Stephen Evans. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations. Volume 12, Issue 3, 2010.
Introduction
This article focuses upon one particular aspect of David Cameron’s leadership of the Conservative party since 6 December 2005, that is, his relationship with Margaret Thatcher (for a wider survey see Bale 2010, chs 6-7). The conventional line of commentary upon the relationship between Cameron and Thatcher denies that one exists in any meaningful political sense. The leadership election that took place in the Conservative party in 2005 has been described by Andrew Denham and Peter Dorey as a tale of two primaries. In becoming party leader, Cameron defeated the two right-wing candidates, David Davis and Liam Fox, and was himself regarded as a candidate of the left, along with Kenneth Clarke, whom he also defeated (Denham and Dorey 2006). Since he became party leader, as Dorey subsequently argued, Cameron has made a concerted effort to distance the Conservative party from its recent Thatcherite past in several important respects (Dorey 2007, 140-149). Given its wider implications, the most significant departure from the policy priorities of the 1980s has undoubtedly been Cameron’s insistence that the next Conservative government would make economic stability rather than tax cuts (or the reversal of the tax increases announced by Alistair Darling in his 2009 Budget) its priority. Cameron has also given the impression that he wanted to move on from the free market agenda that preoccupied the Conservatives during the Thatcher years. His support for such issues as the environment and his willingness to introduce measures to increase the representation of women in the parliamentary party should be seen in this context (Carter 2009, 234-235; Childs et al. 2009, 204). For Cameron, environmentalism and feminisation were clearly important symbols of change.
This new agenda reflected Cameron’s desire to reposition the Conservative party in the centre ground of politics. In order to achieve his objective, Cameron has made what Kieron O’Hara described as ‘a leftward move to the post-Blair centre’ which required him to accept that ‘markets were necessary but not sufficient’ (O’Hara 2007, 315, 299). Indeed, the Conservative party, under Cameron’s leadership, has made a conscious effort to mimic the electoral appeals and modernisation rhetoric of New Labour. In February 2010 the Conservatives even produced their own version of Labour’s 1997 election pledge card. If Cameron was the heir to anyone, in Peter Kerr’s opinion, then he was the heir to Blair, not Thatcher (Kerr 2007, 46-52). In seeking to reclaim the centre ground of politics, the real problem for the Conservative party may not actually be its policies, which have not been particularly right-wing in many respects since 1997, but its prevailing image among the electorate. This point has been made by Thomas Quinn, who argued that it explained why Cameron has concentrated upon changing the public’s perception of the Conservatives as the ‘nasty party’ through a process of brand decontamination (Quinn 2008). In displaying a renewed commitment to the centre ground, it could be argued that Cameron has expressed a preference for a return to the sense of social priority that underpinned One Nation Conservatism, as opposed to a continuation of the economic obsessions of Thatcherism. His interest in such subjects as poverty or, more precisely, relative rather than absolute poverty, was indicative of this (Hickson 2009, 357-358).
There are, however, a number of problems with the basic position regarding Cameron and Thatcher. If you accept the view that the personal can also be political, or at least have political implications, then it is important to remember that Cameron has overcome his initial reluctance to meet Lady Thatcher, or at least to be seen doing so in public. He has made more of an effort to spend time with her and to be photographed doing so after she visited Gordon Brown in 10 Downing Street on 13 September 2007 (Bale 2008, 283). This may reflect the fact that, as Cameron’s leadership lengthened, he felt more comfortable about establishing links with one of his party’s iconic leaders. Yet Thatcher visited Brown at around the same time as Cameron experienced the first serious criticism of his leadership and this may also have encouraged him to follow suit. When moving from the personal to the political, it is also clear that the relationship between Cameron and Thatcher has been equally complex. Tim Bale has argued that Cameron really wanted to distance the Conservative party from its post-1997 failings rather than from what it had done in office in the 18 years before then (Bale 2008, 283). Indeed, rather than actually apologising for what happened during the Thatcher years, Cameron has simply argued that things have moved on since the 1980s (Bale 2009, 227). Cameron has also shown himself to be an astute exploiter of both the myth and the reality of Thatcherism. He has often said that he intended to be just as radical in the field of social policy as Thatcher was in the field of economic policy; a statement of intent that was framed for him by Oliver Letwin (Elliott and Hanning 2009, 357-358). It was Britain’s ‘broken society’ that now needed to be repaired. Yet Cameron has also praised Thatcher’s cautious pragmatism on such issues as trade union reform and privatisation; it would guide him in his reform of the public services. Cameron has thus been willing to invoke Thatcher’s name and example to justify his own policies and overall political approach (when it suited him to do so).
It is argued here that Thatcher has actually exerted considerable influence upon Cameron since he became party leader. Indeed, it is possible to make a number of important connections between them, and to argue that he has made a concerted effort to follow in at least some of her footsteps. More specifically, there has been a clearly definable relationship between Cameron and Thatcher in terms of leadership styles, approaches and rhetoric. In each case, he has been guided by her example to an extent that has usually been overlooked in the current literature. We should not be surprised by the existence of such a positive relationship between Cameron and Thatcher. Even though it was possible to claim ‘a credible provenance’ in order to justify ‘a return to the authoritative tradition of One Nation Conservatism’, Steve Buckler and David Dolowitz have argued that it has been difficult for Cameron to achieve this goal in practice. This was because to do so also implied that the Conservative party’s recent ‘Thatcherite standpoint’ had become ‘outmoded and ineffective’ and that its iconic leader no longer mattered (Buckler and Dolowitz 2009, 26). The outcome of the tension that existed between Cameron’s desire to change his party and his inability to jettison its recent history has created a situation in which his interest in such subjects as relative poverty and social justice has been accompanied by a potent anti-statism and an emphasis upon individual responsibility. This led Kevin Hickson to conclude that the ‘contemporary Conservative party’ has been guided by ‘a Thatcherite-influenced One Nation Conservatism’ (Hickson 2009, 360). Before elaborating upon the degree of influence that Thatcher has exerted upon Cameron, it is necessary to outline the reasons for this in greater detail.
