29 June 2017
Back to Basics
The Tories’ dilemma
by J.R.Thomas
So, the deal is done, the ink is drying, the further picking of fruit from the government’s magic money tree is about to begin – to be packed into crates marked “Northern Ireland”
Mrs May might have solved one problem but it seems that she has pushed the button to begin a whole series of others, as Welsh and Scottish politicians reach for their calculators to begin applying the Northern Ireland formula to their respective domains. And no doubt Cornwall and Yorkshire and many other areas will be not far behind. What seemed to the lady a clever fix may well turn out to be a disaster that ensures a Conservative loss of the next election, driven by a tide of resentment from the English heartlands. It is indeed an odd deal – one that may come unstuck at the first crisis – and it is difficult to see that much consultation with Mrs M’s newly assertive cabinet can have been carried out. Somebody or other said not so long ago that “No deal was better than a bad deal” and maybe that was very good advice that should have been taken.
Nevertheless, a week is a long time in politics, and in strange and turbulent times Theresa may be right to deal with tomorrow and see what turns up in a week’s time. Whatever the strength of her negotiating skills, she is certainly playing a pretty impressive political poker game with her own party. Her base calculation is no doubt that the Conservatives may not want her in the job, but there is nobody else who commands sufficient affection or acclaim from the party to get the mandate that would be required to step into her kitten heels. And even if there were, no ambitious politician wants the job at this point; one has the impression that if Mrs May stepped in the path of a bus on her way down Whitehall there would be a rush of cabinet members to haul her quickly out of the way. All this ought to protect the lady in her job at least until something goes terribly wrong or Brexit is substantially dealt with.
But then what? And indeed and also, then what for the Labour Party? Mr Corbyn may be having a good time now and suddenly found that all those colleagues who had crossed him off their Christmas card lists are inviting him to their summer parties; but the Labour Party too has some tricky chasms within it. It would be hard to jettison Jezza now, though there is a majority in the parliamentary party still wishing for it. But the man who almost won the election; the young person’s hero; the laid back charmer of Glastonbury? Now is not the time to depose the leader, and like the lot on the green benches opposite, who actually would want the job? The Labour Party has still a fundamental structural problem; not just that between the social reformers (what is left of the Blair tendency) and the semi-Stalinists (JC and his band of comrades) but between a Westminster party that does not really want out of Europe and its voter base that really does. Mrs May’s attempts to capture that vote for the Tories did not go as intended, but it is true that the Labour Party is fundamentally split on this issue – just like the Conservatives.
Labour has long fought over its split of what socialism might mean in the context of winning elections and forming a government. But you may argue that it is the Conservatives that have a far deeper issue, one that is masked by Brexit – which Mrs M’s intended electoral outcome might have succeeded in papering over for a while longer. The common view is that the Conservatives are the party of expediency; moving with the mood of the times, only more slowly. Into the bargain they tend to prefer low tax and lower cost government, which tends to play well with tax payers. But the Conservatives also contain two tendencies, the traditional types as above, and the heirs of nineteenth century liberalism. The party has generally won elections when the latter wing is in the ascendant: Churchill in 1951, Heath in 1970, and Thatcher in 1979. This must be partly due to all three promising to lower tax rates and cut the cost of government, but there is plenty of evidence that the electorate does like some sort of intellectual and philosophical approach from those that they entrust with the reins of power. (Not always; the voters on occasion just vote against things – Mr Heath the finest example for his strange question in 1974 as to whether the country would prefer to be run by the government or the miners. The public presumably did not actually want to be run by the miners – but they did want rid of Mr Heath.) Parties that produce manifestos that have coherence, freshness, a set of ideas, and an attractive underlying philosophy do tend to win, as opposed to those that just say “Trust us”.
This is the problem both parties face at this point. They have nothing much to offer the public imagination, other than some very confused messages about Brexit. And political programmes, if they are to convince, cannot just be printed off. Mrs Thatcher, elected to the leadership in 1975, by 1979 had a programme that had been seven years in the making; with work originated by Keith Joseph, a man of strong liberalising tendencies bitterly disappointed by the abandonment of everything except expediency after 1971. Mrs T, though a member of Heath’s cabinet, was also alarmed by the lack of any sense of considered political philosophy, and on assuming the leadership had the opportunity of a long period in Opposition to spend time deeply thinking – and persuading her colleagues to do the same. She put Keith Joseph into a backroom to drive the ideas machine and to create a structure of think tanks, academic research, research institutes, and panels of party activists (especially in the Universities) to work out what late twentieth century Conservatism should be. The thinking that evolved, and the 1979 manifesto which was its resulting message to the electorate, was one of the most carefully considered ever issued by a political party. And it worked; coupled with the Thatcher resilience and determination, and senior ministers who had fully bought the dream, the Conservatives had eighteen years in power.
Now one would be hard put to say what Cameronism was or Mayism is. The Conservative Party seems to have run out of ideas, and none of the potential candidates for that looming job opportunity seem to have any either. Indeed the impression is that a philosophical programme is seen as a positive impediment to achieving high office – pinning the candidate’s beliefs to the wall and not allowing room for adjustment and manoeuvre when required. Into this vacuum something must flow and at the moment that is Mayism as Me-too-ism; a set of ideas which is a watered down version of mild Corbynism, blended with some European leftist concepts. The problem there is that, if the voters are offered two versions of the same product, they may well go for the original; even if they don’t, it leaves the Corbynistas winning the future by dragging everybody in their direction.
It is true that Mr Blair dragged his party in the direction of Thatcherism – and it worked; Labour had thirteen years in government. Mrs May might think that a splendid example but Tony was young and fresh and exciting. It really is not going to happen on her watch.
Whoever wants to win a resounding victory for the Tories needs to come up with a shimmering set of ideas as to what Toryism actually is, something distinct from other parties that can attract the voters’ hearts – and not alarm their pockets. There is not much sign of that going on – but if at least one of those potential leaders does not sit down and start pondering what it is they believe in, the Conservative Party may have five years in opposition to think about it at more leisure.
With the Editors’ consent, next week we will have a part two of this article to consider the Labour Party’s dilemma; the same, but different.
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