Cameron’s Conservativism: influences, interpretations and implications
Hugh Bochel, University of Lincoln
School of Social Sciences
University of Lincoln
Brayford Pool
Lincoln LN6 7TS
Conservative approaches to social policy since 1997
In the same way as Labour arguably took many years to come to terms with and recover from the
election defeat of 1979, and the subsequent dominance of Margaret Thatcher and her ideas, the
Conservative Party too seemed for some time unable to learn the lessons of defeat in 1997 and to
move away from its Thatcherite position and its influences on the development of social policy
within the Conservative Party. Yet, over time, and following a number of leaders, the Conservatives
were able to return to power, albeit in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, with at least the
possibility of developing a somewhat different social policy agenda than the Conservative
governments of the 1980s and 1990s. This paper explores the changing Conservative Party from
1997 to 2010.
The Thatcher legacy
Having been a member of Ted Heath’s government from 1970 to 1974, Margaret Thatcher won the
1979 general election on the back of the ‘winter of discontent’, which had seen high levels of trade
union action, including strikes, and set out to reduce and restructure government in the United
Kingdom. She had become converted to free market views and believed that the state had grown
excessively, with levels of taxation too high and the subversion of individuals’ responsibility. Her
governments sought, albeit with mixed success, to cut taxation and expenditure on public services,
to reduce government involvement and regulation, and to privatise state enterprises, and these
policies, together with three successive general election victories in 1979, 1983 and 1987, reinforced
her popularity with Conservative Party members, although not necessarily with the electorate.
Whilst the Heath government of 1970-4 has often been viewed, in hindsight, as something of a
transition from the one-nation Conservatism that had been seen as dominating the leadership of the
Conservative Party since the 1950s, the Thatcher governments brought the new right influenced
wing of the Conservatives to the fore.
Indeed, the extent of Thatcher’s dominance, and the support for her and her policies amongst Party
members, was to have a major impact upon the Conservative Party for more than a decade.
Although Thatcher’s successor, John Major, won the 1992 general election despite virtually a decade
of poor economic performance and high unemployment, his government immediately ran into
major difficulty when the pound was forced out of the European Monetary System; this was
compounded by internal divisions, particularly over Europe, and a growing concern over ‘sleaze’
within the government, and the Conservatives were heavily defeated by Blair’s New Labour at the
1997 general election.
The New Labour challenge
The general election results of 1997, 2001 and 2005 serve to highlight the difficulties that the
Conservative Party experienced in responding to New Labour. From the mid-1990s Labour’s shift
towards the centre and apparent control of the political agenda, together with the Conservatives’
attachment to Thatcherism, meant that the Conservatives found it hard to develop an alternative
identity and policies, so that they found it difficult, for example, to reconcile the public’s apparent
desire for increased expenditure on public services with the Party’s attachment to tax cuts. New
Labour may have failed to make the decisive break with Thatcherism that many of its supporters
might have wished, but in the same way the Conservatives found it hard to develop an approach
that was distinctive from New Labour and appealing to the public.
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Changing leaders
Part of Margaret Thatcher’s legacy to the Conservative Party was arguably to leave it more
ideologically driven than it had ever been. The Party that had been frequently been described as
flexible and pragmatic in its pursuit of government, was now divided, including over Europe, the role
of the public sector, and moral issues, with the right of the Party generally dominant, inside and
outside Parliament. This was to be reflected in the Party’s struggle to come to terms with New
Labour and its own position in Opposition.
Following John Major’s resignation in 1997 his successor, William Hague, arguably tried to follow
Blair in ‘modernising’ his party. Like Blair he took up the principle of one member one vote,
increasing the power of party members in electing the leader at the expense of MPs and creating a
position where all members of constituency associations were able to participate in selecting
candidates; he also created a new policy forum to discuss and debate party policy, and he
introduced new rules for the election of a leader, increasing the role of party members by giving
them a ballot on the final two candidates.