First, the existence of such a positive relationship between Cameron and Thatcher could be viewed in the context of the wider re-balancing of policy that has taken place in the Conservative party since the late summer and autumn of 2007. Since then, Cameron has placed less emphasis upon his reforming agenda and has been more concerned with such traditional subjects as law and order, immigration and the family (Bale 2008, 277-281). With the onset of the credit crunch and subsequent recession, in 2008/09, he has continued in this vein by calling for the country to live within its means (Bale 2009, 231). According to Bale, the re-balancing of policy has undermined Cameron’s claims to have made a decisive shift ‘back into the mainstream or even the centre ground of British politics’ (Bale 2008, 279). It also showed that he has been a far more calculating advocate of modernisation than the pure reformism of his early rhetoric would have us believe (Bale 2008, 294-295). The re-balancing argument may help to explain why Thatcher has become more important to Cameron over time, particularly in the face of the mounting debt crisis, which he has responded to in openly Thatcherite terms, but it does not explain why she has always been important to him. The re-balancing of policy accentuated an existing trend and did not establish a new one.
Second, that being the case it may be more helpful to focus upon the constraints under which Cameron has long been forced to operate as leader of the Conservative party. The most important of these has undoubtedly been the prevailing balance of power within the parliamentary party, that is, the dominance of the right wing within it. Indeed, a clear majority of the Conservative party’s 198 MPs voted for the two right-wing candidates, David Davis and Liam Fox, in the 2005 leadership contest: between them they secured the support of 104 MPs in the first ballot and 108 MPs in the second ballot (Denham and O’Hara 2007b, 419). And those on the right of the party have not been afraid to make life difficult for Cameron when they think that he has gone too far: in the spring of 2007, for example, they forced the leadership to backtrack upon its policy of refusing to build new grammar schools with remarkable rapidity. Indeed, it could be argued that the underlying motive for the initial re-balancing of policy in 2007 was the need to retain right-wing support, and thereby preserve party unity, in the run-up to the election that it was expected Gordon Brown would call that autumn. It was necessary to retain core support in the renewal process because the appearance of internal divisions only reduced a party’s electoral appeal (Buckler and Dolowitz 2009, 13-14). Of course, for those on the right of the Conservative party, Thatcher remained a figure of totemic importance. Her legend has been kept alive by her supporters in the 92 Group and the No Turning Back and Conservative Way Forward groups.
Third, it is clear that Cameron shared Thatcher’s scepticism towards the state. He has often expressed a preference for individual action and voluntary sector activity over government intervention. Kerr has admitted that this preference served to distinguish Cameron from Blair (Kerr 2007, 51-52). It also made Cameron more like Thatcher in the sense that they both espoused an associational view of civil society which had actually been prefigured in the thinking of the One Nation group (Green 2006, 43-46). This view was reflected in the emphasis that Cameron has placed upon social responsibility and the participatory ethos that underpinned it: we all had a role to play in solving the pressing problems of the day. Social responsibility has been described by Francis Elliott and James Hanning as an attempt to express ‘traditional arguments for a smaller state in more electorally acceptable terms’ (Elliott and Hanning 2007, 313), that is, in terms more acceptable to a 21st-century electorate. Indeed, Cameron’s own brand of One Nation Conservatism has been heavily influenced by his membership of the One Nation group of Conservative MPs. David Seawright’s work on the group has shown that the interventionist tendencies of One Nation Conservatism have always coexisted with a more limited conception of the role of the state which Cameron clearly shared (Seawright 2005 and 2010).
‘You have Given All of Us an Example of Real Courage to Follow’
When interviewed on Newsnight, on 17 November 2005, Cameron admitted that he was ‘certainly a big Thatcher fan, but I don’t know whether that makes me a Thatcherite’ (Cameron 2005a). The distinction that Cameron made reflected the fact that many Conservative MPs now merely admired Thatcher rather than worshipped her (Bale 2009, 224). Cameron’s admiration for Thatcher became evident during his time at Oxford and he held a party in his room to celebrate her third election victory in June 1987 (Elliott and Hanning 2007, 56, 66). Cameron later admitted that Thatcher had been a ‘big influence’ upon him: ‘If you grew up under Thatcher, you either thought she was doing the wrong thing or she was doing the right thing and I thought she was doing the right thing’ (Cameron and Jones 2010, 34). Cameron joined the Conservative Research Department in September 1988 and among those who worked there at the time Thatcher was known as ‘Mother’ (Elliott and Hanning 2007, 73). Nearly 20 years later, Cameron recalled his first conversation with Thatcher, at the 1988 Christmas drinks party: ‘The Prime Minister came up and asked, “What do you do?” I said, “trade and industry”, to which she replied, “What are the trade figures today?” I had absolutely no idea’ (Cameron 2008b).
