A winning formula for the next election

Parliament has broken up for the summer and soon Gordon Brown will shuffle off on holiday, fearful for his future. Only a year ago, clearly thrilled to have the job he so desperately coveted, he exuded confidence and it seemed the country was relieved to be free of Tony Blair.

Now a black electoral hole has opened up under New Labour as support for their right-wing neo-liberal agenda has plummeted to new depths. The Tories, speaking about Britain's broken society and promising social justice, are 20 per cent ahead in the polls and, to compound the sense of an inverted world, the Liberal Democrats are now advocating lowering the tax burden on the poor and middle class.

Beneath the feet of the party leaders, the tectonic plates of British politics have clearly shifted. The country now wants a new deal and a new economic and social settlement.

Against the slow background hum of a gathering financial crisis, the ordinary British citizen, taxed to the hilt, working all the hours God sends but still not making ends meet, has twigged that all is not as it should be.

They were promised, first by Thatcher then Blair and Brown, that through hard work and economic liberalisation, opportunity for all and general material advancement would be delivered. But in spite of working the longest hours in Europe, social mobility has fallen, inequality has increased and many households are now so heavily indebted that rampant inflation could push them over the edge. Indeed with housing facing a possible 30 per cent devaluation, the home-owner's most precious asset is their most vulnerable and potentially un-repayable debt.

Nobody believes in the trickle-down free-market fundamentalism espoused by Mrs Thatcher or her New Labour proxies anymore. Instead there is a yearning for financial stability and economic security.

The desire for economic social justice is coupled with revulsion at the benefits accruing to the super-rich and their avoidance of tax and communal responsibility. Thus the Tories' great electoral breakthrough in recent months was less the proposal to lift the threshold for inheritance tax than the promise to tax the non-domiciled financial uber-class.

Running parallel with this economic rejection of neo-liberalism, another similar cultural shift has been developing. The left-liberal cultural elite, children of the Sixties, have long preached progressive values; they adore personal autonomy, the impermanence of human relationships and the thrill of sexual exchange. They embrace one-parent families as if it were a more noble expression of feminism for a woman to raise a child without the burden of a father. In a covert alliance with right-wing economics, left-wing libertarianism has repudiated the ties of community and civic society in favour of a culture of self-interested choice, promiscuity and hedonistic experimentation.

The manifestation of these new left values in working-class, inner-city Britain has been nothing short of a social disaster. The extended and nuclear families of the poor and the immigrant have been atomised and destroyed by liberal values - while their civil society has been reduced to street governance by the knife.

And so a peculiar reversal has been taking place. Under Mrs Thatcher and her New Labour acolytes, the British public were generally persuaded by the package of right-wing economics and left-wing cultural politics. Now, what looks like emerging as the next popular political formula is a just economic order coupled with the re-moralisation of society. In short, egalitarian economics and conservative cultural politics. Whichever party can recognise and respond to this new political landscape will dictate the future and win the next election.

In this regard Gordon Brown appears incapable of renewal; he is wedded to the old settlement of the overbearing state and the monopoly market. Cameron with his theme of the broken society is already on the right track. If the Conservatives come up with a new economic deal that will really share the benefits of growth then they will surely win the popular vote. ·