Moving Beyond Mrs. Thatcher.(International Edition; WORLD AFFAIRS)(Margaret Thatcher of Conservative Party )

Byline: Stryker Mcguire

Cameron wants to change the Tory image, even if that means giving Britain a slight Swedish accent.

The attention of the British political class is focused on the slow political death of Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his Labour government. Day after day, sober prognostications and wild guesses fill the papers and airwaves. Will it come in days, weeks, a few months, or not until 2010? Meanwhile, Conservative shadow government lies in wait--but not idly. Little noticed by the public, "green papers" outlining Conservative policy pile up on the party's Web site: seven so far; 13, maybe more, to go. If it sounds like a countdown to a new government, that's because it is. With all indicators pointing to a Cameron-led victory at the next election, the Conservatives are seriously getting ready for power.

Ever since David Cameron became Conservative Party leader nearly three years ago at the age of 39, he has faced two big challenges. The first was to rebrand his party, which in the wake of Margaret Thatcher's tough economic reforms needed to cast off its reputation as "the nasty party." The second was to show that his repositioning of the party was more than cosmetic. Skeptical at first, the electorate is now massing behind the Tories, who traveled in high spirits to Birmingham for their annual party conference this week. The fact that the polls have shown them running consistently ahead of Labour by 20 points or so for the better part of 2008--a lead only temporarily dented by Brown's recent attempts to fight back--suggests Cameron and his team must be doing something right.

The growing library of green papers, running to nearly 400 pages so far, is further proof that the Tories, after 11 years in opposition and often in disarray, have put their house in order. The message emerging from the documents are clear: this is not Thatcher's Conservative Party. Here, for example, is a sentence from the education policy paper that could not easily have been written into a Tory party platform of old: "The country that provides the closest model for what we wish to do is Sweden." Sweden, the Socialist paradise of popular imagination, as a model for Conservative policy? Well, yes. In the paper on education, the reference is to groundbreaking Swedish reforms that provide state funding for non-state schools, allowing parents, for example, to remove their children from failing state schools and enroll them in locally controlled, publicly financed independent schools.

It's a reform that fits neatly into the Cameron mantra, "Delivering progressive ends through Conservative means." The phrase may not trip lightly off the tongue, but the Tories believe it's a fair description of their new policy framework. "Education should be a path toward a more equal society," says shadow education secretary Michael Gove, who recently returned from a trip to Sweden. "But our means of getting there are Conservative--choice, competition and trust in the innate good sense of the people at the local level." As in education, much of the Tories' new policy work reflects a more centrist orientation than in the past. Cameron's Conservatives accept many of the goals of progressive governance as set out by Brown and his predecessor, Tony Blair, but they want to strip away traditional leftist features like top-down control from the central government and the sort of tests and targets favored by big bureaucracies. Thus, having studied welfare-to-work models in the United States, Australia and the Netherlands, among others, the Tories share Labour's desire to move as many as possible of the 5 million Britons on benefits into ...