Cameron was more certain of his facts when he presented Lady Thatcher with the Morgan Stanley Great Britons Lifetime Achievement Award, at the Guildhall in London, on 31 January 2008. She was a worthy winner of this prestigious award: ‘Margaret Thatcher is a fitting recipient of the Morgan Stanley Great Britons award, when we judge greatness as it should be judged: the scale of the legacy. She made the landscape in which we live today’. Her achievements were indeed immense: ‘Today we know what Thatcherism meant for our country—victory in the Cold War, victory against unbridled trade union power, the sale of council houses, the liberation of the British economy’. Cameron also tried to establish a personal political connection between himself and Thatcher by arguing that they were both modernisers: ‘Those who say that the modern Conservative party is breaking with the legacy of Margaret Thatcher are wrong. Lady Thatcher was a moderniser, one of the great modernising prime ministers of our history’ (Cameron 2008a).
Throughout his leadership, Cameron has in fact given a number of indications that he was a great admirer of Thatcher. There were winners and losers during the 1980s, Cameron told the readers of the Sunday Telegraph on 1 October 2006: ‘But do I think Mrs Thatcher did a good job? Yes’ (Cameron 2006i). It should also be remembered that during his speech at the annual party conference, in Bournemouth that same day, he made a point of saying that Conservatives could ‘forever take pride in her magnificent achievements’ (Cameron 2006j). Two months later, in an interview for The Times on 2 December 2006, Cameron stated that when it came to the ‘big decisions’ of the day ‘Thatcher was right’ (Cameron 2006m). In his speech at the Conservative party’s spring forum, in Nottingham on 18 March 2007, Cameron spoke about Thatcher’s record as prime minister in glowing terms:
In the 1970s, Britain faced economic breakdown. Businesses that couldn’t deliver the goods. Rampant inflation. Irresponsible trades unions. An over-taxed and over-regulated economy that was the sick man of Europe. Margaret Thatcher focused on these challenges, applied Conservative ideas and values, and engineered Britain’s great economic revival. The result was something we can all be proud of. A free enterprise economy—the envy of Europe and the world (Cameron 2007c).
During one of the newspaper interviews that he gave prior to his party’s annual conference later that year, in the Sunday Times on 30 September 2007, Cameron once again praised his illustrious predecessor and made another attempt to establish a personal political connection between them: ‘I worked for Margaret Thatcher and think she achieved an enormous amount for our country’ (Cameron 2007h). At the beginning of his speech at the conference itself, in Blackpool on 3 October 2007, Cameron referred to the 1990 party conference at Bournemouth, which took place the year after the Berlin Wall had fallen. He remembered how the new political leaders of Eastern Europe had ‘walked onto that stage and praised Margaret Thatcher and our party for the inspiration she gave on our long march to freedom’ (Cameron 2007i).
Cameron has also sought to reassure Conservatives that he was following in Thatcher’s footsteps. He expressed his commitment to the ideas that had long animated her and their party in an article he wrote for the Daily Telegraph on 15 January 2007:
Those who ask whether I am a Conservative need to know that the foundation stones of the alternative government that we’re building are the ideas that should unite us all: the ideas that encouraged me as a young man to join the Conservative party and work for Margaret Thatcher. Those ideas are profound and enduring: freedom under the law, personal responsibility, sound money, strong defence, and national sovereignty (Cameron 2007a).
Cameron has reinforced this point by arguing that he has always been intent upon renewing, rather than abandoning, the Conservative party’s traditional commitments, in order to make them relevant in today’s world. Cameron spoke in these terms in his speech at the party’s annual conference, in Blackpool on 3 October 2007:
Every generation of Conservatives has to make the argument all over again for free enterprise, for freedom, for responsibility, for limited government and that’s why I stood here two years ago and said to our party, after three election defeats, that we needed to make changes and we have made those changes (Cameron 2007i).
Further, Cameron has attested to the continued importance of Thatcher’s leadership (and leadership style) for the Conservative party. During an interview on BBC Radio 5 Live, on 18 February 2009, he admitted that her conviction politics and her approach to Britain’s economic problems in the late 1970s were still relevant today:
I think that influence, that character she had, that conviction she had, I think that will be very important. Some of the things she said about the importance of living within your means, of not spending money you don’t have, about cutting your cloth was wise then and it is wise now. Perhaps we need to listen to that again (Daily Telegraph, 19 February 2009).
Two months later, on 2 May 2009, Cameron wrote a letter to Lady Thatcher to mark the 30th anniversary of her 1979 election victory or, to use his words, the ‘great day’ upon which she became prime minister. Thatcher’s premiership had been ‘awe-inspiring’ and she had set an ‘example of real courage’ which would be invaluable to the next Conservative government:
It is with huge trepidation that I attempt, thirty years on, to get rid of an exhausted Labour government and start the process of mending the national finances and tackling some deep and entrenched problems that we face. If we are elected as the next government, I know that it will be extremely difficult work—but in your life and work you have given all of us an example of real courage to follow (Cameron 2009c).
The importance that Cameron attached to the courage and determination that Thatcher had displayed as prime minister was confirmed the following October. He presented her with a bronze bust of Sir Winston Churchill at a fundraising dinner for the Churchill Museum, held in the Cabinet War Rooms on 20 October 2009, and praised her strong leadership during the early 1980s recession and the Falklands war (Daily Telegraph, 19 October 2009).
