[A-List] Maggie's gift to Gordon

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

David Cameron tried to break with the Tory past by modelling himself on
Tony Blair. But with Margaret Thatcher back at No 10, his new clothes
are looking sadly dated.

by John Gray

New Statesman (September 20 2007)


History imposed on David Cameron the task of persuading the electorate
that Conservatives are at home in 21st-century Britain. William Hague,
Michael Howard and Iain Duncan Smith were at one in supposing that,
overlooked or derided by metropolitan opinion, there was a conservative
British majority that viewed the society emerging around them with alarm
and indignation. In fact, most voters felt at home in liberal Britain,
and the Conservatives went on to three successive defeats. Breaking with
his predecessors, Cameron decided that unless the Conservatives
identified themselves with the nation that Britain has become they were
finished as a party of government. By aligning himself with contemporary
British values, he posed a challenge to Labour to which Gordon Brown
must now respond.

The next general election will take place against the background of a
period of profound social change that goes back to the crises of the
Seventies. To a considerable extent, 21st-century Britain is an
unintended consequence of Margaret Thatcher. It was Thatcher who,
accentuating the impact of global forces that no one controls,
dismantled the postwar settlement and created the market-driven society
we live in today. She believed that by rejuvenating British capitalism
she could revive the stolidly bourgeois Britain she had known in the
Fifties; but that country was a product of Labour rule, and the upshot
of reshaping public institutions on a market model was to create a
society of a kind she had never imagined.

In an essay that had a powerful influence on the intellectual fringes of
early Thatcherism, Friedrich Hayek distinguished between two rival
versions of individualism - a "true", Burkean variety, rooted in
tradition, that accepted the constraints of conventional morality and a
"false", Romantic version in which personal choice and self-realisation
trumped all other values. Hayek believed that a revitalised free market
would bring with it a return to "true" individualism.

Instead, it was a version of Romantic individualism that triumphed. As
the imperatives of market choice have spread into every area of social
life, personal fulfilment and the satisfaction of desire have become the
ruling values. Relationships of all kinds have become looser and social
structures have become more negotiable and provisional. In many ways
this has been a benign process. As a result we are more tolerant of the
varieties of family and sexual life, and less pervasively racist, and
although we are perceptibly more unequal we are less obsessed with class
than in the past. But the country created by freeing up the market is in
many respects the antithesis of the one Hayek and Thatcher aimed to
restore. If ever there was such a thing as a conservative philosophy,
its central values were social cohesion and cultural continuity in a
settled form of common life. Yet when it is released from restraint the
market works to unsettle established ways of living. So, far from
reviving an older Britain, Thatcher wiped away its last traces.


Endemic discontent

However, if the freewheeling society we have today is Thatcher's
creation, her latter-day followers refuse to recognise the fact. The
diehards who make up much of the Conservatives' core support despise and
reject the nation she unwittingly created. They believe that by ditching
Thatcher's inheritance, Cameron has abandoned anything resembling
conservatism; but it was Thatcher who destroyed the old social
structures - and with them the possibility of a viable conservative
project. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Conservative Party itself.
The loosening up of hierarchies that occurred in society at large has
been reflected in a parallel dissolution of the Tory culture of loyalty.
Before Thatcher, Tory leaders could rely on an ethos that elevated
loyalty above ideology. After Thatcher, disloyalty and infighting became
defining Tory traits, and every party leader was placed permanently on
probation. Mistrusted by his party, Cameron is seen as a traitor to
conservative values. But the Thatcherites themselves - with their
endemic discontent and doctrinal mentality - demonstrate how unreal
these values have become. Early this month, the former deputy leader
Michael Ancram urged Cameron to "unveil the party's soul" rather than
"trashing" its Thatcherite past. If Cameron follows such advice, the
Conservatives will be left stranded on the margins of power in a country
they have ceased to comprehend.

Whatever his critics may say, Cameron had no alternative but to remodel
his party. His strategy of repositioning his party on the liberal centre
ground enabled it to become, once again, a contender for power. The
trouble is that the model of modernisation he adopted was already
obsolete. By the time Cameron adopted Blairite new Labour as his
template, Blair had become a buffoonish figure - a would-be global
messiah who engineered the worst British foreign policy disaster since
Suez. A more experienced politician might have asked himself whether it
was wise to pose as Blair's successor. Cameron might have unseated Blair
in a general election run-off; but once Blair vanished from the scene,
the Tory leader was left looking dated and redundant.

In the Commons, Cameron goaded Blair with the taunt, "You were the
future once". Yet, by modelling himself on Blair, Cameron tied himself
to the past. Unprepared for the national sigh of relief that greeted
Blair's departure, he seems ill-prepared for the very different style of
politics that has arrived with Gordon Brown.

Only a new breed of Conservatives, for whom Thatcher was a chapter in
the history books rather than a living presence, could have consigned
her to the memory hole with such brisk finality. In this, Cameron's
limited political experience has been a source of strength, but passing
most of his short political life in Blair's shadow has narrowed
Cameron's vision. Blair's decade in power was a by-product of
unrepeatable historical conditions. He was able to return Labour to
power by accepting many of Thatcher's policies because she embodied the
interests and values of a crucial part of the electorate that was ready
to transfer its allegiance to him.

By the time Blair left office he represented no one, and the same is
true of Cameron today. Like Blair, Cameron moves in a smart, moneyed set
with tenuous links to the wider society. Aside from the fox-hunting
fraternity - promised a free vote on repealing the ban - it is hard to
think of any social group whose concerns Cameron has consistently
championed. Even his commitment to green issues, which at one point
seemed to be voicing widely felt anxieties, sounds contrived and
unconvincing. There is no section of today's Britain where his voice
resonates with any particular force.

