David Cameron and Conservative renewal: The limits of modernisation? 9781526108241

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David Cameron and Conservative renewal

Series editor Series editor Richard Hayton Richard Hayton

TheThe study of conservative politics, broadly defined, is of enduring scholarly interestinterest and im-and study of conservative politics, broadly defined, is of enduring scholarly portance, and isand alsoisofalso great signifisignificance cance beyond the academy. In spite of this, for afor variety importance, of great beyond the academy. In spite of this, a variety of reasons thethe study of conservatism andand conservative politics waswas traditionally regarded as as of reasons study of conservatism conservative politics traditionally regarded something of aofpoor relation in comparison to to thethe intellectual interest in in ‘the‘the Left ’. In’. the something a poor relation in comparison intellectual interest Left In the British context thisthis changed with thethe emergence of Th which prompted a greater British context changed with emergence of atcherism, Thatcherism, which prompted a greater critical focus on the Conservative Party andand its ideology, andand a revitalisation of Conservative critical focus on the Conservative Party its ideology, a revitalisation of Conservative historiography. NewNew Perspectives on theon Right buildtoon thison legacy establishing a historiography. Perspectives the aims Righttoaims build this by legacy by establishseries work for in this field. It will publish best and innovative titles drawn ingidentity a series for identity work in this field. It willthe publish themost best and most innovative titles from the fifrom elds ofthe sociology, cultural studies and studies politicaland science and hopes stimudrawn fields of history, sociology, history, cultural political sciencetoand hopes latetodebate and debate interestand across disciplinary boundaries.boundaries. New Perspectives is not limitedis in stimulate interest across disciplinary New Perspectives notitslimhistorical or geographical but is united itsisconcern to critically interrogate ited in coverage its historical coverage or scope, geographical scope,by but united by its concern to critically andinterrogate better understand the understand history, development, basisintellectual and impactbasis of the Right. and better the history,intellectual development, and impact Norofisthe theRight. seriesNor restricted by its methodological approach: it will encourage original reis the series restricted by its methodological approach: it will encourage search fromresearch a plurality of perspectives. the series will act a voice original from a plurality of Consequently, perspectives. Consequently, the as series willand act forum as a voice for and workforum by scholars engaging with engaging the politics of the the politics right inof new imaginative for work by scholars with theand right in new andways. imaginative ways. Reconstructing conservatism? The Conservative party in opposition, 1997–2010 Richard Hayton Conservative orators from Baldwin to Cameron Edited by Richard Hayton and Andrew S. Crines The right and the recession Edward Ashbee The territorial Conservative Party: Devolution and party change in Scotland and Wales Alan Convery

David Cameron and Conservative renewal The limits of modernisation? Edited by

Gillian Peele and John Francis

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2016 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA, UK www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN  978 1 7849 9153 1  hardback First published 2016 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate

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Contents

List of figures and tables Notes on contributors  Preface and acknowledgments    Introduction: the politics of Conservative renewal   Gillian Peele and John Francis

page vi vii ix 1

1  David Cameron’s leadership and party renewal   Gillian Peele

22

2  Constructing a new conservatism? Ideology and values    Richard Hayton

41

3  Policies under Cameron: modernisation abandoned   Peter Dorey

58

4  The Conservative Party and a changing electorate     Matthew Burbank and John Francis

82

5  The parliamentary party     Philip Cowley, Mark Stuart and Tiffany Trenner-Lyle 6 Continuing fault lines and new threats: European integration and the rise of UKIP    Philip Lynch and Richard Whitaker

105

121

7  The evolving Conservative Party membership    Tim Bale and Paul Webb

139

8  Conclusion: a limited Conservative renewal?    Gillian Peele and John Francis

159

Select bibliography Index

168 175

Figures and tables

Figures 4.1 The Alford Index of class voting, 1964–2010 4.2 Voting turnout by age, 2015 4.3 Intended voting by age, 2015

page 89 97 98

Tables 3.1 The four domestic policy review groups and the issues they were to consider60 3.2 Key recommendations of the four ‘domestic’ policy review groups 62 4.1 General election results by region, 2015  83 4.2 Constituency changes, 2015 84 4.3 Conservative, Labour and no party identification, 1992–2015 91 4.4 Party identification and voter choice in selected ethnic groups, 2010 92 4.5 Differences in major party choice by gender and age, 2015 94 7.1 Tory membership’s basic demographic profile 141 7.2 Left–right attitudinal scale item statistics, 2009 and 2013 143 7.3 Libertarian–authoritarianism attitudinal scale item statistics, 2009 and 2013143 7.4 Conservative Party members’ views on intra-party processes, 2009 150 7.5 Views of Conservative Party members on intra-party processes by social and ideological backgrounds, 2009 151 7.6 OLS analysis of members’ attitudes towards internal democracy in the Conservative Party, 2009 152

Contributors

Tim Bale is Professor of Politics at Queen Mary, University of London where he specialises in comparative party politics. In 2016 his book The Conservatives since 1945 (Oxford University Press) went into paperback, as well as a new edition of The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron (Polity). Matthew Burbank is an associate professor in political science at the University of Utah where he teaches courses on political behaviour and research methods. His research focuses on political participation, political parties, and urban politics and policy. His most recent co-authored book is Parties, Interest Groups, and Political Campaigns (2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 2012). Philip Cowley is Professor of Politics at Queen Mary, University of London. His recent publications include (with Dennis Kavanagh) The British General Election of 2015 (Palgrave 2015) and (edited with Robert Ford) Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box (Biteback, 2015). Peter Dorey is Professor of British Politics at Cardiff University. He is the author of British Conservatism: The Politics and Philosophy of Inequality (I.B. Tauris, 2011). He is the co-author of The British Coalition Government, 2010–2015: A Marriage of Inconvenience (Palgrave, 2016) and of The Political Rhetoric and Oratory of Margaret Thatcher (Palgrave, 2016). John Francis  is Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah where he specialises in elections, regulatory policy and comparative politics. His most recent  publications are two works with Leslie P. Francis: Sustaining Surveillance (Springer, 2016) and Privacy: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2016). Richard Hayton is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of Leeds, and the Convenor of the Political Studies Association’s Conservatives and Conservatism Specialist Group. He has published extensively on British party politics and is

