Conservative Party and devolution. Labour and tuition fees

Two headline-grabbing political policies from the two main parties:

Conservatives

Cameron promises to give the Welsh Assembly more powers, including being able to call itself a Parliament and being able to raise its own income tax. Interesting for G and P students in unit 1 considering how Cameron has changed the Conservative party since the days of Thatcherite concentration of power in Westminster.

Labour

Miliband promises to lower tuition fees for University students to £6k from its current £9k. Again - interesting to consider how this fits into the narrative about the Labour party and its move away from / back towards more left-leaning policies.

The BBC's Robert Peston analyses the fiscal implications of all of this here.

Thatcher and Europe

Any G and P student studying Unit 1 should be able to discuss some of the policies of Margaret Thatcher and how the current Conservative Party compares.

One of the many points of comparison is certainly Europe, and the Atlantic is on hand to offer some analysis. The take-home message is that although Thatcher was against the Euro and famously won the British rebate she was not rabidly anti-Europe as some make out.

Here is a clip of her in full flow giving her response to the suggestion that Britain gives up the Pound and agrees to a larger integrated Europe (go to 2:05 for the famous bit).

Prime Ministerial power

An interesting story here about the decision-making process in government; Universities minister David "Two-brains" Willetts was on-air discussing budget cutting in the education sector and said that scrapping free milk for the under-5s was an option being considered. During the interview, Downing St contacted the BBC to say that David Cameron didn't like the idea and that it wasn't happening.

Various newspapers have their own take on the story, the Daily Mail here, the Independent here and the Mirror here. It is interesting for G&P students because it can be used in discussions about coalition policy, and also about Prime Ministerial power and the process of policy-making (before the PM moved in, it was a policy that had been discussed at length in government, and was worth £50m a year).

As pointed out here by Bagehot in the Economist, the PM disliked the milk policy because it was an echo of Margaret Thatcher's policy of ending school milk to the over 7s in 1971. There are issues about whether it is wise for the PM to have the power to arbitrarily decide on policy (further echoes, this time of Tony Blair's sofa government) rather than it being a cabinet decision, which can be discussed at length in any relevant essay.

Labour leadership race and the coalition

An interesting piece here from Bagehot in the Economist, discussing the Labour leadership race (we're in for a Miliband), and the direction of the coalition and conservatism under David Cameron (he's not merely a Thatcherite, but something more interesting).

First entry to Downing St

Just because one can, here are videos of recent PMs entering Downing St for the first time. First up, Mrs Thatcher from 1979:



A clip about Tony Blair's entry into Downing St in 1997 (sadly, I haven't yet found a clip of Blair's triumphalist entry into Downing St with a large flag-waving crowd):



David Cameron enters Downing St on 11th May 2010:



And, just because it shows the relationship between Nick Clegg and David Cameron, this short clip from the PM and the DPM's first joint news conference together:

George Osbourne's emergency budget

I'm a bit wary about posting too much about the emergency budget, especially given that for G&P students taking AS, the autumn spending review will have happened by the time the exam season rolls around in 2011. I think the graph below (from the BBC) summarises the problem for the Government quite nicely, in that it shows the scale of the spending-cut and tax rises needed in the coming parliamentary session to reduce the budget deficit:

In short, as indicated here in a BBC article, the cuts announced by the coalition government are huge, but aim to balance the government books by 2016 (i.e. after the next projected election). There is much uncertainty, especially given that the coalition will face extraordinary pressure, and there is the possibility the government won't survive the next 5 years intact. More thorough business analysis here from Robert Peston and an economic view here from Stephanie Flanders, and here from the Economist magazine. The Think-Tank the Institute for Fiscal studies has a page here of useful links.

The interesting stuff for G&P students is contained here in an article by Bagehot in the Economist: that this budget challenges the dominant political orthodoxy of the past 12 years, that government spending has to increase:

Mr Osborne’s statement shattered and reversed the orthodoxy, which took hold in the last decade, that public spending must grow eternally. It has revised the relationship between the state and its employees, and signalled a reconfiguring of welfare support, which is set to be more generous to some of the very poor and stingier for many others. It was the start of a bid to create a new balance in the British economy: between the public and private sectors, and among industries and regions. This was the most painful budget in living memory, and one of the riskiest.

In short, the government deficit has encouraged the Coalition to think radically about certain areas of public policy, like removing income-tax for the less well-off, and public pension reform which previous governments have been wary of tackling. Nick Robinson highlights some of the impact the Lib Dems on the budget here. Don't forget, that Lib Dem Danny Alexander is the Chancellor's right-hand man as Chief Secretary to the Treasury.

Labour has not yet found a way of attacking the government policy except to decry it as a return to Thatcherist cutting of public spending; Polly Toynbee in the Guardian puts it this way:

There was nothing "unavoidable" about adding £40bn to Labour's already eye-watering pledge to halve the deficit in four years. There was no necessity to create a surplus in six years, returning to depression economics with mortal risk of sinking the country into second recession or slump. This was the budget to fulfil old Tory yearnings: it promises to shrink the state below 40%, which Mrs Thatcher never achieved.

There are, and will continue to be, complex arguments about the economics of all this which are not within the scope of this blog. We'll all see soon enough what the effects of these policies are; growth, or a disastrous double-dip recession.

Progressive Conservatism

Interesting political movements afoot in the coalition goverment with Ken Clarke, former Home Secretary and Chancellor in the previous Conservative administration of the 1990s, coming up with a policy on prisons which sounds more like a LIb Dem policy and is likely to give grassroot blue-rinse Conservative supporters the vapours (as indicated here in a Daily Mail article).

In sum, the credit and fiscal crunch has led government to look for cutbacks in most government depts of 25%, more of which will become evident in the spending review due to happen in the autumn. Clarke's argument is that increasing the cost of prisons by banging up people for longer is more expensive in the long-run than rehabilitating those prisoners who can be persuaded not to offend again.

It is a startling contrast to a previous Conservative policy promoted by former Conservativve leader Michael Howard in the 2005 election and in the 1990s: "Prison works"

The new Labour policy in this area was to lock-up increasing numbers of prisoners until serious overcrowding occurred and then prisoners had to be released early, as described here in this BBC article from 2009. Former Labour Justice Secretary Jack Straw even defends his record in this piece in the Daily Mail in reaction to Clarke's new policy.

Useful stuff for G&P students contemplating the policy differences of new Labour with old, Conservative Thatcherism vs Cameronism and the impact of Lib Dems on the coalition government policy.

I haven't taken a look at George Osbourne's emergency budget yet; I'll do a separate post about it.

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.