Hague also initially attempted to reach out to potential supporters by apologising for the Party’s
failure to listen to voters in the final years of the Major government and adopting a more liberal line
on some social issues, such as gender, race and sexuality. However, he struggled to persuade many
within the Party of the need to convince the electorate that the public services were safe in
Conservative hands, and in practice the Party continued to argue for privatisation, low income tax
and a flexible labour force, and ultimately his period as leader was characterised by an attempt to
consolidate the Conservative’s core support, so that in terms of policy Hague’s most distinctive shift
was to harden the Conservatives’ line on the Euro, saying that the UK would not join the single
currency for at least two parliaments.
By the time of the 2001 general election, with press speculation rife about who was likely to succeed
Hague, the Conservatives had failed to regain a reputation for economic competence and had
produced few new significant policy initiatives, in part because they found it difficult to deal with
New Labour’s shift to the centre ground, in part because those issues on which they were potentially
electorally strongest were those of least salience to voters, and in part because the primary
emphasis was on maintaining the Party’s ‘core vote’, rather than reaching out to potential new
supporters. The 2001 general election manifesto therefore again called for a smaller state and
‘welfare without the state’, and emphasised the Party’s support for the family, including tax cuts,
‘freeing’ schools from local authority control, increasing police numbers, tougher sentencing for
criminals, and increased expenditure on the health service. Within hours of the election result being
announced Hague resigned, with the Conservatives effectively having failed to regain any of the
ground that they had lost in 1997.
In the ensuing leadership contest perhaps the biggest surprise was the defeat of Michael Portillo.
However, whilst he had previously been associated with the right, following the 1997 general
election he had generally moved towards a more liberal and socially inclusive approach, and he
clearly wished to take the Conservative Party in such a direction. One of the other contenders,
Kenneth Clarke, was pro-European, whilst the Party as a whole had become more Eurosceptic. The
final three candidates were David Davis, Michael Ancrum and Iain Duncan-Smith. After the ballots of
MPs left members a choice between Clarke and Duncan-Smith it was not surprising that DuncanSmith received 61 per cent of the vote in the membership ballot.
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To some extent Duncan-Smith’s leadership followed a similar pattern to that of Hague, with
attempts to be more more positive about public services, more socially inclusive, and to recognise
the ‘sins of the past’, perhaps best summed-up by then Party Chairman, Teresa May’s, speech to the
Party conference in October 2002, when she said that the public viewed the Conservatives as the
‘nasty party’. Duncan-Smith himself set out his vision of ‘Compassionate Conservatism’ in a speech
delivered on a Glasgow housing estate in February 2002, in which he pledged his commitment to
public service reform and helping ‘the vulnerable’ (Seldon and Snowdon, 2005). However, like
Hague, he struggled to generate widespread support for a more inclusive approach to social policy
within the Conservative Party, and particularly within the Shadow Cabinet. However, unlike Hague,
Duncan Smith’s advocacy of ‘compassionate Conservatism’ did find an audience, particularly
amongst a group of new, young Conservative MPs who would eventually come to prominence when
David Cameron became leader in 2005. Following Cameron’s election as Party leader, Duncan Smith
would become chair of the policy review group on social justice.
Under Duncan-Smith there continued to be no improvement in the Conservatives’ performance in
opinion polls, although they did do somewhat better in European and local elections. Perhaps as a
result there continued to be whisperings, conspiracies and divisions about Duncan-Smith’s
leadership; there was also some concern about payments to his wife for work done as part of his
office, which did not help his position. In autumn 2003 he was challenged by a request for a noconfidence vote by the backbench MP, Derek Conway, which received support from at least 25
Conservative MPs. Following this he lost the confidence vote and resigned.
The next Conservative Party leader was Michael Howard, a former Home Secretary. Whilst some saw
this as something of a return to the Thatcher/Major era, Howard did make the Conservative Party in
parliament something more of a political force. However, having backed the war in Iraq, Howard was
unable to exploit one of the government’s biggest weaknesses and at the 2005 general election,
whilst the Party did gain thirty-three seats, perhaps in part aided by Blair and Labour’s increasing
unpopularity, its share of the vote increased by only 0.5 per cent, undermining any claims of a
significant advance, and Howard stood down as leader.