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Notes on contributors

the  author of Reconstructing Conservatism? The Conservative Party in Opposition, 1997–2010 (Manchester University Press, 2012). Philip Lynch is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Leicester. His recent publications include articles on the Conservative Party and European integration, party competition between the Conservatives and UKIP, and the Conservatives in the European Parliament. His latest book is (with Mark Garnett) Exploring British Politics (4th ed., Longman, 2016). Gillian Peele is Fellow and Tutor in Politics, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She has published widely on British, American and comparative politics. Her most recent work is (with David Hine) The Regulation of Standards in British Public Life: Doing the Right Thing? (Manchester University Press, 2016) Mark Stuart is an assistant professor at the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. He has published widely in the areas of Westminster parliamentary rebellions, UK political parties and political biography. His latest biography, to be published late next year, covers the colourful life of the late Eric Forth, Conservative MP from 1983 to 2006. Tiffany Trenner-Lyle has been a researcher for Philip Cowley and Mark Stuart on their work about parliamentary rebellions. She has had other work on British politics and current affairs published regularly in the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator. She has worked in Parliament for a Conservative MP for three years. Paul Webb is Professor of Politics at the University of Sussex and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. His field of research expertise covers party and electoral politics, a subject on which he has published widely. He is co-editor of the journal Party Politics, and is currently engaged in work on two ESRC-funded research projects, one of which is a major study of political party memberships in the UK. Richard Whitaker is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and Inter­ national Relations at the University of Leicester. He has published widely on the Conservatives, UKIP and European integration. He is currently engaged on a major study of the attitudes of Members of the European Parliament.

Preface and acknowledgments

This book explores aspects of David Cameron’s efforts to renew the Conservative Party after becoming leader in 2005. After an intensive and controversial time of modernising initiatives in the early period of his leadership, Cameron’s priorities were reshaped by the global fiscal crisis of 2008, leaving critics to question what, if anything, had survived of the early radical approach to changing the Conservative Party. In power between 2010 as head of a coalition government, Cameron necessarily seemed somewhat detached from the process of reformulating the Conservative Party’s appeal. Nevertheless, a shrewd and well-organised election campaign saw the Conservatives returned to power in May 2015 with a small overall majority, despite  the predictions of the polls. The victory raised the question of how far Cameron’s strategy for Conservative revival had been successful and whether, quietly and indirectly, he had achieved the changes necessary to make it electorally competitive again. It also raised the question of how far the leader’s relationship with his Party was so marked by factionalism and internal opposition that it would constrain his ability to develop a new style of Conservatism in office. In fact the loss of the EU referendum in June 2016 precipitated Cameron’s resignation and brought to an end a leadership which had successfully brought the Party back to power but without completely overcoming problems of internal disunity and diminished electoral appeal. This book had its beginning in a seminar series at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford in 2012 when John Francis was a Beaufort Fellow there. We would like to thank the Principal and Fellows of Lady Margaret Hall for their support and the various participants who enhanced our understanding of Conservative politics and policymaking through their talks. Early versions of the chapters here were given at a panel of the American Political Science Association in August 2013. We would like to thank the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford and the Mellon Fund for financial support to attend that conference and also to thank the DPIR at Oxford for support to hold a one-day conference around the chapters in January 2015. Philip Cowley and Mark Stuart wish to thank the University of Nottingham for its financial support of the research on which their chapter is based.

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Preface and acknowledgments

Finally we thank Richard Hayton, the series editor, for his generous help and advice at different stages in the life of this book. Tony Mason was an ever-friendly, patient and constructive editor at Manchester University Press. And we sincerely thank the anonymous referees for their insightful comments and suggestions at various stages of this project. Clare Atkin and Janet Wardell at Lady Margaret Hall provided invaluable technical support to the editors in preparing the manuscript. Any errors that remain are, of course, our responsibility. Gillian Peele and John Francis July 2016

Introduction: the politics of Conservative renewal Gillian Peele and John Francis This book examines the British Conservative Party and David Cameron’s efforts to renew the Party after 2005. It seeks to make a contribution to the understanding of contemporary British conservatism and the dynamics of Conservative Party politics by exploring the evolution of the modernisation strategy which Cameron promoted on becoming leader and the factors which constrained that process. Debate about the evolving character of British conservatism is still very much a live one and it has been given new relevance by the 2015 election and the loss of the EU referendum. While the 2015 general election saw David Cameron narrowly returned to Downing Street at the head of a Conservative government, the victory left a number of questions about the character of the modern Conservative Party unanswered. To what extent has Cameron been able to create a new version of the Conservative creed, capable of broadening the Party’s electoral appeal and addressing the needs of British society as it moves through the second decade of the twenty-first century? Can the Party’s identity, and indeed its unity, survive the profound challenges posed by withdrawal from the European Union and the fragility of the Union with Scotland? Will a second period in power allow the Party to reestablish its reputation for governing competence or are the problems facing the government likely to destroy its credibility once again? Cameron had embarked on the leadership of the Conservative Party against the background of seemingly inexorable decline. More than a decade later, the context has radically altered. From a situation in which the Conservative Party needed to reposition itself to reverse the haemorrhage of its own support and to meet the formidable challenge from New Labour, the Conservative Party has regained much of its competitive edge and has once more been returned to power in its own right. Moreover, it faces, at least for the moment, a Labour Party leadership located on the far left. The centre ground of British politics looks increasingly likely to be under Conservative command. The danger for the Conservatives now, apart from complacency, is that the inevitable absorption with short-term governance and policy problems will obscure and stifle the effort to think flexibly and innovatively about its own principles, policies and organisation. The book has a second central purpose in addition to shedding more light on