‘Responsibility is the Most Important Word in Politics’
Cameron has been heavily influenced by the Civic Conservatism espoused by David Willetts during the 1990s. Civic Conservatism offered a critique of the encroaching power of central government upon those local institutions that nourished community life (Willetts 1997). This basic idea has, according to Fraser Nelson, provided the template for many of Cameron’s speeches since he became party leader (Spectator, 24 June 2006). Nowhere was this more evident than in the Chamberlain Lecture on Communities, which Cameron delivered in Birmingham on 14 July 2006. By empowering individuals in their own communities, you enabled them to become less reliant upon the state in their daily lives: ‘That is the way to reduce the size of government—from below, as people progress from dependence to independence—not from above, by a brutal and instant reduction in spending’ (Cameron 2006g). This is not to deny, however, that reducing the size of government from above has also played a part in Cameron’s localism agenda. The existence of an ever-increasing budget deficit meant that the next Conservative government would have to make spending cuts, but Cameron was keen to stress that this should not be viewed as ‘some dreadful catastrophe’. On the contrary, as he argued on The Andrew Marr Show on 26 July 2009, it provided ‘a big opportunity to deliver public services in a different and a better way, and to totally reform our government and put people back in control’ (Cameron 2009e).
Cameron believed that there was such a thing as society, but he has always been careful to distinguish it from the state, in much the same way that Thatcher did in her more famous comments upon the subject 20 years earlier (Thatcher 1993, 626). One of the Conservative party’s campaign slogans under Cameron, ‘Our Society, Your Life’, reflected the common ground that he shared with Thatcher in this respect. Indeed, Andrew Rawnsley remarked that Cameron was ‘not rejecting the Thatcherite concept of society; he is seeking to rehabilitate it’ (The Observer, 18 December 2005). For Cameron, society consisted of individuals who lived together in local communities. These communities, and the sense of community that underpinned them, were being destroyed by the corrosive power of ‘big government’. In the Hugo Young Memorial Lecture, which he delivered in London on 10 November 2009, Cameron argued:
The paradox at the heart of big government is that by taking power and responsibility away from the individual, it has only served to individuate them. What is seen in principle as an act of social solidarity, has in practice led to the greatest atomisation of our society. The once natural bonds that existed between people—of duty and responsibility—have been replaced by the synthetic bonds of the state—regulation and bureaucracy (Cameron 2009g).
It was thus necessary to revive the natural bonds that had once bound communities together. This could be achieved through the activity of local government, voluntary action and a reinvigorated co-operative movement. The revival of local communities would promote a sense of belonging among their members, particularly among those groups that often felt excluded, and could even encourage a sense of national identity.
Herein lay the significance of Joseph Chamberlain and the city of Birmingham for Cameron. The sense of civic pride that Chamberlain had instilled into the people of Birmingham during his time as mayor continued to exert a powerful grip upon the city, and it provided a municipal example which Cameron thought was worthy of wider emulation today. He stated at the Local Government Association Conference, in Bournemouth on 6 July 2006, that ‘Out there are the twenty-first century Chamberlains, the civic leaders who will be talked about in another hundred years’ time’ (Cameron 2006f). Decentralisation provided the basis for a revolution in local government that would bring power (quite literally in the field of energy provision) and public services closer to the people, and give them greater influence over how the money they paid in Council Tax was spent. As the scandal over MPs’ expenses unfolded, Cameron argued in a speech at the Open University, in Milton Keynes on 26 May 2009, that a ‘radical redistribution of power’ would also help to restore public confidence in the political system (Cameron 2009d).
As Civic Conservatism has never been a static concept, its emphasis has inevitably changed over time, and so too therefore has the nature of its impact upon Cameron. Willetts himself later took a more positive view of the role that social justice should play in Conservative politics than he had done to begin with (Hickson 2009, 357). In a more recent contribution, Phillip Blond has sought to inject an economic imperative into the civic strand of Conservatism. Writing in Prospect, on 28 February 2009, he argued that ‘vibrant local economies’ were necessary to ‘uphold the party’s civic vision’. Decentralising economic power would make ‘markets truly free’, by ending ‘corporate domination’ within them, and they would then be able to ‘work for the many, not the few’. This was the way to complete the ‘task of recapitalising the poor’ (Blond 2009). Blond had been writing along these lines for some time and it was possible to detect their influence upon Cameron in the speech that he made at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland on 30 January 2009:
It’s time to help create vibrant, local economies—even if that means standing in the way of the global corporate juggernauts. And it’s time to decentralise economic power, to spread opportunity and wealth and ownership more equally through society, and that will mean, as some have put it, recapitalising the poor rather than just the banks (Cameron 2009a).
Further, Blond has written approvingly of Cameron’s support for co-operatives, and the way in which they could help to revive ‘local commerce’ by challenging the monopoly power of the ‘big-box retailers’.
Back to Joseph Chamberlain: by invoking the name of Chamberlain, who served as mayor of Birmingham in 1873-76, it would perhaps be more correct to say that Cameron was seeking a restoration rather than a revolution. The promotion of municipal growth and endeavour was the one ‘Victorian value’ that the 1980s Conservative party had ignored, with good reason in Cameron’s opinion, and which he was now intent upon reviving. He wrote in the Daily Telegraph, on 15 April 2008, that ‘The only area of Margaret Thatcher’s legacy I regret is the centralisation of government which was performed in those days’ (Cameron 2008b). It was something, however, that she had been forced into in Cameron’s view. As he argued in a speech in Bath on 22 March 2007, the actions of ‘crazy left-wing local politicians’ had made it necessary to ‘increase the levers of central control’. Given the choice, Conservatives preferred local government to central government and so, under his leadership, the party was merely ‘getting back to its roots’ (Cameron 2007d).
