Tory leader pays tribute to Bush
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Your support makes all the difference.The Conservative Party should not ditch its principles in an attempt to regain power, Iain Duncan Smith said in Washington yesterday. The Tory leader said his party would need to convince people its values would translate into solutions for the problems they faced in their daily lives.
Mr Duncan Smith had talks with President George Bush and senior Republican Party strategists to learn lessons from their victory over the Democrats.
His visit came amid a heated debate among the Tory high command over whether to play down issues such as asylum and Europe to bolster the party's appeal to middle-ground voters.
Mr Duncan Smith told the International Democratic Union that centre-right parties owed a huge debt to President Bush for showing them the way back to power. "He has shown us that conservative parties don't have to stop being conservative to win elections, but we do have to show how our principles will deliver solutions to the problems people face," he said.
"We have allowed quality-of-life issues to be colonised by the centre-left for far too long. The paucity of their methods and the poverty of their results are failing the most vulnerable in our society."
Mr Duncan Smith said Tories should tackle crime, failing schools, family breakdown and poor health care. "We will work to give people back control over their own lives, to direct power away from government to where it can be used effectively," he said.
"It is about putting people before systems, results before theory, substance before spin. It is the difference between promises and delivery."
He mocked the suggestion by Peter Mandelson, a leading architect of New Labour, that Labour were "all Thatcherites now" on economic policy. "Just as centre-left parties were incapable of conceiving and seeing through the economic changes that enriched our nations in the Eighties, so they have been unable to offer effective leadership in tackling the issues that undermine our society today," he said.
Conservative parties needed to safeguard society from forces that threatened it from inside, under-achievement in schools, disorder on the streets and the insecurities of old age and infirmity.
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