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the general character of the contemporary Conservative Party. It seeks to further our understanding of how fundamental changes occur in democratic political parties by focusing on the Conservative modernisation process. There is already a significant literature on the Conservative Party’s effort to rebuild itself under David Cameron’s leadership (see for example Lee and Beech, 2009; Bale, 2010; Dorey, Garnett and Denham, 2011; Hayton, 2012; Hayton and Kerr, 2015). Cameron himself and his handling of government between 2010 and 2016 have also been the subject of important new studies (see for example Seldon and Finn, 2015; Seldon and Snowden, 2015; Ashcroft and Oakeshott, 2015). The key element in Cameron’s strategy in the early days of his leadership was the quest for a modern version of conservatism which could address the agenda of the twenty-first century and transcend the language and values shaped by Thatcherism. This modernising strategy provides an important lens through which to evaluate the evolution of the modern Conservative Party. We should, however, recognise straight away that it is a starting point for understanding the dilemmas of modern conservatism and the dynamics of the contemporary Party. The process of reform and renewal has gone through a serious of stages and, after 2008, the vision of moving the Conservative Party towards a broadly based progressive centre was overtaken by the politics of austerity and the need to address the financial crisis. In this process different values and goals came to the fore. After 2010 the Conservative modernisation strategy devised for opposition was deflected by the constraints of government. The book retains the Cameron modernising agenda as the starting point of its analysis because, in the editors’ view, 2005 ushers in a new period in Conservative fortunes and marks a turning point in the Party’s engagement with a process of change and adaptation. The language and logic of modernisation have shaped the environment in which the subsequent and often bitter debates about the character of contemporary conservatism occur. And some of the Party’s crucial internal relationships, for example between the centre and the Party activists in the constituencies, have been soured by their resentment at aspects of the modernisation agenda. Not surprisingly the book’s contributors have different perspectives on the significance of the Conservative renewal process. Indeed, most are sceptical about the coherence and durability of the initial Cameron modernisation project, although they differ as to whether it was abandoned under pressure, was always cosmetic rather than real, or was absorbed into a more amorphous and pragmatic approach to revamping the Conservative image. The process of party renewal as presented here is thus uneven and indirect; it has different strands; and its meaning and value are certainly contested. The uneven progress and lack of continuity are especially important in relation to the Party’s ideological identity. We note at various points the efforts to redefine the meaning of conservatism, sometimes in conjunction with a resurrection of interest in the ‘OneNation’ tradition of conservatism (Seawright, 2010; Carr, 2014). Sometimes the

Introduction3 reworking of Conservative ideas was the result of new thinking about the economy and welfare and was driven by George Osborne who was an early moderniser and as Chancellor became a key partner of Cameron’s in government. Osborne, who was in many ways more interested in the intellectual foundations of policy than was Cameron, promoted a distinct strand of Conservative ideas which fused economic analysis and strategic thinking about the Conservative Party’s future appeal (Ganesh, 2014). An evolving transformation We may identify four distinct stages in the process of Conservative renewal after 2005, although these stages are not hermetically sealed from each other. The first was the early period of Cameron’s leadership when the modernisation agenda was at its most explicit and dynamic. In this period Cameron was seeking to give a new face to the Conservative Party, transforming its ‘nasty’ features and creating a sympathetic countenance. He sought to reassure the electorate that the Conservatives would not overturn the broad economic consensus adopted by Labour governments under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Specifically with an eye to emphasising the importance of high-quality public services, the Conservatives committed themselves to keeping public spending at the same level as their Labour predecessors. This was an energetic period of fundamental questioning of the Conservative Party’s political appeal and many aspects of the Party’s organisation and operations. It was an exercise enthusiastically joined by friends and allies such as Michael Gove, George Osborne, Francis Maude and Steve Hilton, many of whom had stronger modernising credentials than Cameron himself. It was ended by the global financial crisis of 2008 which shattered many of the comfortable assumptions on which much of the new Tory thinking had been predicated. The global financial crisis firmly placed deficit reduction at the top of the Tory agenda. In the view of many commentators, including some of our contributors, the reaction to the global crisis was a critical juncture for the Conservative Party. From that point, the Conservative Party apparently reverted to the neo-Thatcherite priority of getting the economy right and diluted much of the early effort to create a new socially liberal version of conservatism. Thus, although the Party continued to develop some of the modernising ideas canvassed in the early period of Cameron’s leadership, including new social thinking around the idea of the Big Society, on the crucial issue of its political economy the Party very clearly moved back to an agenda of financial constraints and extensive public expenditure cuts. The period of Coalition government of 2010–15 represents a third period of Conservative adaptation. The election result of 2010 had witnessed a good deal of discontent with the clarity of the Tory message despite the impressive Tory gains. Cameron himself called the campaign a ‘mess’. Lord Ashcroft and many others thought it confused and chaotic (Ashcroft, 2010). Many candidates were openly

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critical of the modernisers’ promotion of the ‘Big Society’ ideas of reducing the state’s role and strengthening voluntary and private sector groups to empower individuals and the community (Norman, 2010). Instead they wanted a much stronger emphasis on the familiar themes of tax cuts, immigration curbs and public spending restraint. The very formation of a coalition was seen by some Conservatives as evidence of a failure by Cameron to deliver electoral advance, although in fact the Party by any measure had done extremely well to secure the additional seats it won. This period saw the return of the Conservative Party to government but its policymaking was constrained by the need to keep Liberal Democrats on board. During the Coalition government, elements of the Conservative Party, especially the right, were deeply discontented and fractious and party management became increasingly challenging for the leadership. The final and most recent period is one in which a majority Conservative government had begun to promote its own version of conservatism and where there was a new political situation created by the apparent leftwards lurch of a weakened Labour Party, the surge of the SNP in Scotland and the virtual elimination from Parliament of the Liberal Democrat Party. Although there was not a return to the modernisation ideas promulgated in the first period of Cameron’s leadership, there was a range of new initiatives, many of them built around Chancellor George Osborne’s ideas about steering conservatism in new directions. There was also an attempt to press the ideas of ‘One Nation’ conservatism into service, an effort likely to continue under Cameron’s successor. In this chapter we explore aspects of these turning points in the process of Conservative Party renewal, although we largely leave discussion of the period from the 2015 election to the referendum until the Conclusion. Before discussing the contributions of our authors to the analysis, we provide a brief summary of some key features of the broader political landscape which have had an impact, both negatively and positively, on the structure and style of Conservative politics. First, however, we explore more extensively the concept of modernisation as applied to a political party and distinguish between some of its dimensions. Understanding modernisation Modernisation is, as many commentators acknowledge, an amorphous concept and its meaning may change with external circumstances (Denham and O’Hara, 2007). Indeed, in the case of the contemporary Conservative Party, as Kate Dommett has emphasised, it may be undefined by the party itself (Dommett, 2015). Modernisation necessarily focuses on how to produce a raft of changes to improve the party’s chances to win subsequent elections and regain power. Such a strategy is inevitably connected to debate within the party about why the previous election has been lost and the causes of other weaknesses in the party’s performance. It links ideology and electoral appeal, organisation and policy. While

