Dave’s land of opportunity

BEFORE an audience thick with journalists and lobbyists, David Cameron delivered a speech to the Conservative Party conference on October 2nd that might have been blown across the Atlantic. The conference, held in Manchester in a cavernous former railway station, had started with a memorial to Margaret Thatcher. Ending it, the Tory prime minister offered a quasi-biblical vision of meritocracy, “a land of opportunity”, in his refrain, where the virtues Thatcher preached—aspiration, hard work and personal responsibility—would be deepened and spread. Traditional inequalities—between men and women, blacks and whites, north and south—would fade. “Our dreams are about helping people get on in life,” said Mr Cameron. “I believe it is the great Conservative mission to… make this country, at long last and for the first time ever, a land of opportunity for all.”