Each of Cameron’s three predecessors did appear to embrace more socially liberal and inclusive
policies early in their leaderships, but none appeared particularly comfortable in this position and it
was perhaps unsurprising that each moved back to the right after failures to increase the
Conservatives’ standing in the opinion polls (Dorey, 2007). Indeed, the continued support for
Thatcherism within the Party led Bale (2008) to point out that the Party failed ‘to separate the
impressive election victories (and huge personal following among party activists) by Mrs Thatcher
and her far more ambivalent record when it came to public policy and indeed public support’ (p.
282), and that the failure to admit that things went wrong made it difficult for the Party to produce
credible policy responses to New Labour.
David Cameron’s leadership
Following Michael Howard’s resignation, in December 2005 David Cameron defeated David Davis for
the leadership of the Conservative Party, following a context which was seen by some as a
‘moderniser’ versus a Thatcherite traditionalist, with the former gaining 68 per cent of votes cast by
Party members. His view of ‘modernisation’ appeared to suggest a break with Thatcherism, with
more socially liberal and inclusive policies, and an emphasis upon the Party being more socially
representative in its membership and particularly within parliament (Denham and O’Hara, 2007).
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Almost immediately Cameron sought to move the Conservatives towards the centre ground of
British politics, arguing, for example, for the Conservatives to support social action to promote social
justice and combat poverty, stating that economic stability would take precedence over tax cuts, and
suggesting that the Party should reach out beyond its core support. Cameron’s stance on such issues
was widely perceived as genuine, and as harking back to ‘Tory paternalism’ and one-nation
conservatism (Dorey, 2007), as well as reflecting his experiences of the NHS with his disabled son,
Ivan, who died in February 2009 aged only six. Critics noted, however, that he had been one of the
architects of the Party’s 2005 general election manifesto which had been relatively hard-line in its
policies.
Where policy development was concerned, the early years of Cameron’s leadership were, arguably
deliberately, ‘policy-lite’, with frequent general statements of principle from the leader together
with assertions that policies take time to develop. Kenny (2009) has pointed out that ‘The first two
years of his leadership witnessed a concerted attempt to shift public perceptions of the Tories and to
develop Cameron’s own political persona in ways that symbolised this transformation. This involved
an important set of symbolic and policy shifts, designed to ram home the message that the Party
was willing to move away from Thatcherism and the rightward lurches on crime, migration and
morality attempted by his predecessors William Hague and Michael Howard’ (p. 152).
With echoes of New Labour’s Policy Forum, the Conservatives established six policy review groups.
These resulted in a series of ‘Policy Green Papers’, but in many cases were without clear policy
proposals or any commitment from the leadership to follow policy recommendations that were
sometimes contradictory across the groups. It is, however, possible to identify a number of trends or
common features across the Policy Green Papers. These included: a continued use of assessment
and increased sanctions for benefit claimants; a commitment to a strong voluntary and social
enterprise element in society and the provision of public services together with significant private
sector input; promises of reductions in bureaucracy, but retaining inspections and audits; choice for
consumers of services.
Cameron’s attempts to realign the Conservative Party were arguably helped by the Labour
government’s difficulties in persuading the electorate that its public services reforms were working,
with problems with NHS Trusts’ deficits in 2006-7, crises around the work of the Home Office, over
crime, particularly knife crime, and immigration, as well as the loss of confidential data. Indeed, the
Home Secretary, John Reid, was led to acknowledge to the House of Commons’ Home Affairs
Committee, in May 2006, that the Home Office was ‘not fit for purpose’. More generally Labour’s
grip on the political agenda was loosening, so that it was increasingly in the position of having to
respond to rather than shape issues and debates. At the same time, the attention of the media was
increasingly focussing upon the travails of the government, leaving the Conservatives and their
policies relatively free of detailed scrutiny.
How did Cameron’s Conservatism come about?