Introduction5 such debate naturally concentrates on enhancing a party’s leadership capacity, the party’s policy positions and its ideology (Denham and O’Hara’s ‘three mantras’ of modernisation), it requires extensive analysis not just of existing electoral attitudes but their likely evolution. It needs to incorporate an understanding of the national and international factors shaping British society and it needs to have a strong sense of the realities of substantive policymaking. The extent of that effort and its coherence will depend upon other factors which may or may not be conducive to the generation of effective analysis. Sympathetic and imaginative leadership is obviously important as is the existence of organisations and individuals within and outside the Party to promote the discussion and promulgation of new thinking. Public intellectuals whose arguments can provide legitimacy and stimulus for policy change are an important element in this process. Political parties are, of course, always changing some aspects of their organisation but the notion of modernisation implies a process which is more radical and comprehensive than the frequent incremental adjustments parties make to the various aspects of their operations. The demand for modernisation involves something more, an explicit recognition that some major and fundamental overhaul of the party is needed to bring it into line not just with its target audience of voters but future electoral cohorts. To achieve this realignment a party needs to revisit not just its policies and programmes but the frameworks it uses to interpret the world, the language it uses to explore and express ideas and the understanding of key concepts in its vocabulary. Modernisation is undertaken, as Dommett emphasises, as the remedy for a party which has failed to keep up with changes in the external world, whether with voters, opponents or in the imperatives of governance, and has paid the price. Modernisation is thus a way of overcoming a gap between the party and the wider society. It is, however, driven by practical concerns. It usually occurs as a very self-conscious reaction to some catastrophe or sustained political defeat, although inevitably the interpretation of why a defeat or defeats occurred is likely be heavily contested. Tim Bale and Peter Dorey, who are both authors in this volume, have made important contributions to the analysis of party change. Bale (2012) has emphasised the extent to which, while there is rich debate about the evolution of party types, party change as such is not that well understood. Bale draws attention to the ‘working consensus’ that has emerged about what actually constitutes change, citing the Harmel and Janda framework which defines party change as ‘alteration or modification in how parties are organised, what human and material resources they can draw upon, what they stand for and what they do’ (Harmel and Janda, 1994). There are, however, as Bale underlines, also important issues about how change is operationalised and about the drivers of change. Bale in his masterly analysis of the Conservative Party identifies different elements of the modernisation process, including a reappraisal of personnel, organisation and policy adaption over the period since 1945 (Bale, 2012). Following Harmel and Janda, he draws a sharp distinction between drivers of change, which are the result of external shock

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(notably electoral defeat) and internal drivers, a change of leader or a change in the dominant party faction. The stimuli for modernisation may thus have exogenous or endogenous origins but they are not mutually exclusive. Events outside the party (external shocks such as a massive electoral defeat) may be followed by aftershocks such as amendments to a rival party’s programme or leadership or the entry of an attractive new party into the system. Social and economic developments – such as the contraction of trade union membership or demographic change – may alter the traditional appeal of a party and new-issue agendas can emerge again, threatening a party’s position. The point here is that, while one major external shock may have an impact, there may also be a series of subsequent events which ultimately may force a party to rethink its repertoire of policies and priorities but which may not elicit fundamental change immediately. Modernisation itself as a process may evolve slowly. Similarly, while a change in the leadership or attitude of key elites can produce important steers in a new direction for a party, not all change necessarily comes from the top. Ordinary members and activists may be the catalysts for new thinking or they may embrace it slowly. Party activists may also mobilise in new ways around their values, including expressing opposition to new leadership priorities. Part of the problem here is that parties are not unitary actors. They operate on different levels, and initiatives launched in one segment of a party may not mesh well with attitudes in another. Sometimes distinct segments of a party may actually be in conflict. Different segments of a party may hold conflicting goals and evaluations of tactics; and different factions even within one element of a party (for example its parliamentarians) may be less or more open to change than others. Peter Dorey’s discussion of modernisation in terms of three different levels – the ‘macro’, the ‘meso’ and the ‘micro’ – also offers a useful classification, allowing us to distinguish between overarching ideological change (the most dramatic and difficult) and lower-level policy shifts (Dorey, 2007). Certainly these distinctions are analytically helpful, although it is important to bear in mind the extent to which the different levels overlap. Modernisation rarely comes without resistance. Indeed Bale includes the facing down of internal opposition as an important part of his account of the modernisation process (Bale, 2010, 2012). Altering familiar and fundamental elements of a political party is inherently fraught with difficulty. Even after a shattering election defeat there will be profound disagreement about the causes of the disaster as well as about an effective strategy for the future. One frequent reaction to electoral rejection is to claim that the party lost the voters’ support because it failed to communicate its message clearly enough rather than because of any fundamental flaw in the message itself. But even if a party is persuaded that it needs to reappraise its whole enterprise – its values and ideology, its leadership, its image and policies and its organisation – the process is likely to be highly contentious. Existing elites and party activists will feel threatened by changes that challenge their cherished beliefs

Introduction7 and worldviews. Organisational change may disrupt their positions and authority in the party. New policy initiatives may exacerbate disagreement within the party ranks and create an electorally damaging sense of party disunity. One problem likely to affect parties which have suffered a series of defeats is that those who remain inside the party as members will be the most resistant to change to counter opposing parties. Using Hirschman’s terminology (Hirschman, 1990), exit will remove those most susceptible to the appeal of a competing party. Those who remain display loyalty but their exercise of voice may be an impediment to reform. Moreover party reform initiatives will inevitably take time to have any positive impact and their short-term effects may be negative. It is an interesting question as to whether conservative and right-of-centre parties find radical reappraisal of their position easier or harder than do other parties. On the one hand, right-of-centre parties are often hierarchical in organisation, allowing their leaders greater authority and discretion to shape strategy than do left-of-centre parties that tend to have a more decentralised and internally democratic power structure. On the other hand, changing political direction may be more problematic for conservative and right-wing parties because such parties are ideologically predisposed to resist change, however rational it may appear to the leadership. Conservative and right-of-centre parties which ostensibly dislike ideological argument may lack the analytic tools to interpret wide-ranging social changes or be impatient with such theoretical findings. After an initial theoretical commitment to reform, a range of formidable barriers to substantive change in a party subsequently may appear to thwart the continuation of reconstruction. Certainly the initial modernising efforts of the three Conservative opposition leaders who immediately preceded David Cameron – William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard – all faded to be replaced by strategies which concentrated on consolidating the core vote by traditional appeals rather than broadening the Party’s electoral base. As Matthew d’Ancona has noted in relation to the Conservative Party, modernisation is an easy cause to embrace but a much harder one to continue (d’Ancona, 2013). The challenge of how to adapt a political party to new social and political conditions will of course be harder at some times than at others and in some periods modernisation will be unsuccessful. In the political narrative of the major British parties there are powerful examples of restructuring and modernisation – for example in the Conservative Party between 1945 and 1950, although even here some of the elements of the narrative have been subject to reinterpretation (Bale, 2012; Hoffman, 1964; Ball and Seldon, 1987; Denham and O’Hara, 2007; Ramsden, 1987). The 1945–50 modernisation occurred without much effective direction from the party leader, Winston Churchill, and was largely the product of younger politicians to an extent that would be difficult to imagine today. At a later date both Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher in their very different ways set the Conservative Party in a new direction. The Heath-led modernisation had as its

