 avid Cameron has hardly got his
feet under the table as Conservative leader and
already voices are being raised against him. Those
from the Thatcherite wing of his own party criticise
both his policies and his general approach. He
is too centrist and non-ideological for their taste.
They yearn after the apparent certainties of the
Thatcher years – the
once and future queen.
After three election defeats, there are elements
in the party who follow the ‘one more heave’ view
which provided such solace to those in the Labour
Party after 1983 who believed that the gap with
the Conservatives could be narrowed election on
election. Now it is true that the Conservatives
have narrowed the margin that Labour had over them
after the massive Labour majority of 1997, but
although pigeon steps can make for giant strides,
it is a long process that is likely to outlive
any particular party leader.
The Thatcherites, who deny their support and finance
to the current Conservative leadership and who
seem more tempted by the UK Independence Party,
live in a world where all they need to do is keep
repeating the same messages and it will come right
in the end; just like the supporters of the Labour
left, who believed in the 1980s that there was
nothing fundamentally wrong with the party. Classically
Tony Benn described Labour’s 1983 election
performance, an election in which he lost his own
seat in the House of Commons, as not a defeat.
It seems that the Conservative Party is as prone
to what Max Weber once called the “ethic
of ultimate ends” as the Labour Party. It
is better to be right than to be in power. The
product remains the same, even if the voters will
not buy it.
After 1990, the post-Thatcher Conservatives under
John Major tried to find a new identity or at least
a new image. The trouble was that Major’s
concept, partly borrowed from George Orwell, was “old
maids biking to holy communion through the mists
of the autumn morning”, warm beer and cricket
on the green. This was an exercise in nostalgia.
Even if such an England had ever existed, which
is very doubtful, it did not exist by the 1990s.
The Thatcher years undermined many of the institutions
which had formed the bedrock of Conservative domination
in the twentieth century. Local government had
been a recruiting ground for Conservative activists,
with many people joining the party not for ideological
or political reasons, but in order to contribute
to the local community.
That ethic of public service is now largely dead,
thanks to the marketisation of local services.
The old boys network of the City, with its rules
of a gentleman’s club was turned into a giant
casino, where profit and sharp practice ruled.
The professions were almost uniformly Conservative,
but the days when doctors, nurses, dentists, teachers
and lawyers could be assumed to be largely Conservative
supporters are long gone. The interesting feature
of the Thatcher and Major governments was the way
that the party haemorrhaged the backing of large
sections of the middle classes, just as Labour
lost support amongst many skilled manual workers
during the 1980s and early 1990s.
Writers such as Ivor Crewe have focused on the
processes of de-alignment, both partisan de-alignment,
where political affiliation and allegiance is weaker
than in the past, and class de-alignment, where
a person’s class as determined by their occupation,
became a less reliable guide to how they were likely
to vote. What for a long period in the 1980s was
seen as a problem for Labour has now turned out
to be just as much or more of a problem for the
Conservatives.
The problems of the Conservative Party are not
just a result of the aftershock of Thatcherism,
but reflect deep-seated changes in society. The
rise of individualism has generated difficulties
for all institutions including political parties.
Changes in employment patterns mean that women
no longer provide the almost inexhaustible supply
of free labour for parties. Increased leisure opportunities
compete for time and energy with parties and it
is most likely that TV, the bowling alley and the
multiplex are likely to win.
Sociologists, such as AH Halsey, have stressed
the decline in deference. We are less respectful
of those in authority and this has provided a particular
problem for the Conservatives. Those institutions
which underpinned custom and tradition and therefore
the Conservatives as the natural party of government
no longer have the same hold that they once did.
This is certainly true of the Church of England
and the monarchy, which were identified by Disraeli
in the nineteenth century as two of the major pillars
of conservatism.
The Major and Hague years could have been periods
of consolidation and preparation, but the 1997
election was more or less lost almost five years
earlier because of the government’s need
to leave the Exchange Rate Mechanism. The Conservative
claim to be competent managers of the economy was
holed below the waterline and the party flatlined
in the polls from then on.