Cameron's patrician background plainly had a role in his most serious
error to date. His insouciant dismissal of an institution that was for
generations a hugely important part of British education showed how
slender is his acquaintance with the choices most people have to face.
Unlike most Tory voters, Cameron has always been able to take for
granted the option of educating his children privately. Like a junior
colonial officer in the declining years of empire, he seems hardly to
comprehend the lives of those he has set out to govern. His stumble over
grammar schools was more than a minor slip. It disclosed an amateurish
quality in his entire operation, and exposed the vulnerability of a
political project that lacks any solid base of social support.


Provincial majority

There is a great opportunity here for Gordon Brown. Linked by
overlapping social ties and a common proximity to the London media,
Blair and Cameron are alike in their detachment from Britain's
provincial majority. This is not the disaffected, reactionary rump
invoked by latter-day Thatcherites. It is broadly liberal in outlook,
but it demands from government some of the qualities that used to be
claimed by Conservatives, such as common sense, competence and a cool
head in times of crisis. It has no time for Blairite rants about
incessant change, nor for the unending stream of ephemeral initiatives
that embodied the Blair regime in practice. By distancing himself so
sharply from this style of government, Brown has wounded Cameron at his
weakest point.

The shift in the public philosophy of the Conservatives that Cameron
initiated seems to have started as a psephological gambit, which
recognised that the party could not return to power on the back of its
core supporters alone and aimed to capture Liberal Democrat votes in
about a hundred key seats. As an electoral strategy it has had mixed
results, with Lib Dem voters switching to Labour as well as to Cameron's
Conservatives. At the same time, large issues have been left unresolved.
At present there are at least two tendencies vying for control among the
Conservatives. There are neoliberals such as John Redwood, who urge
further large-scale market deregulation and hugely reduced government -
a programme whose effect would be to impose another revolutionary
shake-up on society, and which for that reason has no prospect of being
implemented by any government in the foreseeable future.

In contrast there are the neoconservatives, who accept that governments
are bound to continue to play a significant role in social welfare and
regulating the economy. What these tendencies have in common is that
neither can claim to be distinctively conservative - the neoliberals owe
more to Hayek (who always denied being a conservative) than they do to
Burke, while neoconservatism originated on the American far left. Both
are progressive ideologies, which differ from those that prevail on the
centre left chiefly by being less realistic and more dogmatic.

The practical problem for Cameron is that neither of these tendencies
allows the Conservatives to make the vital break with the past. If the
neoliberal tendency represents a reversion to Thatcherism at its most
rigidly doctrinal, the neoconservative wing of the party - to which, in
most respects, Cameron himself belongs - offers little more than a
continuation of Blairism. These difficulties have been compounded by his
most recent turn in which - while talking of the need to repair
Britain's " broken society" - he has increasingly reverted to stock
right-wing themes such as crime and immigration.

Many commentators have accused Cameron of inconsistency, but his larger
error is that of moving back to the reactionary territory that lost his
predecessors the past three elections. However dressed up in fashionable
jargon, talk of the broken society cannot help harking back to a nation
whose passing the majority of Britons do not regret. No doubt concern
with crime is widespread, as are doubts about current levels of
immigration. But these worries do not add up to anything like a wide
sense of social collapse, and most of Britain's voters like the country
in which they live. By putting a rejection of that country at the heart
of his campaign, Cameron has fallen into the trap that has snared every
Conservative leader since Thatcher. He has failed to reconcile his party
to the society she created, while alienating the voters he needs to
attract by implicitly condemning the way many of them have chosen to live.

At present, both the parliamentary party and the party organisation are
racked by internecine conflicts, and Cameron himself is looking ever
more like an opportunist with no settled beliefs. By itself,
intellectual incoherence has rarely been a serious obstacle to securing
power. When combined with an ill-conceived political strategy, the
result can be disastrous. Only months ago Cameron seemed poised to
overtake Labour. There is still a chance he could deny it an overall
majority in the general election, but with the Tory leader's switch to
the self-defeating politics of reaction and Gordon Brown's assured
performance as Prime Minister, the initiative has moved back to Labour.
Brown's "steady as she goes" brand of government is an ambiguous
phenomenon, for though it involves a sharp break with Blair's style, it
is premised on continuing with much of the policy framework that was in
place when Blair was in power - which itself continued much of
Thatcher's. In an irony neatly captured by the tea at No 10, Cameron has
been left struggling to manage the party Thatcher nearly destroyed,
while Brown is using the Thatcher inheritance to entrench Labour as the
party of government. If Brown can convince voters that he has viable new
policies - particularly in the areas of energy and the environment -
there is every chance Cameron will follow Blair into history's memory hole.

Much now depends on events. Enough has transpired to plant a large
question mark over Cameron's project. He aimed to fashion a new
centre-right party, but the result has been a continuation of drift and
division. A setback in the next general election could turn these
divisions into a civil war not unlike the one that engulfed the party
when Thatcher was toppled. The difference is that, after Cameron's
attempt to impose a Blair-style makeover on the party, it could end up
like a failed state - a rabble of rival factions, each claiming to
embody true conservatism at a time when such a thing is no longer
imaginable.

The stakes could hardly be higher. The upshot of the next general
election could be meltdown in the Conservative Party and a long period
of unchallenged power for Gordon Brown.

_____

John Gray's latest book is Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the
Death of Utopia (Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, GBP 18.99)


http://www.newstatesman.com/200709200029


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