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centrepiece Britain’s ­membership of the European Union; but it also promised, and failed to deliver, a ‘new style of politics’ and a radically reduced role for the state. The Thatcher renewal from 1975–79 inevitably appeared to be the most wide-ranging repositioning of the Party. It embraced radical new intellectual trends which bolstered free market thinking within the Party and rejected much of the accepted wisdom of British policymaking and government. Controversy continues to swirl around the consequences of the shifts in the Conservative Party’s identity which occurred under Mrs Thatcher and its relationship to the Conservative tradition. Was the Thatcherite synthesis (a potently populist mix of neo-liberal economic policy with elements of moral authoritarianism and patriotic national sovereignty values) inherently contradictory? Was it a triumph for one (albeit hitherto a minority) strand of the Conservative Party’s intellectual heritage? Or did it represent the capture of the Party’s dominant values and ethos (overwhelmingly pragmatic about government intervention and suspicious of sharply defined dogma) by an alien ideology, indeed one with the capacity to destroy genuine conservative values? Either way, the apparent political success of the energetic Thatcherite revision of conservatism ultimately provoked a response from Labour. The transformation of a failing Labour Party into the highly successful brand of ‘New Labour’ under Tony Blair was initially met with approval inside Labour ranks. Even if the period since Blair’s resignation has seen bitter controversy over whether that rebranding should be put into reverse, and control of Labour’s future ideological direction is now in the hands of a left-leaning leadership, British politics was for a long period dominated by Labour’s electorally popular blend of social democracy and free market economics (Bale, 2015). Modernisation is of course a means to an end, only adopted if people believe it will bring victory. Denham and O’Hara underline both the extent to which modernisation by itself is no guarantee of success and also the extent to which, when a party loses an election badly, recovery is likely to be a long-term process (Denham and O’Hara, 2007). Devising a strategy for party revival has proved unusually hard, however, for the Conservative Party in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries because of developments which have had a transformative aspect on the political agenda and on the conduct of British politics. The Cameron modernisation project Cameron’s efforts to modernise the Conservative Party took place after three successive general election defeats. In 1997 the Party saw its vote share drop from 14 million to 9.5 million, the worst performance since the Liberal landslide of 1906. Conservative claims to be a national party were exploded by the loss of all its seats in Scotland and Wales and almost all of its seats in the north of England and its larger cities. Analysis of the breakdown of the vote was hardly reassuring as Conservatives had performed particularly poorly among important social groups whose support

Introduction9 would be needed for the future, including younger voters and women. Despite some minor successes at local and European levels between 1997 and 2005, the Conservatives’ electoral position appeared very bad indeed. Their image with the  public remained negative, marred by continuing divisions over Europe, the perception that the Party was out of touch with ordinary people and the lingering association with economic failure, not least as a result of Britain’s 1992 ejection from the ERM under John Major. Cameron was the fourth Conservative leader to take on the role since 1997, a telling indicator of the Party’s enthusiasm for refreshing itself at the top and of the daunting task facing its leaders after 1997. Behind the gloomy headline figures of election defeats and Labour dominance, the Conservative Party wrestled with the problem of its negative public image which senior politicians such as Theresa May brought into the open. Francis Maude, who became Party chairman in May 2005, had long been anxious to address the public view of the Conservative Party as the ‘nasty’ party. In his 2002 R.A. Butler lecture he had starkly put the options for the Conservative Party as a choice between modernisation and dying (Maude, 2002). He demonstrated the Conservative predicament to the 2005 Conservative conference by a series of ‘killer slides’ which encapsulated Conservative problems: a policy on immigration – which voters overwhelmingly supported when tested blind – dramatically lost support when it was revealed as a Conservative policy. As Maude himself put it, the Conservative Party had become a threat to sound policies because of the attitudes attributed to the Party by much of the public (Maude, 2012). The ‘toxic’ image of the Party reflected the perception that not merely were its policies on such issues as poverty and welfare harsh but that its reactionary attitudes were increasingly out of step with a more tolerant, socially liberal and multicultural country. How to overcome this deeply entrenched hostility to the Tory brand was the overwhelming priority of the Conservative modernisers. Cameron thus inherited a party that was profoundly unhappy with itself. Conservatives rarely find the opposition benches comfortable but between 1997 and 2005 the Party had torn itself apart over a range of issues and seemed to have lost the instinct for political success. Books about the period of opposition convey the flavour of internecine strife and frustration that under Blair’s leadership a revived Labour Party appeared to have replaced the Conservatives as the natural party of government (Walters, 2001; Fowler, 2008; 2010). The strategic options faced by David Cameron on becoming leader in 2005 were limited. His campaign for the leadership had ultimately embraced the need for radical modernisation urged both by his own generation of allies and from more senior figures such as Archie Norman and from Francis Maude, who has been dubbed the ‘Holy Spirit’ of Conservative modernisation. Cameron’s approach signalled more than an electoral makeover. Cameron knew the Party had to be taken back to the centre ground, to be a big-tent party that could include groups that had been alienated from the Party or had never been attracted by it. To get there the Conservatives

