However that's not what I'm getting at.  What struck me about the article was a passage that went:

[David] Cameron knows that Britain is now a social democratic country. Only a catastrophe will make it anything else in the foreseeable future. He must adopt a social democratic agenda to win an election, and he will certainly lose it if he embraces an old Conservative one.

This is what many in the Conservative Party do not quite get.  We are now a social democratic country.  When the Tories were categorically defeated in 1997, they were beaten, not because of scandal or fatigue, but because Thatcherism had run its course.  The necessary medicine of economic neo-liberalism had been taken and Britain could no longer be dismissed as an economic basket case.  Thanks a lot, there's the door.

New Labour has changed the political landscape in the UK.  By looking towards Clinton's Third Way election winning achievements in the US, and the successful Social Democratic countries of Northern Europe they were able to marry economic competence with improved social provisions.  There have been great successes and significant failures, but the expectations of the country have indeed changed.  Cameron knows this, as he knows the dark unforgiving politics of Thatcher are no longer appetising to an electorate that sees social justice as a key political goal.

There are many in the centre-right blogosphere who consider it cool again to be a Tory.  They see Labour on the ropes and believe they can now come out and celebrate their conservatism.  Taking the lead from Conservative (Big C) America, they believe that can take a disciplined and aggressive Tory argument to a willing electorate.  They are wrong.  The Tory argument won't win, and Cameron knows this, yet if he apes Blair's Labour he will have to deliver Blair's vision; that of a social democratic future, more in line with the Swedish economy than that of the US.  This however will be unpalatable to the Tory base and indeed to the avowedly low-tax bloggers who champion his cause.  Can Cameron sustain a fight with his grassroots for ten years?  Blair has had to, and for the most part he has pulled it off.

Voters in Northern England, Scotland, Wales, and the major urban areas still refuse to trust the Tories, which makes winning power outright almost impossible.  While Cameron enjoys some successes in polls he fails to convince the electorate when directly compared to Gordon Brown.  Brown is trusted more on security and the economy.  Slippery Dave clearly has a lot still to do.

I have already admitted, there are major failings of this Labour Government.  Delivery on health and education, while impressive, doesn't quite match the massive increase in spending.  The tax system is over-complicated.  Violent crime is a concern.  And the consumer credit levels are frighteningly high (a hangover of Thatcherism).  There is also the colossal error in going to war in Iraq, which was, we must remember, fully supported by the Tories.

There is a strong argument for some reduction in the overall tax-burden to stimulate a cooling economy, but the public refuses to see schools and hospitals return to the dilapidated state of the eighties and early nineties.  We don't particularly enjoy paying for it, but we do like the fact that working families can have some self-respect and enjoy some of the proceeds of Britain's impressive economic growth.  And let's not forget, there are many more millionaires too.

Labour needs renewal.  We need a fresh batch of cabinet members to take on the next generation of change, but we don't need the Tories, nor do we need Cameron's rehashed pseudo-Blairism.  

I'm undecided on the leadership ambitions of Brown, but I'm very attracted to his demanding and uncompromising approach to policy.  We need a bit of steel to get the next round of reforms through and start to get the returns on current investment that taxpayers demand.  I want to see an extension of the impressive urban regeneration that we have seen across the country (a real visible improvement so rarely championed by the media).  Maybe he's not the radical the Blairites demand, but let's not get carried away, many of the present reforms have not actually been fully implemented nor their benefits fully realised.  So let's dot our i's and cross our t's before we start a new chapter.  We need to consolidate.

What can Cameron really offer the British people that a Brown Government cannot?  It may offer a new logo and a trendy leader, but he can't really offer anything new that actually matters.  We like who we are, who we have become.  Last year, during Hurricane Katrina, we saw exactly what a low-tax neoliberal economy is really like.  America's poor suffer real poverty in the world's richest country.  They work long hours for little pay, and when the storms came their government abandoned them.  Many Americans were shocked to see how the other half really live, and were disturbed to see how little value their government put on their safety and wellbeing.  Is this the small government you want for Britain?

We are a Social (Big S) Democratic country, and because David Cameron will never fully convince his party as such, he will fail.

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