Cameron tick? Last week I looked at the vision and values of Gordon Browns speech, now its ‘Dave’s turn. Except this was more grave than Dave. When Nick Clegg compared David Cameron to an Andrex puppy, he was partly right. Camerons speech to the Tory conference was certainly very long (65 minutes), but it certainly wasn’t soft.

(Full text of the speech is here, quotes below are in italics. )

Strangely, in pragmatic political times, we’ve had two strong ‘values’ speeches. Brown was heavy on duty, service, and especially ‘fairness’. Cameron was even more explicit:

(people) want to know whether our politics, and let’s be frank, whether our politicians - are up to it. In the end, that’s not really about your policies and your plans. Of course your plans are important… so people want to know what values you bring to big situations and big decisions that can crop up on your watch.

and so he told us. There were some clear inconsistencies between his stated values, and what he actually proposed to do, but we’ll come to that later. First I’ll have a look at the values he highlighted.

This was impressive to watch
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