Is "One Nation" Toryism BS?

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David Cameron's government is trying to revive and push this Disraeli term, but does it actually mean anything? Or is it as vapid as the Big Society project which exploited the good will that already existed.

Is there any substance in it historically and in this case? Or is is a clear PR game.

Disraeli's "One Nation" concept was quite heavily paternalistic which seems at odds with Cameron's claim not to want to interfere in people's lives.

I have no problem with pragmatism, but I don't think this is the aspect Cameron is using this phrase for. In fact I don't think he is using it to draw attention to a philosophy at all, but more of a vague cover of "togetherness" for having to make unpopular decisions.

Talking of togetherness, did you see that photo of Dave arm in arm with other European leaders. It was the memorial service for the Charlie Hebdo slain. Was he milking it, or am I cynical?

Tbh I wouldn't read too much into that particular event. Noone, is totally selfless in their actions but pretty much he was doing what was expected of him and probably did sympathise to a extent.

I think he a nice guy in an impossible situation. A bit of Keynesian spending might help. I guess it is easy to talk about increasing the GDP and manufacturing.

He is not Keynesian by any measure. The question is regardless of his position on the economy, is there any substance behind "One Nation"...?

Don't get me wrong many campaign slogans seem equally meaningless.

He has to say something to cope with that Scottish woman. Politicians can get caught with their parties credo to the detriment of practical policy. At least Tony seemed to be free of that.

If he cared about Unionism, why did he gamble the integrity of the union to win an election? Many fell for his fear mongering. Including my own mother. Yes if you think about it logically it makes it more likely not less.

Don't get me wrong you are probably partially right, he did that now is desperately trying to claw back.

I'm a Unionist, but I don't think insulting the Scots is a very effective way of supporting unionism. Scotish Unionist need to stand up for themselves, and not rely on Camoron who will let them down.

I suspect this is less to do with unionism, although Disraeli also fought home rule in Ireland from the Liberals like Gladstone, so there always a element of that. I think he is not trying to convince Scots so much as English.

I'm not sure how far the comparison with Disraeli can go - we're talking about a very different era in terms of political attitudes and expectations, and a society in which the Welfare State was not yet even a pipedream.

There has been a massive growth of inequality since 1979. This was obviously a trend set in motion by the Thatcher government and continued under Major. But it was accelerated under the Labour administrations of Blair and Brown, to such an extent that the salary of a C.E.O of a FTSE company is now almost 10 times what it was in 1979 IN REAL TERMS, and is 150 times the average wage of an employee in such a company. I think people like Cameron and Osborne are far less ideologically driven than Thatcher, they just spent their formative years in an era in which her politics reigned supreme, and being 'born to rule' so to speak, they have simply regarded such policies as the norm, and presided over the continuation of the previously mentioned trend. And yes, their 'One Nation' sloganizing is pretty cynical, and simply an update on 'All In This Together'.

The remarks about Keynesianism are interesting. Government borrowing is a key feature of Keynesian economics, and it's worth noting that Osborne increased the National Debt from about £900 billion in 2010 to its current level of over £1500 billion. Keynesian economists also strongly support Quantitative Easing and the extremely low, near-zero interest rates we have seen in recent years. Despite some sort of muddled shift towards 'Monetarist' policies in the 1979-2008 period, all Western economies since 1945 have been run on essentially Keynesian principles. Even the Arch-Monetarist Milton Friedman said, as long ago as the mid-1960s, "We're all Keynesians now".

The reason for mentioning Disraeli is becuase Cameron mentioned him as his favorite Tory leader, and it is not a coincidence that he used one of his terms. I'm not sure if Cameron is deluded in thinking he is like him or it much like the football team(s) he supports, just PR nonsense from start to finish. He is a PR man after all. I agree with your assessment of the cynical "All in it together"/"Big Society"/"One Nation".

Cameron is not a conviction politician with his own ideas. We have had unbelievably weak opposition. Brown and Miliband didn't make strong opposition. There is no way with a strong opposition the Cameron would have leader the conservative party for long let alone become Prime Minister. Consider how many leaders the Conservatives had in opposition. Only Hague was able to give Blair a workout in Questions. Questions have descended into farce now.

I didn't mean to sound dismissive of the Disraeli issue, and admit that I know very little about the man, or about the entire Disraeli-Gladstone political era in the later 19th Century. But I'd guess that Disraeli's paternalism would've had a good deal in common with that of the philanthropic businessmen and benefactors of the Victorian era, and that he'd have reacted with disbelief and incomprehension if he'd contemplated modern Britain, in which around 30% of all government spending goes on benefits and pensions and where we still borrow the equivalent of almost the entire NHS budget every year in order to stay afloat.

That's the version of 'Paternalism' Cameron has to deal with, and despite the fact that around £12 billion is set to be cut from the benefits payout, to the undoubted discomfiture of the current recipients, the 'triple-lock' on state pensions and the projected increase in the number of pensioners means that state-funded paternalism in its present form isn't going to shrink or be replaced with anything else in the foreseeable future.

I wouldn't be surprised if Cameron had known little or nothing about Disraeli before his recent announcement, and suspect, like you, that it's a PR stunt. This is nothing new for the Tory Party. It's pretty obvious these days, if you watch an old interview with Mrs Thatcher, that she had pretty simple, basic political views, which she stuck to like a limpet. Nonetheless, in her early years as PM, she managed to convince significant numbers of both supporters and opponents that she had a good grasp of the economic and political theories of Friedrich Hayek, and the Monetarist views of Milton Friedman. Much later it emerged that she had been told by people at the Centre For Policy Studies (like Keith Joseph and Alfred Sherman), that Hayek and Friedman were the 'good guys', whereupon she told her aides to collect quotations from their works, which she cut up and put into her handbag, memorizing them or reading them out to interviewers and journalists. Likewise, in an interview outside 10 Downing Street on the morning of her 1979 election victory, she claimed to derive her inspiration from Saint Francis of Assisi, quoting one of his prayers: it turned out that speech was written for her (all 40 seconds of it) a few hours earlier, and all she had to do was memorize it.

The Labour Party was a bit slower to cotton on to this game, but when the Blair-Mandelson era arrived in the mid-1990s, they certainly made up for lost time!