Australian Foreshadowing?
The Guardian has an opinion piece today from Julian Glover suggests that Tony Abbott’s Liberal Party in Australia could be a sinister foreshadowing of what David Cameron’s Conservatives could turn into. I speculated only a few days ago that one could envisage the Conservatives heading down a similarly populist route, driven by increasing public scepticism and the grassroots of the party. Tim Montgomerie, editor of Conservative Home, a popular grassroots website, said the following of climate change:
You have got 80% or 90% of the party just not signed up to this. No one minded at the beginning, but people are starting to realise this could be quite expensive, so opinion is hardening.
The same article suggests, again quoting Montgomerie, that up to 6 members of the Shadow Cabinet may be sceptics. This may or may not be the case, but I don’t feel – unlike Julian Glover – that we will see shifts in policy whilst Cameron is leader of the party; he simply has to much credibility personally invested in the issue for such a clear repudiation of current policy; it was after all one of the first issues he started his rebranding of the party with. We have already seen enviromental issues be pushed down the Tory party agenda; no longer such focus on the ‘Vote Blue, Go Green’ message that was centre stage when Cameron took the helm. I do think though, if the Tory lead in the polls continues to shrink and the election leads to a hung parliament where a Lib/Lab pact keeps the Tories out of power, that Cameron could go and the next Tory leader is likely to start to change the party’s language on climate change.