Mr Cameron, The Tories & the mirage of compassionate conservatism: compelled to justify neoliberal politics at #ge2015?

As the British election campaign gathers momentum, it is of interest to reflect upon some aspects of the key debates. At national level, the battle is intense, given the prospect of a hung parliament. Concerning Scotland, the 2014 Scottish Referendum may have produced a result that was to the satisfaction of leading parties and royalty, but the Scottish National Party’s subsequent rise as an extremely decisive contender in national-level politics could be described as the seminal consequence of #Indyref. Irrespective of the ultimate election result, the Scottish National Party (SNP), led by the articulate Nicola Sturgeon, is definitely set to be a decisive element in the post-election political dispensation. [1]

Critics of the Conservative government’s policy agenda have developed strong arguments over the NHS, immigration policy, austerity and discriminatory practices. A cursory glance at the body of work by bloggers such as Thomas G. Clark (author of Another Angry Voice , which has attracted some 141,292 likes on Facebook) suffices to take stock of the key issues on which the Tory government has caused substantive public discontent. This short article is an effort to briefly revisit David Cameron’s transformation from a young and reformist leader keen to break away from the Tory Party’s legacy of Thatcherism, and his position today, as a Tory Prime Minister who is brought to defend Tory policies, which are far from popular outside the politico-economic elite Cameron himself represents. By no means is this an adequate appraisal of the Conservative-LibDem coalition’s record in government under the Cameron-Clegg duo. Instead, what follows is rather an effort to outline several salient examples that clearly demonstrate the categorical failure of the Conservative Party under Mr Cameron to evolve on a path of compassionate conservatism (the definition of which, to borrow from Sophocles, is up to the wise to determine).

David Cameron’s accession to Tory Leadership: focus on compassionate conservatism

When David Cameron was appointed leader of the Conservative Party in 2005, efforts were made to give a ‘progressive’ touch to the traditionally establishment-friendly party, and also to distance the party from the legacy of Thatcherite neo-liberal politics. Having been an MP for only four years, Cameron expressed his resolve to develop a brand of ‘ modern compassionate conservatism ‘ soon after his election as party leader.

It was a time of dealing with the past, and setting the record right on a number of issues, from the party’s 1980s position on same-sex relationships, mass privatization, the Apartheid regime in South Africa, and more. For a moment, Cameron did appear to bear the aura of a reformer, a man set to take the Tory Party to a new era in its political evolution. As Peter Dorey, an academic, wrote in 2007, Cameron’s initial efforts in demonstrating a move towards a socially inclusive and compassionate conservatism were somewhat successful, with the Conservative Party enjoying its first sustained poll leads over Labour since 1992. [2] Efforts to ‘modernise’ the party’s policy agenda have been at the heart of the Conservative Party’s agenda throughout the 20^th century. In Cameron’s case, he initially demonstrated that he was more in tune with a modernisation agenda than his predecessors William Hague and Ian Duncan Smith. [3]

Drift in to the abyss of neoliberal politics

Since coming to power in 2010 through a coalition with the LibDems, Cameron began to gradually loose his reformist aura. Instead, the party’s polices, be it austerity, financial management, immigration, Europe, or the NHS, have marked a continuation of a neoliberal (and neoconservative) agenda, which favours the party’s wealthy donors and influential well-wishers, while widening the gap between the rich and the poor.

Concerning the NHS, for instance, the Health and Social Care Act of 2012 turned out to be contradictory to election pledges, to say the least.

In the 2015 election campaign, Cameron’s modernising, reformist and progressive credentials have substantively waned, as the dominant image of the Prime Minister and his coalition government is that of a quintessentially Tory and neoliberal establishment. Jeremy Paxman’s pointed questions to Cameron at a recent TV show, if anything, provide proof of this reality.

Unlike at no point in the recent past, more and more people have ended up dependent upon food banks under the Tory government. It is an approach to governance that prizes the six planks of neoliberal economic strategy, namely, liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation, re-commodification, internationalisation, and reduced direct taxes.