Having been the dominant political party in Britain for the bulk of the twentieth century, from 1997
the Conservative Party suffered an unprecedented three general election defeats and three
consecutive Labour governments. These, and other developments, meant that the Party faced a
series of major challenges including: the political challenge of having to respond to New Labour and
to socio-economic change, so that simple appeals to ‘core voters’ were insufficient to win elections;
the ideological challenge of overcoming the dominance of Thatcherism within the Conservative
Party; the challenge of having to adapt to a world of globalisation but also, towards the end of the
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period, financial crisis and economic downturn; and the need to respond to new themes and issues,
such as global warming and terrorism.
Following the 2001 general election the Conservative Party had made almost no electoral progress,
and even after 2005 the gains that they had made were at least in part down to the growing
unpopularity of Tony Blair and the Labour government, particularly over the war in Iraq, but also
with the loss of middle class voters in seats in the Midlands and the south of England. The harsh
reality was that the Conservatives’ share of the vote was 30.7 per cent in 1997, 31.7 per cent in
2001, and 32.4 per cent in 2005. Even allowing for parties needing a smaller share of the vote to win
a parliamentary majority than in the past, the lack of progress over eight years and the distance
required to win office, meant that the Party continued to face a major electoral challenge.
After three successive leaders had failed to make any significant inroads into Labour’s majority, and
in particular had failed to increase support for the Conservatives at the ballot box, when Cameron
became leader he made clear that the Conservatives needed to broaden their electoral appeal
beyond the core vote that was then insufficient to deliver victory. In particular he quickly sought to
make Conservative candidates more diverse, including attempting to get more women and black
candidates selected for winnable seats, through the development of an ‘A-list’. He also argued that
the Conservatives had to accept that Blair and New Labour had been right in their analysis of the
mood of the United Kingdom in the 1990s, with economic success and social justice going hand-inhand.
The Conservatives were also weak on what had traditionally been one of their strongest cards –
economic competence. The recessions of the 1980s and early 1990s, and the debacle over Black
Wednesday, 16 September 1992, when the United Kingdom was forced to pull Sterling out of the
European Exchange Rate Mechanism, had damaged them. In contrast, the first two Blair
governments saw the United Kingdom economy grow steadily, and even when, in late 2008
recession loomed and financial crisis struck, Gordon Brown’s response meant that the Conservatives
found it hard to respond. In addition, the initial responses in the UK and several other countries
tended to favour the idea of active action by governments and large scale public expenditure, which
lay much closer to traditional Labour territory than to that of the Conservatives, including Cameron
and the Shadow Chancellor George Osborne. Whilst the rapid increase in the budget deficit in 2009
and 2010 raised hard questions for the Labour government on how and when they would seek to
reduce the deficit and which areas of public expenditure would be most affected, the Conservatives
too found it difficult to respond with any degree of clarity, so that prior to the economic crisis they
were talking about matching Labour’s spending plans, but following the growth of a large deficit they
talked about a need for rapid and deep spending cuts, before appearing to talk about cuts slightly
further into the future.
Like Blair and the other architects of New Labour, Cameron also had to respond to what he saw as
new political realities, including, for example, that issues such as inflation and trade union power are
no longer key concerns, and that opinion amongst the electorate had changed (Norton, 2008),
leading to a view that the Conservative Party had to ‘modernise’, so that, for example, in responding
to issues such as poverty and social ‘breakdown’ he appeared to recognised a role for the state and
for public services, including in creating the conditions for a flourishing voluntary sector, and
therefore sought to draw upon both one-nation and neo-liberal approaches, as well as aspects of
New Labour discourses (Kerr, 2007).
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In addition to areas such as environmental issues, Cameron’s early years as leader saw a
considerable emphasis, and arguably a significant break with the Thatcherite past, on social
inclusion. In the 2006 Scarman Lecture he said:
Let me summarise my argument briefly. I believe that poverty is an economic waste
and a moral disgrace. In the past, we used to think of poverty only in absolute terms –
meaning straightforward material deprivation. That’s not enough. We need to think of
poverty in relative terms – the fact that some people lack those things which others in
society take for granted. So I want this message to go out loud and clear: the
Conservative Party recognises, will measure and will act on relative poverty (Cameron,
2006c)
although he also argued that such a response ‘ involves a dramatic decentralisation, a big shift in
emphasis… from the state to society’, and emphasised the role of the voluntary sector in tackling
poverty (Cameron, 2006c). He later suggested that ‘Communities, rather than the state, are best
equipped to effectively tackle social deprivation’, that ‘The answer lies in communities themselves,
not in well-meaning schemes directed from Whitehall’ and that ‘Social enterprises in particular
represent a huge potential resource for our most hard-pressed communities… The social enterprise
is the great institutional innovation of our times. At the moment, however, we are not making nearly
enough use of the potential of the voluntary sector’ (Cameron, 2007).