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had to address new issues and new concerns, recognising frankly the generation shift that had occurred since the Conservatives had last enjoyed power. It needed to transcend the ideology, the discourse and the priorities of Thatcherism, to identify with the concerns of a changing society and to adapt its values to a ­different world from that of the 1980s. The task of moving the Conservative Party on from its Thatcherite impulses was a delicate one. Cameron was aware that any explicit rejection of Thatcherite ideas could antagonise sections of the Party. He therefore advocated supplementing what he saw as the gaps in the message of previous leaders rather than moving away from their primary concerns, an approach which became known as ‘and conservatism’. Although he was later to insist that the Conservatives should never have lost the mantle of ‘One Nation’ and sought to reclaim it, this label needed careful handling. In its recent history, support for ‘One Nation’ ideas has been used as code for antiThatcherism and it later aroused further suspicion when taken up by the Labour Party (Seawright, 2010). Cameron certainly did not want to reopen earlier divisions between wets and dries and wanted to move the debate about the role of government on from where it had been in the Thatcher period. He wanted to project a style of conservatism which was moderate and compassionate. He wanted it to be socially inclusive but without the associations of paternalism and expanded government sometimes associated with the ‘One Nation’ Conservative tradition. A new progressive version of conservatism, Cameron thought, needed to take account of the changed role of the state and the market that had occurred as a result of Thatcherism. It needed to provide solutions to domestic social problems and global issues in ways which did not rely on either the juggernaut of large government or the unpredictable effects of the market. Cameron had the advantage of looking attuned to the modern era, and he had excellent communication skills. To critics he was perhaps too smooth and polished, and his privileged background was seen by many as a disadvantage, but he appeared attractively youthful and confident to a Party anxious to rediscover the secret of winning again. New leaders are expected to bring new elites to the fore and Cameron was no exception. Although Cameron reached out to include previous leaders (notably William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith) and former opponents in key roles in the Party’s policymaking, his inner circle of advisers reflected preexisting and close-knit ties of friendship. The search for new policy themes and approaches has been transformed in the post-1975 period by the growth of think tanks of varying quality and strength. Cameron early on drew on Iain Duncan Smith’s network of social justice reformers and the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) but also on Policy Exchange (PE), which (together with C-Change) had been founded by Francis Maude and others explicitly to promote new thinking on the centre right. Although Cameron himself was not keen on overtly ideological approaches to politics, he was more than willing to draw on the ideas of intellectually innovative friends such as Steve Hilton and other

Introduction11 modernisers such as Michael Gove. Hilton developed the theme of the Big Society as the foundation for a different emphasis for a new conservatism. The Party also tried to change its image by altering the logo of the flaming torch of freedom which Mrs Thatcher had introduced but which by 2005 seemed dated. An oak tree was identified as a better option as the Party emblem and the blue trunk and green branches meshed well the Party’s highlighting of environmental issues. To critics such as Lord Tebbit, who likened the new logo to a ‘bunch of sprouting broccoli’, it seemed blurred and meaningless (Jones, 2010: 128), a view which Lord Tebbit expressed about much of the modernisation agenda. Cameron also wanted to change the image of the Party by broadening the range of candidates selected for safe seats. Specifically he wanted to see more women on the Tory benches and more representatives of ethnic minorities. The instrument for this change – the so-called ‘A list’ – was bitterly opposed by many of his backbenchers, aspiring candidates and constituency activists. As is discussed in later chapters, the initiative created early hostility between Cameron and the wider Party. The first years of Cameron’s leadership thus saw a good deal of innovation in the field of ideology, policy and organisation – some of it highly controversial within the Party, some of it (like the invitation to ‘hug a hoodie’ and the promotion of environmental concerns) vulnerable to mockery and ridicule (Bale, 2008). However, the early modernisation agenda was overtaken by events in the form of the impact of the global fiscal crisis of 2008. This crisis constituted a major external shock and had the effect of reshaping Tory priorities and causing a rethink of economic commitments. In the process the early modernisation agenda was to a large extent diluted or ignored, raising the question of how far those early new directions were real commitments and of the character of the Conservative Party being reshaped under Cameron. The changing landscape of British politics Cameron’s efforts to renew the Conservative Party took place against a backdrop of profound alterations in the topography of British politics. While New Labour under Tony Blair had established itself as the dominant party by shifting Labour firmly towards the centre ground, by the time Cameron took on the Tory leadership electoral attachment to the established two-party system seemed to be eroding. The Conservatives found their own vote challenged both by Labour and by the growing appeal of third parties. The Liberal Democrats had benefitted from Conservative unpopularity in the last years of the Thatcher/Major governments, winning a series of by-elections, and had established themselves as a credible third force in British politics. The Liberal Democrats made headway by emphasising a progressive and humanitarian approach linked to a liberal internationalism in stark contrast to the strident populism which had come to taint the Conservative image. In the 1997 election the Liberal Democrats took a series of hitherto Conservative seats and consolidated a regional presence in the south-west.

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David Cameron and Conservative renewal

In addition to the realignment around the centre of British politics, other parties had emerged since the late 1970s and grown in salience. Some of them were good examples of niche parties – ones which de-emphasised economic concerns and  stressed a small range of non-economic issues. The nationalist parties of Scotland and Wales promoted a different agenda, starting in the 1970s. The SNP in particular gained traction in the 1980s in opposition to Thatcherism and began to erode support in Labour’s Scottish strongholds, a movement which culminated in 2015 with the near clean sweep of all Scottish seats. The Greens also made a little headway as environmental issues rose up the political agenda. On the right of British politics, there were a variety of smaller parties, none of which initially seemed to have much impact. However, in the early years of the twenty-first century UKIP began to gain support and attention. UKIP merged a populist message on Europe with a strong line on curbing immigration. Although dismissed as a minor fringe party and derided by Cameron as representing ‘fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists’, its appeal increased dramatically after 2010. Its platform focused on specific issues, especially Europe and immigration, that the major parties had seemingly side-stepped. It also tapped the more general feeling that both major parties had failed to address the real concerns of the electorate. Its organisational resources were powerfully strengthened by several major donors, including Stewart Wheeler and other wealthy individuals and firms. UKIP frightened many Conservatives because it was thought that its message would draw off some support in tight races. UKIP’s surge during the period of Coalition government reflected the increasingly apparent alienation of much of the British public from the major parties. The challenge from UKIP also threatened to inflame intra-party divisions as some Conservative MPs such as Michael Fabricant and Jacob Rees-Mogg in the run-up to the 2015 election urged finding an accommodation with UKIP. There was also concern that some disillusioned Westminster Conservatives might cross the floor, although in the event only Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless did so. An important part of the political environment in which the Conservatives have had to rebuild themselves has been the apparent alienation of the public from political activity. Turnout at general elections has fluctuated over the post-1997 period, dropping when the election result seemed predictable (to 59.1% in 2001 and 61.3% in 2005) but rising to 65.1% in the more competitive contest of 2010 and to 66% in 2015, the highest since Blair’s 1997 victory. These turnout figures contrast markedly with the level of electoral participation in the immediate post-war years – for example the 84% turnout in 1950. Other elections reinforced a decline in public engagement with orthodox politics. Local elections saw some very low turnouts over the post-1997 period as did European elections. The European elections of 2014 in which UKIP achieved the largest share of the vote saw a UK-wide turnout of 34.19%, which was lower than the European average. While elections to the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh

Introduction13 National Assembly initially at least seemed to excite more interest among voters, the elections for newly created crime commissioners in 2011 saw turnout fall to a low of 15%. Behind these low turnout figures there were a number of other developments, including the weakening of the ties between parties and voters which is discussed further in later chapters. In addition to the increasing fluidity of the British electorate, there has been a decline in traditional forms of political activity. This trend is one which has been observed in a number of democracies and has been linked by some commentators to a more wide-ranging crisis of legitimacy or democratic deficit (Norris, 2011). A decline of citizen engagement and of trust in politicians suggested a disconnect between the public and their representative institutions. Plummeting membership of traditional parties has been another marker in the atmosphere of eroding civic participation. Political parties have been forced to adapt as disillusion with traditional party activity has taken its toll on party membership and other resources (Dalton and Wattenberg, 2001; Dalton, 2004; Dalton and Welzel, 2014; Scarrow, 2014). This development deprives parties of important organisational resources but also may undermine their legitimacy as representative bodies linking government to the governed. Many commentators have spoken of the challenging environment this shift has caused for parties which find themselves ‘swimming upstream’ in cultures that are less attuned to partisan identities (Scarrow, 2014). The Conservative Party membership had been as high as three million in the 1950s but that had dropped to 400,000 on the eve of the 1997 election and was to drop further after 2005 (Strafford, 2013). William Hague made the recruitment of a million members by the millennium a key goal of his brief leadership though it was probably always unrealistic and was unsurprisingly dropped. Whether this kind of top-down drive to boost traditional party membership was ever wise in the late twentieth century is a moot point. What is important here is that in such circumstances there is inevitably a tension between the enhanced rights which may be given to those members who remain and their ability to reflect the wider electorate. Their exercise of voice inside the Party in the name of internal democracy risks constraining the ability of party leaders to appeal to the wider population of voters (Scarrow, 2014). Technology has added its own contribution to the internal dynamics of parties through the accessibility of new social media that empower grass-roots activists to a greater extent than before and enable new actors to challenge the leadership control of the Party agenda. The success of ConservativeHome, a website funded by Lord Ashcroft, underlined the point that activists could now get their message across in a way which was not susceptible to leadership control. Conservative efforts to rebuild their organisation thus had to fight against cultural and social developments which had weakened many traditional forms of political activity, especially party membership, and against specific factors which had

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caused new conflicts between the Conservative Party leadership and its m ­ embers and offered new ways of fighting those conflicts. The chapters The contributors to this book address different aspects of the complex process of Conservative renewal since 2005. Gillian Peele evaluates David Cameron’s leadership of the Conservative Party and its relationship to party renewal. She suggests Cameron’s approach to party reform went through a number of stages and that, while aspects of the early modernisation agenda were important to Cameron personally, he was always pragmatic about much of it. Moreover, even if he had wanted to drive a more radical modernisation programme through, he was constrained not just by events but by the lack of deep support for modernisation in the parliamentary party. His leadership style, though very effective in many respects, alienated and antagonised sections of both the parliamentary and voluntary party. Nevertheless he was able to deliver what the Party most wanted – electoral advance and a return to government. Although the early modernisation agenda was diluted, Cameron has altered elements of the Party significantly. He has edged the Party towards the centre ground and has re-established the Party’s reputation for governing competence, as well as softening its rhetoric and image. She argues that, while this achievement needs to be developed by careful attention to the public perception of policies and personnel, there has been a movement towards the construction of a party which can claim to be more socially liberal and inclusive than it was when Cameron took over. That movement towards a socially more liberal and compassionate Conservative Party has been paralleled by important new directions in the Party’s thinking about the key issues of economic policy, public spending and welfare largely as a result of George Osborne’s period at the Exchequer. Osborne and Cameron have long been close allies in stark contrast to the Blair– Brown relationship which so troubled Labour between 1997 and 2007. Cameron himself, if not a self-conscious intellectual, had a well-developed tactical sense. He largely had the secret ingredient of leadership – luck. He was certainly lucky in his opponents in the Labour leadership after Blair’s resignation. However, intra-party division remained a serious problem, and the European referendum, forced on him by those divisions, ultimately destroyed Cameron’s leadership. Richard Hayton in his analysis of Conservative ideology argues that Cameron’s attempt to reposition the Party ideologically involved an attempt to distance it from the legacy of Thatcherism. Hayton sees Thatcherism as espousing three elements: a neo-liberal approach to the economy, a moralistic authoritarian approach to social policy and a narrow view of sovereignty. Unlike some critics such as Ian Gilmour (1992), he sees Thatcherism as being within the Conservative ideological tradition, not outside it. Thatcherism for Hayton is thus part of the intellectual family