Cameron’s earlier zest as a young party leader intent upon progressive transformation, the election manifesto of 2010 built in the backdrop of that discourse, and his track record as Prime Minister have led to considerable inconsistencies that political analysts have strongly criticized. As Thomas Clark noted in an article in November 2014 , the Tories have deleted their 2010 election manifesto (the pre-election “contract” as such) from their website, most likely as a means of avoiding public attention on policy inconsistencies, broken promises, under-achieved targets and policy mishaps. The positive point is that in the cyber age we live in, it is extremely difficult for a government, be it in the global North or the global South, to conceal hard facts and contradictory policies from the electorate.

To make things worse, there is no denying that an uptight, arrogant and somewhat boisterous attitude has added to the scars on the Cameron government’s track record. The controversial bedroom tax issue led to a report filed by a UN Investigator, Raquel Rolnik, which was critical about the tax, and the way in which it affected the most vulnerable. It was Grant Shapps, the Chairperson of the Conservative Party, who launched a scathing attack on Ms Rolnik, with several other politicians following suit. This was, as several analysts have correctly highlighted, an extremely undiplomatic and undignified reaction on behalf of a government.

Another controversial aspect of Tory policy that caused the wrath of academics, the literati, school teachers and pupils alike, was Michael Gove’s efforts to reform the English curriculum in schools (and to make English literature an optional subject), giving more attention to British literature and scrapping key texts of American literature. [4] This zest to reform curricula was somewhat reminiscent of Mrs Thatcher’s efforts to influence the teaching of history. Thatcher took a strong interest in a new ‘national curriculum’ in history. As she wrote in her memoires, ‘though not a historian myself’, I had a very clear ­- and I had naïvely imagined uncontroversial – idea of what history was. History is an account of what happened in the past’. [5]

Irrespective of the result of the general election, it is a given that no party will be in a position to secure a safe majority. Labour, as Sadiq Kahn MP has rightly admitted, faces an unprecedented challenge from the rise of the SNP in Scotland, traditionally an electoral minefield for the Labour Party. Indeed, the emergence of UKIP, the Green Party and the SNP mark the gradual end of a strictly speaking two-party system, in which the two main parties on the right and the left are faced with substantive challengers.

In such trying times for political parties seeking a place in the British House of Commons, it is worth for politicians across party and ideological dividing lines to reflect upon Sir John Major’s retrospective comments from a book chapter he authored, entitled ‘The Limits of Power’:

‘In government, we should have explained more and assumed less. In Opposition, we shouldn’t have let myths take root: but we were demoralised by defeat-and did’. [6]

[1] The primary focus of this article is not the impact of the Scottish referendum on the election campaign, or the overall role of the Scottish question in the election. It is a topic best discussed in a separate article.

[2] Dorey, Peter, 2007, A New Direction or Another False Dawn? David Cameron and the Crisis of British Conservatism. British Politics, 2, 137-166.

[3] On the Conservative Party’s modernisation discourses, see, for example, Denham, A. and O’Hara, K. 2007, The Three ‘Manthras’: ‘Modernization’ and The Conservative Party. British Politics, 2, 167-190.

[4] The Gove reforms on the English curriculum sparked a broad critique, with some analysts, such as Claire Fox, supporting Gove’s decisions.

[5] On Mrs Thatcher’s involvement in the history curriculum and her confrontations with historians, see Bernard Porter, 1994, ‘Though not an historian myself”: Margaret Thatcher and the historians’, Twentieth Century British History, 5:2, 246-256.

[6] Major, John, 2013, The Limits of Power. In R. Carr and b. Hart (Eds.), The Foundations of the British Conservative Party: Essays on Conservatism from Lord Salisbury to David Cameron. London: Bloomsbury.

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This post was written by Dr Chaminda Weerawardhana