Indeed, it would appear that Cameron adhered to his own set of ‘Victorian values’: voluntary service and co-operative action were also children of the Victorian period. Cameron wanted to empower the multiplicity of voluntary and charitable organisations that existed because their participatory ethos would help to foster what he termed, in the Annual Hinton Lecture to the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, which he delivered in Westminster on 23 November 2005, as a culture of ‘pro-social behaviour’ (Cameron 2005b). It was important to Cameron that we accepted our responsibilities and his proposal for a form of ‘national citizen service’ for 16-year-olds, which he first floated in his campaign for the party leadership, was designed to instil into young people the belief that we all had ‘an obligation to each other’ (Cameron and Jones 2010, 143). Of course, the origins of the co-operative movement were also to be found in the Victorian period. The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers was established in 1844 and this provided the inspiration for the Conservative Co-operative Movement that was established in 2007. At its launch, in Manchester on 8 November 2007, Cameron praised the communal ethos of the co-operative movement: ‘a co-op is part of the community it serves’ and could thus respond to its needs far quicker than ‘a central state agency’ (Cameron 2007j).
It was also evident from what Cameron has said that the next Conservative government would seek to complete the work of the last. In a speech on modern Conservatism, at the think tank Demos, in London on 30 January 2006, Cameron expressed the hope that a modern, compassionate Conservatism would provide Conservatives with the means of ‘fulfilling, not betraying our inheritance’. It would enable them to combine the preservation of the free market consensus that they had created in the 1980s with the resolution of those ‘social problems which were left unresolved at the end of our time in government’, and which remained so today due to Labour’s failings (Cameron 2006a). Indeed, these social problems could be solved in much the same way as Britain’s economic problems had been in the 1980s. As Cameron wrote in the Daily Telegraph, on 8 September 2007, ‘Much of the answer is the same: give people more freedom and control over their lives, so they can exercise responsibility’ (Cameron 2007g). Further, by tackling the various problems associated with family breakdown, government would be able to divest itself of some of its more burdensome (and expensive) social responsibilities. In his speech at the annual party conference, in Bournemouth on 4 October 2006, Cameron said that the last Conservative government had been committed to ‘rolling back the state’ by restoring economic responsibility to individuals and businesses. The next Conservative government would ‘roll forward the frontiers of society’ by extending the parameters of social responsibility (Cameron 2006k). The shift from the economy to society could not disguise the fact, however, that Cameron shared Thatcher’s concern about ‘recognising the limitations of government’ (Cameron and Jones 2010, 309).
Indeed, the link between social responsibility and limited government cannot be ignored, and it could fairly be described as the ghost in the machine of Cameron’s politics. Social responsibility, as he stated in his speech at the annual party conference, in Bournemouth on 1 October 2006, was the ‘essence of liberal Conservatism’ and it placed an emphasis upon individual action (Cameron 2006j). He elaborated upon the theme of what social responsibility entailed in his second speech at the conference three days later: ‘That means a Britain where instead of always turning to the state for the answers we turn to each other and ask: what more can we do together to solve this problem?’ (Cameron 2006k) There was therefore, as Cameron made clear in a speech to a party conference on social responsibility, held in London on 15 January 2007, an ‘expectation that, in the first instance at least, responsibility lies with the people’. He also made a point of referring to ‘big citizens’ and a ‘limited state’ in this speech (Cameron 2007b). On another occasion, in his speech at the annual party conference, in Birmingham on 1 October 2008, Cameron declared: ‘Social responsibility, not state control’ (Cameron 2008d). Social responsibility was really a modern euphemism for individual responsibility and we were ‘all in this together’ because everyone had a role to play in solving the pressing social problems of the day. This, in turn, was because, as Cameron stated in the House of Commons on 24 May 2005, ‘Central government do not, and cannot, have all the answers’ (Hansard, col. 661, 24 May 2005).
During the Scarman Lecture on Poverty, which Cameron delivered in London on 24 November 2006, he argued that it was only by rolling ‘forward the frontiers of society’ that the war against poverty would be won. It was the responsibility of ‘every part of society’, individuals, families, communities, businesses and the public sector, to improve the ‘well-being of every member of society’ (Cameron 2006l). This was why, in the summer of 2007, he supported the establishment of social enterprise zones in deprived areas; Cameron also admitted, in an article for the Guardian on 7 August 2007, that they were ‘Modelled on the enterprise zones that helped revive the economies of our inner cities in the 1980s’ (Cameron 2007f). By this time, the Conservatives had already formulated a mission statement for themselves which focused upon the need for a ‘responsibility revolution’. This was the phrase that Cameron had used in his foreword to the revised version of Built to Last, a statement of aims and values, which was published on 16 August 2006, and endorsed by party members on 19 September 2006. ‘That is the mission of the modern Conservative party: a responsibility revolution to create an opportunity society—a society in which everybody is a somebody, a doer not a done-for’ (Conservative Party 2006, 3). It should thus be no surprise to find that Cameron believed that ‘Responsibility is the most important word in politics’ (Cameron and Jones 2010, 141). It was also ‘the golden thread that connects all our policies and positions’ (Hutton and Cameron 2009).