Ideologically, Thatcherism posed as much of a challenge for the Conservatives as it had done for
Labour. Whilst Blair and some others within the Labour Party had sought to respond to Thatcherism
and the changing world economic system through the development of the ‘Third Way’, many
Conservatives found it hard to accept that there was anything bad about it, that social and economic
realities were changing, and that the public were apparently willing to see increased public
expenditure and improved public services rather than tax cuts. Nevertheless, there were some signs
of change, so that when undertaking interviews with MPs on their attitudes to welfare in 2004 and
2005, Bochel and Defty (2007a and 2007b) identified a significant number of Conservative MPs,
including front benchers, who held views at variance from those that had dominated the Party’s
recent thinking and policies. Some of those MPs were keen to emphasise, in confidential interviews,
that they had very different beliefs. Whilst, for the most part, these individuals were clearly unaware
that there were a significant number of their parliamentary colleagues who held similar views, these
might arguably have been early signs of support for Cameron’s position on conservatism.
Soon after his election to the Party leadership David Cameron sought to distance himself from his
predecessors, and arguably to shrug off the ‘nasty party’ reputation and decontaminate the
Conservative brand (Bale, 2008). Whilst considerable attention was focused upon his early
expressions of concern about the environment, at the 2006 Party Conference he promised to make
the preservation of the NHS a priority and at the same time rejected ‘pie-in-the-sky tax cuts’
(Cameron, 2006b). However, in the following weeks he also promoted traditional Conservative
concerns such as crime and support for traditional family structures.
Writing in the Daily Telegraph in June 2007 Cameron sought to explain how his ‘new’ approach fitted
with more traditional Conservative positions, arguing:
I am a Conservative because of the values that I have believed in all my life: family,
responsibility and opportunity. I am a Conservative because I believe that those values
lead inexorably to a political agenda whose central mission is to give people more
power and control over their lives … because we want people to rely on their family, not
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the state; because you can't take responsibility for something unless you have control
over it; and because true opportunity means having the freedom to achieve all you can
in life.
Cameron also placed considerable emphasis upon ‘quality of life’ issues, such as climate change, the
environment, and the work-life balance, thus linking the Conservative Party’s traditional emphasis
upon the family as a desirable social institution, with ideas such as a ‘flexible’ pattern of work,
arguably in a more sympathetic way than Thatcherite Conservatism and New Labour (Dorey, 2007).
Having previously supported the 2004 Civil Partnerships Act, as leader he also taken a more tolerant
line on sexual orientation and lifestyles than many of his predecessors.
In relation to crime and anti-social behaviour, Cameron famously departed from the Conservative
Party’s traditionally punitive stance, when he argued, in July 2006, in a speech to the Centre for
Social Justice that the recent media furore over young people wearing ‘hoodies’ was misplaced and
that:
The long-term answer to anti-social behaviour is a pro-social society where we really do
get to grips with the causes of crime... Family breakdown, drugs, children in care,
educational underachievement - these provide the backdrop to too many lives and can
become the seed bed of crime… Of course, not everyone who grows up in a deprived
neighbourhood turns to crime - just as not everyone who grows up in a rich
neighbourhood stays on the straight and narrow. Individuals are responsible for their
actions - and every individual has the choice between doing right and doing wrong. But
there are connections between circumstances and behaviour…
going on to argue that in order to understand what causes such behaviour requires an
understanding of the reasons for it, that law enforcement is not sufficient as an answer, and that the
role of the voluntary sector is crucial in contributing to an understanding of the challenges that
young people face and in offering the care and emotional support that they need (Cameron, 2006a).
