Whatever happened to conviction politicians?

What happened to politicians who took a view and argued for it it, rather than trying to be all things to all people?

During the budget speech I was struck immediately by Osborne's language. Early in the budget he asserted that he wanted "An economy where the state does not take almost half of all our national income, crowding out private endeavour", i.e. a much smaller public sector. But when actually announcing his plans, many of them covering the full 5-year period of this parliament,
he concentrated completely on the "its unavoidable" argument.

Of course, the two justifications imply a totally different rationale and depth of cuts. Saying "I want to reduce the size of the public sector", and "I just want to get us through this economic mess" are two very different things.

The most likely explanation is that Osborne would like to roll back the state, but the "we have to do it because we have too much debt" argument is much more palatable to voters. But failing to make the case for a smaller public sector at the out-set and focusing almost exclusively on the "necessity" of cuts doesn't avoid political arguments about the size of the state. It simply postpones them a few years to a time when people are unlikely to have much appetite for more cuts. By failing to make the argument now, Osborne has ducked his best chance to win the private sector vs. public sector debate.

It is unsurprising, then, that the Tories are trying to fight Labour on their own turf. I lost count of the number of times that Osborne claimed that the budget was "progressive", and extensive space is given in the budget document to graphs demonstrating this (though, as the IFS pointed out today, this is basically a complete lie given that the graphs stop in 2012 just before the real cuts are planned to begin). Even as a Labour-ite, I think this is a disaster. Osborne is allowing Labour to win the redistributive argument by proxy: the Tories are implicitly accepting that budgets should be a redistributive as possible. If they truly believe in the foot-steps of Thatcher and Lawson that a smaller public sector, lower business taxes and a lower top rate of income tax are the best routes to priority, that argument needs to be made now. Otherwise, it is going to be almost impossible to convince the public to move away from the distribution argument that was completely accepted on Tuesday.