‘We Risk Becoming Once Again the Sick Man of Europe’
Cameron believed that his commitment to social responsibility was also an important mark of partisan identification; that is, it served to distinguish the Conservative party from the Labour party. This was because there was no room for society in Labour’s conception of politics as a zero-sum game between the state and the individual. Cameron made this clear in his speech at the Conservative party’s annual conference, in Birmingham on 1 October 2008:
For Labour there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society—just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance (Cameron 2008d).
It would seem then that the Labour party had not really changed that much under Tony Blair’s leadership. It was clear to Cameron that New Labour remained wedded to the party’s old principles of ‘legislation, regulation, and bureaucracy’. Its ingrained Fabianism had spawned what he described, in the Hugo Young Memorial Lecture, in London on 10 November 2009, as a penchant for ‘command and control’ government which had been reinforced by the more recent preoccupation with news management (Cameron 2009g). This led Cameron to argue that the Labour party had still to find a role in the ‘post-bureaucratic age’ and that its continued adherence to the outdated practice of ‘top-down government’ had only succeeded in ‘infantilising people’. In a speech at the Royal Society of Arts, in London on 23 April 2007, he made a point of saying that things would be very different under a Conservative government:
I want people to understand that the next Conservative government is not going to treat its citizens like children. It’s not going to do everything for them, promise to solve every problem, respond to every incident, accident or report with a new initiative, regulation or law (Cameron 2007e).
The changeover from Blair to Brown two months later merely reinforced the reflex interventionism of New Labour. Cameron maintained that Gordon Brown had not changed his spots at all: he remained committed to the guiding precepts of old Labour. The ‘big clunking fist’ was always ready to wield the heavy hand of government. The decision to take Northern Rock into temporary public ownership in February 2008 was indicative of this. Cameron has thus described a Labour government led by Brown in crude Orwellian terms: ‘like a boot stamping on a human face—forever’ (Elliott and Hanning 2007, 294).
Cameron has therefore constructed a contemporary political narrative which bears a strong resemblance to that which Thatcher developed in opposition to the policies of the Labour governments of the 1970s. It could thus be argued that, in the case of Britain, there has been a pattern to how centre-right oppositions have attempted to undermine social democratic governments. Indeed, like Thatcher before him, Cameron has not been afraid to invoke the spectre of Labour governments past in order to undermine the party’s electoral credibility. Even though the main contours of the political landscape are now very different from what they were in 1979, not least because of the reforms introduced by the Thatcher governments, this may still prove to be a tactically astute move on Cameron’s part. This is because Andrew Denham and Kieron O’Hara have argued that the link between modernisation and electoral recovery in the post-1945 Conservative party should not be exaggerated. The Conservatives have usually been returned to office on the back of the record of the previous Labour government (Denham and O’Hara 2007a, 168). This is the context within which Cameron’s claim that Brown had ‘lost control of the nation’s finances’ must be seen. It was made in order to undermine New Labour’s reputation for economic competence in the eyes of the electorate.
The profligacy of the Blair and Brown governments, after New Labour was no longer bound by the pledge to adhere to Conservative spending targets during its first two years in office, was Cameron’s starting point. In a speech on the economy, in Birmingham on 19 May 2008, he said: ‘They have splashed the cash like there’s no tomorrow—but the trouble is, there is a tomorrow, and it’s got to be paid for’ (Cameron 2008c). The outcome was that Britain was ill-equipped to deal with the effects of the global credit crunch and subsequent recession. Labour had failed to ‘fix the roof when the sun was shining’ and so ‘the cupboard is bare’; a critique that illustrated the continuing influence of Lynton Crosby’s Australian experience upon recent Conservative electoral strategy (Elliott and Hanning 2009, 359). The Brown government therefore responded to the economic downturn by resorting to record levels of borrowing in order to finance its fiscal stimulus. Speaking in the House of Commons on 22 April 2009, after Alistair Darling had introduced his Budget, Cameron stated that the scale of the deficit was now ‘more than Denis Healey borrowed when he was forced to go to the International Monetary Fund’ in 1976, but that was hardly surprising as ‘all Labour governments run out of money’ in the end. Cameron continued: ‘The last Labour government gave us the winter of discontent; this Labour government have given us the decade of debt. The last Labour government left the dead unburied; this one leaves the debts unpaid’ (Hansard, col. 254, 22 April 2009). Indeed, debt levels were now such that there was a real possibility that Britain could default on its repayments in the future. A new age of austerity could not therefore be avoided. It was time to champion the virtues of good housekeeping again and to live within our means. As we have seen, Cameron was not afraid to invoke the name of Thatcher to make his point and, as 2009 gave way to 2010, he began to use another one of her phrases: ‘we can’t go on like this’ (Daily Telegraph, 5 January 2010). In words that echoed Thatcher’s assessment of Britain’s problems in the late 1970s, Cameron told the Conservative party’s spring forum, in Cheltenham on 26 April 2009, that ‘Unless we deal with this debt crisis, we risk becoming once again the sick man of Europe’ (Cameron 2009b).
