Will Cameron build a new political consensus?

By Owen Jones / @OwenJones84

David Cameron is a politician much misunderestimated, as George Bush would have it. For much of the time he was leader of the opposition, he was repeatedly dismissed as a “lightweight” (by none other than Obama, among others); as a “shallow salesman“; and as “all style and no substance“. This was the guy who hugged huskies and hoodies: a fluffy, policy-free zone who would sweep to power purely on the back of disillusionment with Gordon Brown’s dysfunctional government.

He’s not looking quite so fluffy now. Margaret Thatcher famously picked off her opponents one by one. But, in alliance with the Liberal Democrats, Cameron’s government has unleashed a form of political ‘shock-and-awe’, fighting a number of separate battles all at the same time: whether it be swingeing cuts, the slashing of welfare benefits, hikes in student tuition fees and, least reported but just as dire, the systematic privatisation by stealth of the National Health Service. It is this radical offensive on a number of fronts that has led Vince Cable to label the government “Maoist”.

It was unthinkable just a few months ago, but there is a real prospect of Cameron achieving a feat only Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher have achieved in post-war Britain: to lead a genuinely transformational government. Both Attlee and Thatcher established a new political consensus. They changed the rules of the political game so that what was once unthinkable became mainstream, and what was once received wisdom became heresy. Above all, they forced their political opposition to accept their underlying principles, even if they would be somewhat tweaked.

The key pillars of the Attlee settlement were a mixed economy, Keynesian state intervention, powerful trade unions, high levels of taxation on the wealthy and a strong welfare state. Attlee may have lost power in 1951, but subsequent Tory governments essentially accepted these guiding principles as set in stone.

Labour’s social democratic wing was jubilant, believing that they had won an irreversible victory. Tony Crosland, the icon of Labour’s revisionist ‘moderates’, thought that any government that attempted to tamper with the welfare state would be thrown out of office by the electorate. You can almost see the wry smile on his face as he triumphantly remarked in 1955:

“the Conservatives now fight elections largely on policies which twenty years ago were associated with the Left, and repudiated by the Right: on increases in the social services, the over-riding claims of full employment, the prosperity of the wage-earners, and even, occasionally, on the success of the nationalised industries!”

The Tory right knew that they had been defeated. “…In the fine print of policy, and especially in government, the Tory Party merely pitched camp in the long march to the left,” was Margaret Thatcher’s damning verdict. “It never tried seriously to reverse it.” Quoting her mentor Keith Joseph’s description of post-war politics as a “socialist ratchet”, she argued:

“Labour moved Britain towards more statism; the Tories stood pat; and the next Labour Government moved the country a little further left. The Tories loosened the corset of socialism; they never removed it.”

In the 1980s, Thatcherism demolished Attlee’s settlement and founded a new consensus based on low taxation on the wealthy, minimal business regulation, a rampant free market and weak trade unions. New Labour accepted these guiding principles, merely attempting to humanise them. British politics had become a “free market ratchet”, and it was Labour who now fought elections on policies which were once associated with the Right. And, as Cameron’s administration has shown, each successive Tory government moves the country a little (well, more than a little) further right: and New Labour had merely “pitched camp” in this “long march” to the right. On everything from marketising the NHS to student fees, the Tories are merely accelerating what New Labour had already started.

A few months ago, I asked New Labour leading light James Purnell if he felt that New Labour accepted the Thatcherite consensus in the same way the Tories once accepted what Attlee bequeathed them. He did not even hesitate. “Yeah, I do.” For him, it was a legacy of both Thatcherism and the right-wing triumphalism that followed the collapse of Communism.:

“The combination of 1979 [Thatcher’s first election victory] and 1989 [the fall of the Berlin Wall] meant that a little bit of the left’s optimism and confidence about itself died, actually… somehow post-1989, a whole bunch of things were defined as – if not insane – then at least slightly far-fetched, and therefore people on the left had to argue very, very hard to win arguments about overcoming market outcomes or reducing inequality, and so I would definitely agree that New Labour basically tried to do the best that it could within some of the parts of that settlement.”

When I put the same question to former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, he felt it was an inevitable part of the political cycle:

“That always happens. Winston Churchill, whose party voted against the Second Reading of the National Health Service Bill, didn’t give a millisecond’s thought to dismantling the NHS when he became Prime Minister in 1951.”

Very true: but Cameron’s dismantling of what are, by historical standards, the limited progressive gains introduced under New Labour shows this is far from an iron law of history.

But will Cameron succeed in imposing yet another consensus: a sort of “Thatcher plus”, if you like? As one political pundit put it, if the Cameron project is successful: “then post-War social democracy will cease to be a viable political philosophy in this country.” Nothing made New Labour more distinctive from High Thatcherism than investment in public services. Could Cameron enshrine the small state at the heart of a new political settlement?

If David Miliband had won the Labour leadership, the answer would have been an almost certain ‘yes’. During the leadership campaign, he urged Labour to learn from R A Butler – the post-war Tory politician who did more than anyone to force his party to accept the Attlee consensus. As well as calling for Labour to move away from its “comfort zone” of automatically opposing every coalition policy, Miliband Senior had a striking warning:

“We are pigeonholed as spendthrift when we need to be prudent; we are seen as accreting power to the state when in fact our mission is to empower individuals, communities and businesses.”

But Ed Miliband’s triumph in the Labour leadership is no guarantee against a new Cameron settlement. Rather than appoint Ed Balls as shadow chancellor – who had moved towards a ‘no cuts’ position – he opted for Blairite Alan Johnson. As things stand, Labour’s position is to accept the logic of the Tory cuts agenda, but simply argue that it is going too far, too fast.

There are three reasons for optimism that the Cameron project will fail. Firstly, unlike Attlee or Thatcher, he lacks a democratic mandate. Thanks to the divided anti-Tory vote caused by the SDP split from Labour, Thatcher won a landslide in 1983. But Cameron’s Tories won only 36% of the vote despite the biggest economic crisis since the 1930s and a hugely unpopular Labour Government. Such a radical right-wing programme lacks democratic legitimacy.

The second reason follows from the first. This lack of a mandate is the main reason we have already seen the outbreak of resistance against government policies. The Tories had banked on the British people rolling over and accepting their ‘medicine’: revolting in the street was what the French and the Greeks did. But the unexpected student movement that exploded in November 2010 punctured the idea that you could not resist the government. This bodes well for a more concerted attempt to stop the Cameron project in its tracks.

The third reason is that, while Ed Miliband’s background is a New Labour apparatchik, he is not the same as a Tony Blair or a Gordon Brown (or a David Miliband, for that matter). These politicians were ideologically wired to support the Thatcherite consensus: they would have resisted any countervailing pressure, however strong. There is a real prospect that Ed Miliband will shift under pressure from below, and even adopt positions he would never have dreamt of taking under his own steam.

The Attlee settlement pushed power in the direction of working people: Thatcher moved it decisively back towards big business. Cameron has ingeniously used a crisis of capital to push even more power in its direction. The question will eventually arise: can a mass movement not only put a brake on this effort, but even send it hurtling into reverse?

Owen Jones also blogs at owenjones.org