David Cameron needs a fourth way

May 1, 2008 seems to have set a new course in British politics. New Labour endured its worst local election results for over a generation, whilst the Conservatives appear on target to form the next government.

But while Labour has dramatically and deservedly lost popular support, it is not clear that David Cameron has won it. If anything, the local elections represent a wholesale repudiation of the policies of Blair and Brown rather than any endorsement of the New Conservatives. Moreover, since New Labour is little more than an intensification and extension of Thatcherism, what the voters were really rejecting was the legacy of the last 30 years and its governing ideology.

Ordinary British citizens are exasperated with contemporary politics: they voted in Mrs Thatcher to revive the economy and New

Labour to revive the public sector, and now neither the market nor the state seems to work. The free market has hugely enriched the top 10 per cent and forced everybody else to work harder for less money while our public services subject us to ever larger amounts of taxation for an ever more incompetent service.

The trouble for Cameron is that he has aligned himself with the New Labour project just as the voters have so demonstrably rejected it. Indeed, until Brown's 'election that never was' fiasco in the autumn, the Conservatives were essentially just promising to deliver - in a more professional and competent manner - an entirely New Labour agenda. The Conservatives locked in their own budget to Labour's spending plans and promised to be more Blairite than Blair in their approach to the public services. But the public have rejected Gordon Brown because the Thatcher/Blair legacy no longer delivers.

Indeed, from Northern Rock to Brown's asset price bubble economy, the ruinous legacy of New Labour is increasingly felt by