William Hague, who is not a stupid person, but
someone who has spent too much time listening to
recordings of Winston Churchill’s speeches,
intermixed with the cheeky chappy persona of George
Formby, wasted his chances by going down the route
of ‘save the pound’. The average person
in the saloon bar of the proverbial Dog and Duck
is only in favour of the pound if they have enough
of them.
As for Michael Howard, his 2005 campaign got sidetracked
into arguments about immigration and asylum seekers,
emotive issues, but not election winners when you
are coming from so far behind. Although image isn’t
everything, it does count for something, particularly
when much of the press has turned against the party.
To be blunt, Howard had all the manner and charm
of an undertaker mixed with that of an absconding
bookmaker.
David Cameron was elected party leader in a system
introduced by William Hague, which meant that broadly
the party members called the shots. This was a
dramatic change from the way the party used to
be, the rank and file as the humble sherpas lifting
their mountaineering leaders into the major offices
of state. If the old system of charmed elites had
been used, then David Davies probably would have
been elected and the party would be even further
away from power. Cameron is, in many respects,
an interesting figure: after all, he had a main
role in drafting the Howard manifesto of 2005.
He has now, by deed if not always in word, repudiated
that manifesto.
Critics on the left and centre-left have tried
to dismiss him as a lightweight, all style and
no content, and there is some evidence that a substantial
chunk of the electorate share this view. However,
Labour bringing in the spin-meisters, Philip Gould
and Alistair Campbell, seems to be admitting that
the confidence that Cameron could be seen off without
too much trouble is a front not reality. After
all, the Labour parliamentary majority has been
reduced at the last two elections on the basis
of declining turnout and the alienation, not only
of Labour’s core support, but that of many
of the middle class, who supported the party for
the first time in 1997.
Of course, some on the left and centre-left press
have focused on the fact that Cameron is a toff,
a product of public school and an up-market university,
as though Tony Blair was one of the Bash Street
Kids. Where do they think that Labour leaders have
come from in the past?
Cameron has been nervous about committing the
party to policies too soon. After all, there is
no hurry since it is unlikely that there will be
an election before 2009. He has been criticised
for not producing his so-called ‘Clause Four
moment’, when the leader redefines the party
by making an iconic shift. Now it can be argued
that Blair did not redefine his party by a change
in Clause Four that replaced the public ownership
of the means of production with the kind of mission
statement which many companies, schools and colleges
have, often little more than collections of warm
words. The changes in the Labour Party were much
more deep-seated and driven by a desperation to
leave the wilderness years behind at almost any
cost. I suspect that many Conservatives who voted
for Cameron were motivated by similar concerns.
The Conservatives do not have a clear statement
of aims and objectives which are set in stone,
so no similar ploy to that of Blair could possibly
be used. Historically that is the genius of the
Conservatives, able to reinvent themselves, if
they choose, in each generation. Actually, ideology
has been out of place for most of the history of
the party. That all changed with Margaret Thatcher.
Shortly after election as party leader in 1975,
she told a rather astonished Shadow Cabinet, “the
Labour Party has an ideology, we must have one
too”. This was out of keeping with the Tory
tradition of pragmatism, flexibility, paternalism
and being willing to borrow policies from opponents
as and when it suits.
As early as 1983, David Owen set forth the idea
that the newly founded Social Democratic Party
should be, if not policy-free, it must is his term “travel
light”, in terms of specific commitments.
Owen was trying to model the SDP on American parties,
which are often held together more by a vague ethos
than by clearly defined policy positions. Cameron,
by contrast, seems inspired by the Tory tradition:
he is trying to modernise the party by taking it
back to the future, back to its pragmatic and paternalistic
roots.
There might be lessons here for Labour: if the
party is to renew itself once the shabby and bankrupt
project of New Labour has run into the sand, as
no doubt it will, the most sensible lesson that
Labour could learn from the current state of the
parties is simply “David, teach us to be
like you.” |
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