BRITAIN:Conservative leader David Cameron has attempted to define the political battleground with incoming prime minister Gordon Brown a week before Tony Blair's formal handover of power.
In a keynote speech at an event in Tooting, south London, punctuated with the New Tory talk of social inclusion, the fight to protect the environment and defeat global poverty, Mr Cameron defined his "big idea" as "social responsibility" against Mr Brown's alleged reliance on "state control".
Proclaiming his belief in the family as key to reversing Britain's "social breakdown", Mr Cameron also challenged Mr Brown to hold a referendum on any new EU constitutional treaty - while predicting that Mr Brown's prime ministerial style would see a "top-down government . . . he knows best" approach to politics.
Labour's James Purnell derided Mr Cameron's "relaunch" as a "Save Dave" campaign following the party's trauma over grammar schools policy.
Declaring his ambition to make the Conservatives "the true force for progressive politics in Britain" Mr Cameron said his vision was for a country combining "collective security" with "individual opportunity".
He insisted extending opportunity meant "liberating the potential of young people, with world-class education at every level". This was why, he said, his leadership was developing robust and radical plans for the reform of state schools, addressing both standards and structures. And he was warmly applauded when he said this meant "more setting and streaming, with a 'grammar stream' in every subject in every school, so bright pupils are stretched and all pupils are taught at the right level".
However, Mr Purnell claimed that "after weeks of U-turns and cave-ins" on the subject, Mr Cameron was having to shore up his position by "pandering" to Tory backbenchers. "Faced with the choice between the electorate and his party, David Cameron has blinked and swung to the right like William Hague before him," he charged. "No amount of 'Save Dave' relaunches can solve the Tories' basic problem."
Mr Cameron insisted he had laid the basis for a Conservative revival and that the party had stopped "fooling" itself that if it "played the same old tunes" it would get a different result after three election defeats.
"We remembered the importance of rebuilding that broad Conservative coalition without which we've never won in the past," Mr Cameron said. "And we moved this party back on to the ground on which our success has always been built, the centre ground of British politics. That meant addressing the issues that matter to people today, so we became the party of the environment and wellbeing as well as the party of the nation state. It meant understanding the real priorities of people today, so we put economic stability before up-front tax cuts. And, vitally, it means standing up for all of the people all of the time, not just some of the people some of the time."
The task facing Mr Cameron was underlined by a poll suggesting that the Tories are still seen as being "twice as far to the right" as Labour is perceived to be to the left. A weekend YouGov poll showed that the prospect of Mr Brown taking over as prime minister has cut the Tory lead over Labour to just two points.