Once upon a time the Conservative Party was the natural home for national security policy. Not anymore. A combination of factors including the very necessary rebranding of the party; a focus on climate change, health and education has meant national security policy (in its broadest sense: defence, foreign affairs, and intelligence) is now, arguably, Cameron’s weakest policy area.
When David Cameron became leader of the Conservative Party in 2005, he deliberately set out a different vision than that of his predecessors by focusing on policy areas such as health, education and climate change. This was both a reflection of a shift in strategy – to move the Tories away from its ‘nasty party’ image but also because some of the best minds in the Conservative Party were thinking progressively on these issues (health in particular).
During this process of change national security policies largely became second order issues for the new leader. Cameron delegated these policy areas to colleagues, safe in the knowledge, he assumed, that each would be managed by a safe pair of hands. But he underestimated two forces at play. First the decline in knowledge and experience among Conservative MPs (which is still more than the Labour and the Liberal Democrats combined) in these policy areas and second; a lack of fresh and innovative thinking on national security within the party.
Arguably David Cameron’s first mistake was to assume that experience comes with expertise and sound judgement. In a speech to the think tank IISS on terrorism and national security he was quick to make reference to the ‘wealth of experience’ he had, citing numerous Lords and Dames he had recruited. The message was clear: I’m young and fresh but I have experienced politicians and practitioners on tap. But I’m reminded of a brilliant quote by Chris Donnelly, the former special adviser at NATO – who’s now at Oxford University:
In a period of stability and slow evolution our greatest asset is our experience. But at times of revolution our experiences can be fatal baggage. We can no longer assume that, because something we did worked well in the past, it is likely to continue to do so in current circumstances. If we are to survive living in a revolution, we will need to make a correspondingly revolutionary shift in the way we think about both the risk and the response.
A second point is that there is also a struggle for influence and competing agendas between different factions within the Party. Knowledge on these policy areas is spread thinly between nine poles of power. Here’s the breakdown:
Pole One: Ed Llewellyn – David Cameron’s Chief of Staff and de facto National Security Adviser to the Conservative Leader. Ed Llewellyn, Cameron’s chief of staff, was aide to Hong Kong Governor Chris Patten, however, and also adviser to Paddy Ashdown whilst he was in Bosnia. It was Ed who pulled together Cameron’s speech in Pakistan outlining the Conservative foreign policy doctrine;
Pole Two: Pauline Neville-Jones, Shadow Security Minister and National Security Adviser to David Cameron. Dame Pauline Neville Jones was Policy Director at the FCO and spent a few months as Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee;
Pole Three: James Arbuthnot, Chair of the House of Commons Select Committee on Defence;
Pole Four : Dr Liam Fox, Shadow Defence Secretary (there for political reasons).
Pole five: The shadow defence team: Gerald Howarth, Dr Andrew Murrison and Dr Julian Lewis;
Pole Six : Patrick Mercer – a former Army Officer and Radio 4 defence correspondent who latterly was Shadow Homeland Security Minister.
Pole Seven: Dean Godson makes way for the new man at Policy Exchange – Garvan Walshe, Deputy Research Director & Senior Fellow for International Security;
Pole Eight: William Hague – by virtue of the size of his staff relative to most other front bench teams he is able to focus a very broad set of issues, though he seems to concentrate most of his time on non-proliferation.
Pole Nine: the wider Conservative security and defence community made up of Lords, academics and public affairs agencies.
Given the size of the community it is very sad that not more work has been done. There needs to be much more effort behind the scenes to pull these polls together and develop a stronger narrative on national security and defence issues with the aim of setting out coherent and progressive policy ideas. But herein lies the rub. Only a handful of those mentioned above would feel comfortable in discussing the future of a progressive defence policy for example, what it would include, and the impact it would have on transatlantic relations and the EU.
And this leads me on to a third point – the policy vacuum. Unquiet World was a stab at formulating a set of ideas and recommendations under a broad national security framework. The report was written by a plethora of individuals – and while this is not a problem in itself there was seemingly no editorial control and the end result looked like a mash of policy areas bound together with sticky tape rather than a coherent thoughtful approach.
While it clearly has been a political decision to concentrate on other policy issues this shouldn’t prevent those in the party thinking and exploring new ideas and policies. And this process doesn’t need to happen in the full glare of the media but could happen in the think tank community (which Conservative think tanks have published any really thoughtful pieces on the subject and to what effect?), or in academia. For example, the Party is due to publish a National Security Green Paper soon. Now I would guess that when it is announced David Cameron will begin by saying … ‘the first priority of a government is the nation’s security’… or words to that effect before outlining some of the more obvious threats followed by some ideas for change but will it be all forgotten after the last camera is turned off? Will there be seminars, meetings and conferences that explore the paper in detail? My guess is no.
And lastly – as a final point, David Cameron needs to flesh out his liberal conservative foreign policy as laid out in his JP Morgan speech and then in Pakistan. As John Bew suggests:
Of all the oxymorons currently doing the rounds, ‘liberal conservatism’ is one of the slipperiest. It is this phrase which forms the crux of the Conservative party’s approach to international affairs but about which we have had little in the way of concrete definition. It slips off the tongue but leaves us little the wiser as to the criteria by which a future Conservative government might intervene on the international stage.
Conservative national security and defence policy has been left on the back burner. This was partly because Cameron, on becoming leader, felt there were strong foundations in place on which he could build his new philosophy as well as his shadow front bench teams. But this was not the case.
2009 is the year in which Cameron must be bold, not just on issues of health, education and climate change but in the once natural policy area of the Conservative Party which has been seriously neglected in recent times.
