Caught in a Thatcherite trap?

After suffering bad electoral defeats, political parties tend to rethink their approach and thinking. Though the Conservative Party leadership candidates have talked about the need to renew the party, ideologically the Conservatives seem trapped. Tom Tugendhat talked of the need for a “new conservative revolution”. However, the broad consensus between the four final leadership candidates was that this would be achieved by returning to ideas from the past – from the 1980s. 

What was striking about the four speeches given by the leadership candidates was that they manifested a fundamentally Thatcherite paradigm. In short, the Thatcher era was still the one that defined true conservatism in action. The leadership candidates all believe it necessary to re-iterate her project to reverse Britain’s decline by freeing society from the state’s manacles.

In part this consensus reflects an awareness among the candidates that this era is still glorified by a majority of those within the party. Not only within the generation that dominates the party’s ‘grass roots’, but also how this era continues to be venerated by younger Conservatives; those not around during the 1980s. Thatcher remains a lodestar and the shrinking of the state is a theme that united the four candidates making their pitch to the party faithful in Birmingham. 

A new tradition

Such an approach might seem odd given that the disastrous premiership of Liz Truss was inspired by Thatcherite notions of radically reducing the scope of the state and tax cuts. For Truss, it was the burdens of the state that was holding back economic growth. Since leaving office Truss has moved off into the more radical and more reactionary ecosphere of the American alt right. She now claims that her mission is to ‘save western society’. 

From this wilder end of the conservative movement, Thatcherism looks pretty mainstream and orthodox. Though the Hayekian New Right represented a new force within British conservatism in the 1960s and 1970s, it now defines traditional conservatism. When party grandees, such as John Major and William Hague, warn of the party lurching further to the right, they do so from a largely Thatcherite perspective. 

The desire among the leadership candidates to connect to Thatcherism represents a need to show that decline can be reversed. The candidates made regular reference to the mid-1970s, suggesting that we face a similar moment.  The Thatcherite narrative is that, during the 1980s, Britain’s economic and social decline was halted through radical policies which helped produce a more entrepreneurial culture. This narrative is, to say the least, contestable. Even in fairly conservative terms, some see this era as jeopardising some key civilising aspects of British society and weakening social bonds. The type of critique articulated by the likes of Will Hutton in The State We’re In and David Marquand in his work on the public domain.

In his rather platitudinous speech, Tom Tugendhat talked in libertarian terms of a country “where people are trusted and free”. He would “always stand for freedom”, which was the country’s “greatest strength”. His vision was that liberty and freedom were the values which had helped form “our great country”. This was a key tenet of Thatcherism. According to this view, Britain’s decline this century could be traced to a shift away from such values under Labour and Conservative administrations. 

Versions of Freedom

In terms of the distinction made by Isaiah Berlin, the candidates were articulating a negative conception of liberty; of freedom from. In particular freedom from an overweening state that interferes too much. This concern about the excess of the state was again a consistent theme among the candidates, with references to smoking bans and the like as impositions on individual liberty. For Badenoch, the “technocratic” smoking ban was  “the least conservative policy in the last 14 years”, violating key values such as personal responsibility. 

This negative conception of freedom is not the only one. In his engaging (and, at times, eccentric) recent book On Freedom, the historian Timothy Snyder puts forward a powerful case for a positive idea of freedom, the freedom to. Fundamental to his book is a rejection of the view that “the less government you have, the more free you are”. For Snyder, this is “fundamentally not true”. This idea is nothing new.. Roy Hattersley, writing in the 1980s (in Choose Freedom), tried to reclaim the idea of freedom from the Thatcherite right. Snyder’s articulation of it may however achieve some ‘cut through’ due his notability. . 

 As a leading authority on Ukrainian history, Snyder has risen to prominence as a public intellectual, with his powerful short polemical book On Tyranny reaching a wide audience, well beyond what academics usually achieve. His engaging public talks and media appearances also help in this regard. On Freedom argues that a negative conception of liberty has eaten away at important institutions that play a significant role in actually ensuring freedom in the positive sense. For Snyder, many of our contemporary social ills can be traced to forgetting the lessons of the Great Depression and the 1980s when, ‘capitalism was enthroned as the lone source of freedom’. 