How did the Conservative party propose to deal with the debt crisis? On the one hand, it would adopt a more rigorous approach to the control of public expenditure than Labour, and it would do so immediately in order to avoid the fate of such countries as Greece. For obvious political reasons, Cameron has been keen to stress that this approach did not mean that the next Conservative government would make wholesale cuts in public expenditure. The Conservatives would no longer seek to compete with Labour in the field of government spending, from 2010 to 2011, but would seek to make more modest increases in public expenditure instead (Dorey 2009, 265). A Cameron government would also strive to make savings by tackling waste and inefficiency, including that generated by politicians and the political system itself, by scrapping identity cards and the new National Health Service computer system, and by reducing the number of MPs at Westminster from 650 to 585. It was time, as Cameron stated in his speech at the Conservative party’s spring forum, in Brighton on 28 February 2010, ‘to put our government on a diet’ (Cameron 2010b). Initially, Cameron insisted that expenditure on the National Health Service, which he has often expressed his personal commitment to, would be ring-fenced by the next Conservative government. This position proved difficult to maintain, however, given the likely future financial implications of the mounting debt crisis for the whole public sector. On 9 September 2009, Andrew Lansley, Shadow Health Secretary, therefore announced that health spending would also rise much more slowly under a Conservative government than it had done under Labour (Daily Telegraph, 10 September 2009). There was another, more damaging, change of emphasis four months later. Cameron announced, on The Politics Show on 31 January 2010, that there would be no ‘swingeing cuts’ in the first year of a Conservative government (Cameron 2010a). This change of emphasis was more damaging, as the polls quickly revealed, because it created the impression that Cameron and George Osborne, Shadow Chancellor, disagreed over how best to deal with the deficit. Or, more precisely, it confirmed the existence of differences that had first become evident, in private at least, the previous autumn (Sunday Times, 28 February 2010).
On the other hand, in language reminiscent of that used by Goran Persson during his time as prime minister of Sweden in the 1990s, the Conservatives have stressed that everyone would ‘share the pain’ of the spending cuts that will be necessary to reduce the budget deficit. Ministers would be required to set an example for the belt tightening to come: their pay would be cut by 5 per cent and then frozen for the remainder of the next parliament (Cameron and Jones 2010, 377). The logic of this approach underpinned the speech that George Osborne made at the annual party conference, in Manchester on 6 October 2009. There would be a one-year pay freeze in the public sector (for those earning more than £18,000 per year), public sector pensions would be capped at £50,000 per annum, the Conservatives would retain the new 50 per cent top rate of tax announced by Labour, the state pension age would be increased from 65 to 66 from 2016 instead of 2026, families with an annual income of more than £50,000 would no longer be entitled to child tax credits, and only the poor and families with disabled children would benefit from child trust funds. The organising principle behind these wide-ranging proposals was clear: everyone would be affected by them in one way or another; in other words, we would all ‘share the pain’. Osborne himself chose to make this point in more voter-friendly language, that is, ‘We are all in this together’ (The Times, 7 October 2009). When Cameron spoke in Manchester, two days later, he argued that it would be a rewarding experience for each of us to play our part in getting Britain back on its feet:
And when we look back we will say not that the government made it happen … not that the minister made it happen … but the businesswoman made it happen … the police officer made it happen … the father made it happen … the teacher made it happen. You made it happen (Cameron 2009f).
In this way, it could be argued, the participatory ethos that Cameron had long championed as the means of solving the country’s social problems now had a role to play in solving its economic problems too.
‘We can Take that Revolution All the Way’
In two particular areas it is possible to argue that Cameron has tried to link the policies that his government will pursue to those which the Thatcher governments adopted: home ownership and, perhaps more surprisingly, the environment. Indeed, Cameron has argued that these two policy areas were themselves linked in the sense that, as he wrote in the Independent on Sunday on 26 March 2006, ‘house-building plays its part in the broader fight against climate change’: ‘Our goal is a Britain in which there are more beautiful, affordable, eco-friendly homes’ (Cameron 2006b). In developing this argument, however, it is important to remember that the emphasis upon home ownership in Conservative politics predated the introduction of the ‘Right to Buy’ in 1980; the creation of a ‘property-owning democracy’ had been a Conservative aspiration ever since Noel Skelton coined the term in 1924. Further, Thatcher’s statements on the environment were often designed to promote the nuclear option over coal, and her opposition to the coal industry owed more to political considerations than its environmental impact.
First, home ownership: speaking to first-time buyers in Chiswick on 27 March 2006, Cameron declared: ‘I passionately believe that everyone should have the right to buy their own home’ (Cameron 2006c). In his speech at the Conservative First Time Buyers Summit, in Westminster on 17 August 2006, Cameron floated the idea of turning rents into mortgage repayments. ‘In this way we can create a whole new generation of homeowners; we can take that revolution all the way’ (Cameron 2006h). Cameron was making a conscious link with the Thatcher years here as the revolution he was referring to began with the sale of council houses during her first term of office. Indeed, turning rents into mortgages was not an entirely new idea: it was first floated by Peter Walker during his time at the Welsh Office in the late 1980s, when it received Thatcher’s full support (Walker 1991, 214-215; Thatcher 1993, 602-603), and it resurfaced again under John Major in 1993. Cameron’s Conservatives were also considering letting employees borrow money from their occupational pension funds in order to boost their chances of obtaining a mortgage (in a proposal based upon the so-called A401(k) scheme in America: Daily Telegraph, 27 January 2007). In his speech at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland on 30 January 2009, Cameron praised the ‘ownership revolution’ that Thatcher had launched in the 1980s. By giving ‘millions a new stake in our economy’ it had created the kind of ‘truly popular capitalism’ that we needed today (Cameron 2009a).
