The Conservative party

A typical exam question may ask for a comparison between David Cameron’s Conservatism with Thatcher’s Conservatism, or even with “One-nation” conservatism. Any recent information can be used, and this question has suddenly got a whole lot easier and more interesting with the formation of the Lib-Con coalition.

There are the obvious similarities – the party is still right-of centre and overall believes in the power of the market to allocate resources, and that Britain should be strong in terms of foreign policy and have a nuclear deterrent, and is suspicious of further erosion of UK power towards the EU. Examples of Thatcherite policies could be the privatisation of state industries under Thatcher & Major (British Airways in 1987, British Rail in 1994).
Cameron has not advocated nationalisation of industries beyond those already done under Labour and its attempts to prevent financial melt-down (for example Northern Rock, LloydsTSB-RBOS-Halifax) although these are special cases and were supposedly done for economic rather than ideological reasons. He has not clearly demonstrated a wish for further privatisation, except possibly for the Post Office and for the banks currently owned by the tax-payer to be returned to private ownership when possible.

One shouldn't forget the Miner's strike of 1984-5, and the reform of Union legislation which the government brought in and the profound impact this had on unions and their members. Click here to find an article by David Blanchflower, former member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee about this issue.

A view of the Thatcher-era reforms here by Simon Heffer, Conservative supporter and collumnist in the Mail from a few years ago. The article does point out that the Thatcher Union reforms have largely not been touched since.

“The Big Society” was a Cameron theme from the election, which is a startling contrast to Thatcher’s “There is no such thing as society” (see here for more of the interview this quotation was taken from). In this way Cameron is returning more to the “One-Nation conservatism” of Disraeli more than the ideologically strong Thatcher period. Thatcher for example was a strong believer in monetarism and in the power of liberty and freedom of the individual (“This is what we believe” – Thatcher had a copy of F A Hayek’s “The Constitution of Liberty” in her hand as she spoke).

Thatcher was less of a pragmatist than Cameron – as we can see in his pragmatic approach to coalition with the Lib Dems; he was happy to rip up parts of the Conservative manifesto in his desire to get a deal (eg the Lib Dem policy to prevent anyone earning £10,000 or below from paying income tax is now government policy). Cameron did have flag-ship policies on supporting the family through the tax-system, and in raising the inheritance-tax threshold, and these were typical conservative right of centre policy-making. These policies have now been scrapped under the coalition government. See the link above for further analysis.

There are certain caveats one should mention – the credit-crunch and the £163bn black hole in the public finances have limited the government’s room for manoeuvre, and coalition government is necessarily a compromise between differing parties.

There have been many comparisons between Cameron and Disraeli, not only because of the "one-nation" ideology, but also because of the great Victorian statesman's impact on the direction of Conservatism. I won't explore that too much here as it is slightly outside the scope of this blog, but it is useful background which can be mentioned in any analysis of Conservative traditions.