A positive notion of freedom was very much absent in the Tory candidates’ speeches. The central narrative articulated by the four contenders is that we are seeing something of a rerun of the 1970s when, as Robert Jenrick put it, “Britain was broken” with both Labour and Conservatives merely managing decline. His “heroine” Thatcher and those around her had rejected this “defeatism” within the British elite and the Conservatives had, from 1979 onwards reversed this decline. James Cleverly wanted the party to be “more like Reagan” in having a more optimistic view but also in prioritising reducing the scope of the state. 

What was absent was any real discussion of conservatism post-Thatcher. The implication was that after this noble effort, conservatism had lost its vigour. Apart from Brexit, there was little evidence of this real conservatism. Since the 1990s, Britain had, Jenrick outlined,  been “let down by big government” and “low ambition” What it needed was again “a new Conservative Party” formed in the image of that which had risen to dominance in the 1980s, battling a “failed consensus”. The new battles to fight included “ending mass migration”, which was “sapping our culture” and damaging social cohesion.

One striking aspect was his critique of the “mad targets” and “mad policies” related to Net Zero. This he framed as an example of the excesses of state intervention in the economy which was likely to jeopardise Jenrick was firmly “against further de-industrialization of our country”. Again, the coherence of this seems deeply questionable, given the radical de-industrialization programme at the heart of Thatcherism. This was achieved not through the free market but, as Andrew Gamble (in his The Free Economy and the Strong State) and others have argued, through determined efforts of the state. A story powerfully told in the current Netflix documentary Strike: An Uncivil War.

So, the critique is not particularly of state intervention in the economy but the wrong sort. Hence, Jenrick talked  of the need for “the investment that Britain needs”. In particular, he focused on “getting Britain building again” as part of a process of “urban densification”. This leaves open the question of who will do this? Is it simply a case of loosening restrictions on development? What Jenrick argues is that what is required is “a small state that actually works”. This connects to a wider narrative that Britain simply isn’t working, with health, transport, education all in some form of crisis. That things are in a parlous state is widely accepted. But the underlying causes are again highly contestable.

Key to the narrative outlined by the four contestants is that, despite the Conservative Party being in power for the last 14 years, true conservatism has not been implemented and the values and ideology of “the left” dominate. That, as Matthew Goodwin has argued, the woke ‘new elite’ are the ones who dominate much of our public life and discourse. Again, this narrative is deeply contestable but it’s what fuels the leadership contenders’ contention that what is required is a radical form of conservatism to upend the status quo.

Simple binaries

For Badenoch, the election defeat was a “reckoning” that, if not responded to well, “could extinguish the Conservative Party”. The existential threat was not from the right but the result of the Conservatives’ acceptance of social democratic ideas. As a result, it had spoken conservative words but “governed left”.

Underpinning Badenoch’s analysis was a simple binary between socialism and capitalism, in which the former was the source of all our ills. In her analysis there is no room for varieties of capitalism, or of social democracy. In short, a very Hayekian analysis, according to which substantial intervention in the economy carries the seeds of a command economy and authoritarianism. In short, that state intervention in the economy is the first step on the road to serfdom. Snyder argues that Hayek’s “political autism” was flawed due to a fundamental misreading of history. Even so, Hayekian ideas remain a central tenet in contemporary conservatism. In them, it is argued, lie the seeds of social and economic revival. 

Golden era

The Conservatives need, Badenoch believes, to return to the type of ideas that had helped the 1980s become “a golden era of wealth creation”. As in the 1970s, the party faced “a battle of ideas against the left and its desire for ever greater social and economic control”. The “broken” state of Britain was the product of socialism which had returned; albeit “socialism in a suit”.  She said her campaign was about “renewal” in time for the next general election, adding: “we have it in our power to make the 2030s a golden decade.”

Again, the explicit model was the Thatcherite project. She mentioned the pivotal role of Keith Joseph in rebuilding the economy and “reshaping the state and its functions”. These policies had ” given power to the British people”.  In short, the Conservatives are the ones who best represent the true interests of the majority of British people. According to Badenoch, a conservative movement was required to fight against “left wing nonsense” in terms of cultural values and economic ideas. For Badenoch, government simply “needs to get out of the way”. Government should be a “servant of the market”. Since business created wealth and freedom, the key task of government was to “take shackles off the country”.