Cameron has also committed the Conservative party to removing the various ‘roadblocks to ownership’ that currently existed. He referred to them in the Independent on Sunday on 26 March 2006 and added that ‘we’d get rid of Home Information Packs and look at all the ways in which the tax system penalises home ownership’ (Cameron 2006b). In his speech at the annual party conference, in Blackpool on 1 October 2007, George Osborne announced that the next Conservative government would abolish stamp duty for first-time buyers on properties worth less than £250,000. In his own speech at Blackpool, two days later, Cameron gave his unqualified support to a policy which showed that ‘This is the party of aspiration and opportunity’ (Cameron 2007i). Osborne also proposed to increase the inheritance tax threshold from £300,000 to £1 million in an equally popular move which was clearly designed to reinforce the effects of the change in stamp duty. The Conservative party has also promised to abolish Home Information Packs on the grounds that they have increased the costs and bureaucracy surrounding home ownership since they were introduced in 2007.
Second, the environment: the argument that there was any sort of relationship between Cameron and Thatcher on this subject would, at first sight, appear difficult to sustain. He has, after all, used the environment to show just how much the Conservative party has changed under his leadership. Cameron has given every indication that he was personally committed to the future well-being of the planet and that the party, under his leadership, would take green issues seriously. Yet the first Conservative leader to attach such importance to the environment was actually Margaret Thatcher in the late 1980s (Campbell 2003, 642-652; Thatcher 1993, 638-641). Cameron has admitted as much himself and he has also commented upon the impact that her famous speech to the Royal Society on 27 September 1988 had upon him (Cameron 2006e and 2007a; Cameron and Jones 2010, 232). There were nevertheless some important differences between Cameron and Thatcher when it came to the environment: he has made a point of riding a bicycle whereas she was a strong supporter of the car; he has been willing to consider the introduction of green taxes whereas she recoiled from them; and he has been an enthusiastic supporter of renewable forms of energy whereas she was not. There were also, however, significant similarities: both of them believed that global warming and climate change were real problems that could not be ignored; both of them believed that it was only natural for the Conservative party to protect the planet for the benefit of future generations; and both of them believed that the nuclear option had an important role to play in solving our long-term energy needs.
Thatcher also believed that advances in science rather than regulation would help to solve the environmental problems we faced and that science worked through industry and the market (Campbell 2003, 644, 646, 651). Cameron shared this basic outlook. He did not think that technology could provide all the answers—binding international targets and changes in behaviour also had important roles to play—but without it we could not hope to tackle such issues as global warming. This was why research and development in the fields of bio-fuel technology and carbon capture and storage techniques should be encouraged. It was Cameron’s belief in the ‘almost unlimited power of innovation’ that made him, as he wrote in the Daily Telegraph on 23 April 2006, optimistic about the future of ‘our planet and all mankind’ (Cameron 2006e). Cameron was equally sure that government could not provide all the answers to our environmental problems. Once again, as he wrote in the Daily Telegraph in April 2006, ‘we have a shared responsibility to bring about positive change’ (Cameron 2006e). The emphasis that Cameron has placed upon encouraging more environmentally aware behaviour, on an individual, family and corporate level, was indicative of this. His support for decentralised energy provision also reflected his commitment to what he referred to, in an interview with the Guardian on 15 December 2009, as a ‘localist green revolution’ (Cameron 2009h). Cameron integrated these various themes in his speech on climate change in Oslo on 21 April 2006: ‘By setting the right market framework, we can achieve the right outcomes with the greatest possible efficiency and the least possible regulation and centralised direction’ (Cameron 2006d). It was an approach that he believed made him a real friend of the earth in the post-bureaucratic age.
Conclusion
David Cameron has often given the impression that Margaret Thatcher was the stranger at the feast in his Conservative party. He has striven to end the party’s long obsession with purely economic issues, which began in her day, in order to re-establish its position in the centre ground of politics, where New Labour has long resided. Disraeli rather than Thatcher would appear to guide Cameron in the sense that he too believed that there should be a strong social dimension to Conservative politics. Cameron has also argued that the next Conservative government would be very different from the last Conservative government; it would not attach the same importance to tax cuts for instance, and it would place greater emphasis upon such issues as poverty and the environment. Impressions can, of course, sometimes be misleading and, if we take a closer look at Cameron’s leadership, then it becomes apparent that Thatcher has actually exerted considerable influence upon him and how he has conducted himself as leader.
Cameron has been an admirer of Thatcher since his student days at Oxford. He has often praised her achievements as prime minister and the example of strong leadership that she set. Cameron has made clear that the next Conservative government would complete the work of the last and, in doing so, would be guided by its own set of ‘Victorian values’. His emphasis upon social responsibility encapsulated Thatcher’s preference for individual action over government intervention in a way that was more suited to the demands of the 21st century. We were all in this together because everyone had a role to play in solving the pressing social problems of the day (and, likewise, we would all ‘share the pain’ of the expenditure cuts needed to deal with the debt crisis). It was in this participatory sense that Cameron’s Conservatism was really inclusive. There was such a thing as society, but it was different from the state. Cameron’s critique of New Labour stemmed from this distinction and his efforts to undermine the economic competence of the Brown government mirrored Thatcher’s tactics in the late 1970s. Cameron has also been willing to acknowledge openly her influence upon him when it came to two long-standing policy priorities, that is, home ownership and the environment. Rather than being the stranger at the feast, Thatcher has thus been a welcome guest in Cameron’s Conservative party, even if her presence has not always been openly acknowledged. Such coyness was inevitable in a party that was desperate to convince the electorate that it had changed, but which could only escape its recent past at the expense of the unity necessary to achieve electoral success.