However, Bennett argues that within a year Cameron was reiterating the view ‘that punishment is
legitimate, that we are faced with dystopian moral decay and that the long-term solution lies in a
reassertion of a traditional family structure’ (p. 464).
However, a significant element of Cameron’s message, particularly around social policy, has been
the idea that society is ‘broken’, whether applied to family breakdown, welfare dependency or
poverty, or to problems with public services, such as schools, hospitals, policing and housing. In this
respect Cameron’s Conservatism owes something to his predecessor as Conservative leader, Iain
Duncan Smith, who, after standing down, established the Centre for Social Justice which produced a
report entitled Breakdown Britain (2006) and a subsequent report Breakthrough Britain (2007).
Whilst the reports contained a mix of fairly traditional Conservative thinking, such as support for the
traditional family and tax incentives for married couples, they also provided some new ideas such as
a childcare tax credit and the tapering of financial support for parents. The reports also highlighted
the way in which state provision could be seen as having replaced the role of charities and
community organisations, to the detriment of the role and ideas of those groups. As a response to
this there is a perceived need for a smaller central state, with more significant roles being played by
many of the organisations of civil society. Cameron has taken many of these ideas on, and in a
speech on ‘The Big Society’ argued that ‘Our alternative to big government is the big society’, that
the new role for the state is in ‘Galvanising, catalysing, prompting, encouraging and agitating for
community engagement and renewal. It must help families, individuals, charities and communities
come together to solve problems’ and that social entrepreneurs, community activists and mass
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engagement (‘broad culture of responsibility, mutuality and obligation’ are necessary (Cameron,
2010).
The 2010 general election
Despite the Conservatives having held large leads over Labour in the opinion polls for much of 2008
and 2009, in the six months before the general election the gap narrowed somewhat, and at the
start of the election campaign it appeared uncertain whether the Conservatives would be able to
win a majority in the House of Commons, or whether a hung parliament was a possibility.
Given the impact of the financial crisis, the recession and the Labour government’s decision to
borrow to maintain public expenditure and to stimulate the economy, it was inevitable that the
Conservatives’ manifesto for the 2010 election (Conservative Party, 2010) emphasised the need to
substantially reduce the size of the country’s deficit over a five year period, beginning with £6 billion
pounds of cuts in 2010. While there were clearly likely to be significant implications for social policy
of public expenditure cuts in all areas other than health and foreign aid, the manifesto continued to
argue that British society was ‘broken’ and that to repair it, rather than ‘big government’, it was
necessary to build a ‘Big Society’, enabling charities, social enterprises and voluntary groups to play a
greater role in tackling social problems, and to empower communities. This was to include enabling
trusts, charities and other organisations to establish new Academy schools independent of local
authority control. Among other promises the manifesto committed the Conservatives to supporting
marriage through the tax system, giving families more control over their own lives, an linking
increases in the basic state pension to the higher of earnings or prices.
During the course of the campaign the introduction of three televised Prime Ministerial Debates
appeared to make the outcome even less certain, with an apparent surge in support for the Liberal
Democrats after their leader, Nick Clegg, appeared on equal terms with Gordon Brown and David
Cameron, and was seen by many as having ‘won’ the first debate. Nevertheless, the final result saw
the Conservatives winning 36 per cent of the vote (to Labour’s 29 per cent and the Liberal
Democrats’ 23 per cent) and 306 seats, twenty short of a majority, and after four days of discussions
between the political parties the coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats was
announced and David Cameron became Prime Minister. The agreement between the two parties,
released on 11 May with a somewhat more detailed version following on 20 May (Cabinet Office,
2010), provided for tax cuts amounting to £10 billion, meaning that in other areas reductions in
public expenditure would need to be even greater than those initially envisaged, while the
commitment to real increases in NHS spending for each year of the parliament was to be partly
funded by savings from with the health service. It also allowed for a premium for disadvantaged
pupils in schools, the entry into the state school system of new providers responding to parental
demand, the restoration of the link between pensions and earnings, the raising of the personal tax
allowance to £10,000 over a period of years, an annual limit on immigration from outside the EU, a
faster raising of the state pension age than that introduced by Labour, and the creation of a single
welfare-to-work programme. In reality, the short document left many questions unanswered, as
much would inevitably depend on the detail and timing of policy change, while decisions about other
difficult areas, such as higher education tuition fees, were simply delayed. Nevertheless, it did
suggest that Cameron and other senior Conservatives were willing to make compromises, and in
some areas, such as the increase in the personal tax allowance, it was possible to identify significant
Liberal Democrat influence, and others, where there were major policy differences between the
parties, such as tuition fees, they effectively gained the right to opt out of voting with the
government in divisions in the House of Commons.