Replaying the greatest hits

In totality the leadership candidates’ speeches manifested a sense of a party still trapped in the past, playing the greatest hits and very much staying within a comfort zone. Despite Badenoch’s commitment to “tell the truth”, her fundamental ideas do not challenge the consensus within the party. Thatcher is seen as the last true Conservative leader. 

What is absent is any notion that Thatcherism was in any way problematic or that any of our current social and economic ills can be traced to it. There was a sense that things had gone too far in embracing an ‘individualistic’ philosophy during the Cameron-Osborne era. Talk of the ‘big society’ was an implicit acknowledgement that the free market had the potential to erode some social bonds. For instance, what is totally absent is any notion that rising levels of inequality are problematic. Take for example the work of the political geographer Danny Dorling on this. For Dorling, it is inequality which is the underlying cause of many of our social ills. In contrast, most Conservatives see the eroding of social bonds as a result of an overweening state and ‘mass immigration’. 

Influential bad ideas

As I’ve noted, what burst from the lips of the four contestants in Birmingham may well be full of holes. But, the ‘battle of ideas’ that Badenoch wants Conservatives to fully engage in, is not one in which intellectual coherence necessarily leads to success. History is full of influential bad ideas that don’t bear much rational scrutiny.

In short, while the legacy of Thatcherism is hotly contested, this is not the case within most of the British conservative movement. Praising the Thatcher era is very safe territory; it warms the cockles of the Tory faithful’s hearts. Our present ills are seen as a product of diverging from Thatcherism. The state has become too influential again and has again been captured by those with political agendas inimical to true conservative values. What gives Conservatives a sense of excitement when they hear Thatcherite values being espoused is the sense that they are again engaged in a radical project, something which can reverse Britain’s downward trajectory. 

Again, what is attractive is the simple binaries of capitalism against socialism. It’s a reminder that though extreme rhetoric regarding ‘culture war’ themes can often dominate coverage of contemporary conservatism, at the heart of the Conservative project is the free market. Even those on the wilder margins who talk about ‘globalism’ see this primarily as something created by cross-national institutions and global conglomerates. Hence Badenoch argues that real capitalism does not produce “corporatism and monopoly”. Again, all highly contestable but generally not by those who are her audience. The debate within the Conservative Party is very narrow – and possibly shallow.

We saw the way such narration can be successful in the wake of the global financial crisis. Rather than a crisis of neoliberalism, this was fairly successfully narrated as a crisis of the state and its excessive spending and borrowing by Labour. This undoubtedly proved politically effective, as it built on long-running arguments that the Labour Party can’t be trusted with the economy. Judging by the last 14 years, a similar critique might be made of the Conservative Party, yet such a narrative has much less purchase in our public discourse.

Lessons from the past

This is the danger of mocking the Conservatives’ continued deification of Thatcher.

An illustration of the realities is provided by the academic and politician David Marquand, who died earlier this year. From the early 1960’s onwards, he offered a powerful critique of free market conservatism. Marquand was early to pick up on the powerful new radical right emerging in the 1960s. Then, new ideas challenging the post-war orthodoxies were being articulated by the likes of Enoch Powell and by emerging think tanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs.

In ‘Battle of the Ghosts’, a 1964 essay in Encounter magazine, Marquand examined the ‘anti-collectivists’ of the right; ideas would later form the basis of the Hayekian New Right.  Marquand believed that such a politics was riven by contradictions and fundamentally wrong in its diagnosis of Britain’s problems and its proposed solutions. He would become one of the most prominent critics of Thatcherism (in The Unprincipled Society, 1988) and its deleterious effects on the public domain (The Decline of the Public, 2004) and the general health of British society (Mammon’s Kingdom, 2014). 

Marquand’s critique of Hayekian conservatism is a powerful one. However, such ideas have remained very prominent in our politics, as the Conservative leadership candidates have made clear. So, while the Conservative Party may be riven by factional tension, in ideological terms it is relatively united. Those who found the speeches at the Conservative Party conference incoherent and shallow should bear in mind that deep contradictions in the party’s ideology haven’t prevented it from dominating UK electoral politics.