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The formation of the coalition had significant implications for the personnel of government, with the
new Cabinet containing five Liberal Democrats, although one, David Laws, resigned as Chief
Secretary to the Treasury within weeks following newspaper revelations about his expenses claims
as an MP. Where social policy was concerned the Conservatives held most of the major posts, so
that in addition to George Osborne as Chancellor, Theresa May became Home Secretary, Eric Pickles
Community Secretary, Michael Gove Education Secretary, Andrew Lansley Health Secretary and Iain
Duncan-Smith Work and Pensions Secretary, while following David Laws’ resignation, another Liberal
Democrat, Danny Alexander, became Chief Secretary to the Treasury.
Conclusions
Following a long period of opposition, and considerable turmoil within the Conservative Party, it is
worth asking to what extent is it appropriate to portray the brand of Conservatism that has
developed under David Cameron as similar or different to what had come before it? This is not an
easy task, in part because for all of the rhetoric in speeches, and the attempts to make the
Conservatives appear a more open and friendly party, as Dorey (2007) has pointed out, Cameron’s
approach on policies in opposition was as notable for what was not said or emphasised as for
changes in policies and despite the Policy Reviews there were relatively few specific policies
adopted, with the focus instead having been on emphasising the shift away from Thatcherism and a
broader approach to policy. In addition, as noted above, some, although by no means all, of the
Conservatives’ manifesto commitments appeared to be rapidly watered down or amended in the
coalition agreement with the Liberal Democrats. Whilst this lack of radical policies in many areas
might have been to the annoyance of many on the right of the Conservative Party, there appeared
to be a general acceptance of this as part of the Party’s need for greater appeal to the electorate
before the general election, and the need to form a coalition to form a government following the
election. At the same time, the new government’s apparent enthusiasm for cuts in public
expenditure arguably signalled a more hard line approach.
However, even at this stage, it is perhaps possible to put forward a number of different, not
necessarily contradictory interpretations of the Conservatives under Cameron:
1. Cameron’s Conservatism is a variety of Thatcherism – whilst Cameron made a number of
determined attempts to distance the Conservatives from the policies of the Thatcher period,
the ideas of those such as Thatcher and Hayek continue to be cited approvingly by frontbenchers, MPs and to receive support from Party members so that Katwala (2009) has
argued that ‘”Progressive Conservatism” will remain primarily an exercise in political
positioning until it does find something coherent to say about Thatcherism’ (p. 10). Whilst
this may be because of the importance of the Thatcher era to many Conservative members
and supporters, it may also be because the anti-statist approach of today’s Party is
something of a natural progression from the approaches of the Thatcher governments.
Indeed, some elements of the Conservatives’ approach, including the work of some of Policy
Review Groups, such as that on economic policy, chaired by John Redwood, continued to
reflect the economic policy of the Thatcher governments, with the emphasis on the free
market and light-touch regulation, at least until the financial crisis of 2008, and service
provision by the private and third sectors. Indeed, it is difficult to see the Conservatives
having been able to undertake the degree of intervention that Labour did with the banks in
late 2008. Taken together, the Conservatives’ economic and social policies, including
enthusiasm by some for public expenditure cuts, and the idea of the ‘Big Society’, emphasise
and are likely to produce a small state, with services provided by the private and not-for9
profit sectors. In addition, Cameron was a key author of the Conservatives’ 2005 general
election manifesto, which had emphasised asylum, immigration and Euro-scepticism.
However, despite the anti-statism of some speeches and policy proposals, the
Conservatives’ apparent commitment to state health care, and to some extent state
education, or at least education funded by the state, contrasts with Thatcher’s views, whilst
Cameron’s willingness to make concessions in the creation of the coalition government also
suggests a less ideologically-driven approach;
2. Cameron’s Conservatism owes more to ‘one-nation’ Conservatism than to the New Right
influenced Thatcher governments. Whilst the idea of ‘compassionate Conservatism’ was
arguably over-rated, even in the first two years of Cameron’s leadership, the Party did
perhaps move towards a more centrist position. David Marquand has argued that rather
than being a closet Thatcherite, Cameron’s thinking owes more to the Whig-imperialist
tradition associated with moderate reform, including the mixed economy in the 1960s.
Cameron, particularly in the first two years of his leadership, sought to emphasise socially
tolerant and compassionate Conservatism, which recognises and represents the social and
cultural diversity of the United Kingdom. At times this involved public disavowal of some of
the policy positions of the Thatcher years, including the statement, included in Built to Last:
The Aims and Values of the Conservative Party (Conservative Party, 2006), that ‘there is such
a thing as society, it’s just not the same thing as the state’, and repeated by him on a
number of occasions (for example, Cameron, 2008). This was deliberately designed to set
Cameron apart from Thatcher’s claim that ‘there is no such thing as society’, although she
did go on to say that ‘There are individual men and women, and there are families’
(Thatcher, 1987). Cameron also argued that ‘John Moore was wrong to declare the end of
poverty’ (Cameron, 2006b). Yet when the Conservatives’ policy reviews contained a number
of proposals that might have been taken up to reinforce Cameron’s apparent attempt to
move the Conservatives into the centre ground and to promote new issues, such as
proposals for a Carer’s Allowance and for changes to Child Benefit, establishing a consumer
body for NHS patients and establishing a national fund to target public money into local
schemes for affordable rented housing, rather than accepting these proposals the leadership
merely accepted them as input into the Party’s development of policies. Similarly, the
Conservatives’ 2010 election manifesto and the Coalition’s ‘programme for government’
both emphasised a smaller role for the public sector and the much greater use of private,
social enterprise and voluntary organisations in the provision of services;
3. Cameron’s Conservatism is an extension of Blair’s New Labour/Third Way ideas – certainly,
whilst Blair was still Prime Minister the Conservatives adopted a number of policy stances
that were very close to those of the Labour Party, such as the need for an active welfare
state to move people from benefits and into work, and the commitment to end child
poverty. Even from late 2007, when the Conservatives became more openly critical of the
government, including Brown’s economic policies, they were claiming to be able to deliver
public services and progressive ends, albeit through the use of more traditional Conservative
means, including greater use of the voluntary sector, and for a period agreed to abide by
Labour’s plans for public expenditure, although they later dropped this commitment.
However, the policies in the Conservatives’ general election manifesto, including the idea of
the ‘Big Society’, and many of those adopted by the coalition government, were likely to
mean than in many areas the role of the state would be largely restricted to allocation of
resources and contracting with the private and not-for-profit sectors for their delivery. Even
if some of the mechanisms of policy may be similar to those of New Labour, the implications
10
for the size of the state and for the allocation of responsibility between individuals and the
state would be quite different;
4. Cameron’s Conservatism is more complicated than that. In the same way as it is possible to
argue that New Labour was effectively a response to Thatcherism and neo-liberalism which
melded some ideas drawn from those perspectives with traditional Labour policies and
approaches, so that many analysts found it difficult to fit comfortably aspects of New
Labour’s policies and achievements into a neo-liberal paradigm, so it may be that Cameron’s
Conservatism has been created and influenced by political and ideological pragmatism, a
variety of political traditions, and involves a combination of ideas and policies that derive
from this complex mix, and in some respects represents a return to earlier forms of
Conservatism that were less ideologically driven and less policy based. Certainly, the
development of Conservative policies from 2006, the 2010 general election manifesto, and
the formation of the coalition government with the Liberal Democrats with the willingness
to compromise on a range of policies, suggests a significant degree of pragmatism on the
part of Cameron and his allies.
11
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