Introduction15 of ­conservatism. Just how much Cameron wished to modify Thatcherism remains unclear. Cameron has frequently professed himself sceptical about ideology and he certainly did not want to reverse the broad shift away from the big state that had occurred between 1979 and 1997. Rather he wanted to supplement it with an emphasis on social liberalism and cohesion and themes such as the quality of public services and the environment, which had been neglected in the Thatcherite push to roll back the state. This approach meant building on Thatcherism not replacing it. Additionally there were crucial differences of tone and style. Indeed rhetorical distancing as opposed to any movement beyond the parameters of Thatcherism is seen as an important part of Cameron’s contribution to the change in the character of conservatism under his leadership. But, as Hayton emphasises, the fiscal crisis laid bare the different approaches of Conservatives and Labour to the economy and stripped out some of the more liberal elements of the ‘Cameron’ agenda because of the constraints on public spending. What was left Hayton sees as default neo-Thatcherism. Neo-Thatcherism is a difficult concept given the disagreement about the definition of Thatcherism itself and the extent to which it should be seen as an evolving set of ideas and impulses rather than a clearly defined doctrine. As Hayton acknowledges, the Cameron synthesis represents some movement onwards from the values of Thatcherism, although Mrs Thatcher herself came to recognise the need to augment her economic vision with a strong focus on social problems. Hayton’s view is that Cameron’s conservatism, even if it was more broadly constructed and softer in tone than Mrs Thatcher’s, remains in the Thatcherite mould. Thus even if Cameron really did wish to promote a fundamental repositioning, he did not achieve it. Indeed, in opposition to authors such as Matt Beech, he emphasises that Cameron’s values remained essentially conservative. He may have urged movement in the direction of liberal or progressive conservatism but he was shifting gear within the framework of conservatism, not liberalism, as Beech suggests. It is hard not to agree with Hayton’s arguments. Yet there remains the question of how far, even if one accepts the thrust of his suggestion that Cameron retained important continuities with Thatcherism as he sought to change the agenda and soften its style, the synthesis which Cameron has produced is distinctive. Does it constitute a new form of progressive post-Thatcherite conservatism, a new strand in the Party’s intellectual repertoire? It is difficult inevitably to be sure of how much of a new direction Cameron has provided as he had only a short time for any substantial new reflections on Conservative ideals as head of a Conservative government. Hayton would probably be the first to acknowledge that, while Cameron’s emphasis thus far has failed to establish any significant new intellectual underpinnings for the Conservatives, the process of renewal is far from over and under May’s leadership it is likely to exhibit new initiatives and emphasis. Peter Dorey is clear that the initial idea of constructing a progressive compassionate conservatism quickly gave way under the pressure of the fiscal crisis of 2008

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David Cameron and Conservative renewal

to a set of policies which had much more in common with Thatcherite values than with any new and distinctive Tory ‘third way’. Rolling back the state, cutting public expenditure and emphasising the role of the free market were themes that the Party naturally felt more comfortable with than the newer concerns with a ‘broken society’ or the environment which had been rolled out at the beginning of Cameron’s leadership. In a sense therefore the fiscal crisis relieved Cameron and the Tories of the need to pursue an agenda which was not their own. Dorey acknowledges that there were innovations in the policy process but suggests that the rhetoric of conservatism and the substance of policy moved sharply away from the reformist impulses of the early Cameron period once the Party was confronted by the economic constraints of the 2008 crisis. In the Coalition government, he suggests, the policies reflected the priority accorded to defeating the deficit rather than any wider vision of a modernising conservatism. Dorey is also very sceptical about the extent to which there was a renewed commitment to a new style of conservatism as a result of the 2015 election and Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour. On this view modernising conservatism, which he sees as at best a fleeting moment in opposition and at worst a cosmetic veil for continuing neo-liberal beliefs, has become unnecessary for the Conservative Party because of the new stance of Labour. Matthew Burbank and John Francis examine the extent to which the Conservatives have succeeded in re-establishing the dominant electoral position that the Party enjoyed for much of the last century. The justification for the Cameron modernisation programme (as has been the case for most modernisation programmes) was the need to broaden the base of the Party to enable it to regain power. Constructing policies that would appeal to groups who had deserted the Party has not proved easy for the Conservative Party. Over the course of the past four elections the Party has continued to display weaknesses in its ability to appeal to important social groups such as younger voters and ethnic minorities, as well as to women and gay voters. The Party’s appeal is strongest in southern England which, while rich in numbers of voters, risks limiting its legitimacy. If the Party wishes to claim to speak for the country as a whole it needs more support in the north and beyond England. Older voters, the authors argue, are now a critical source of support for the Party not only because they are a larger share of the British population than in the past but, more to the point, they turn out to vote in far larger numbers than younger age groups. But even this group has weakened loyalties and may be vulnerable to the attractions of other parties. The genuine Conservative electoral achievement in the 2015 General Election was not only retaining its share of the electorate but slightly increasing it as well. But the message of this chapter is that the electoral environment is characterised by growing uncertainty. Party loyalty has attenuated. The near disappearance of Labour in Scotland, the collapse of the Liberal Democrats in England and the dispersed appeal of UKIP, all helped the agile Cameron-led Conservatives in 2015 to form the first Conservative government in 18 years. The challenge for future

Introduction17 Conservative leaders is to devise and to sustain winning electoral coalitions in even more uncertain times. Philip Cowley, Mark Stuart and Tiffany Trenner-Lyle examine the role of the parliamentary party in Conservative Party politics by focusing especially on the Parliament of 2010–15 and the extent to which the Tory backbenchers remained divided over key issues. As is now well known, the assumption that MPs will follow their leaders’ directions on how to vote in the division lobbies has been disproved by the escalating dissent from backbenchers of all parties from the 1970s onwards (Norton, 1978, 1980; Cowley, 2002, 2005). Factionalism within the Conservative Party had severely damaged its reputation from the Major government onwards but under the Coalition government of 2010–15 dissent in the Conservative ranks reached record levels. Not only did Cameron not enjoy a honeymoon as a new prime minister, as might have been expected, but of the 163 MPs who at some point voted against their Party, 94 were from the new intake of MPs in 2010. The issues on which the MPs rebelled varied: Europe was a frequent source of division but so too were constitutional issues and foreign policy. Mostly, the rebels were unable to deflect government policy but on some issues they had a crucial impact. Thus on House of Lords reform Conservative opposition in July 2012 caused the Coalition government’s proposals to be abandoned with profound consequences for Liberal Democratic support for constituency redistribution. On intervention in Syria in August 2013 Cameron’s government was to abandon its effort to engage in military action against the Syrian regime. Cowley, Stuart and Trenner-Lyle suggest that the parliamentary party was more restraint than resource for Cameron in this period. And they emphasise that in the 2010–15 Parliament only some 14% of the parliamentary party could be counted as modernisers. Put slightly differently Cameron had only a very limited amount of support for his modernisation project within his own parliamentary party even after the 2010 election which saw extensive turnover in the Tory ranks. Cowley, Stuart and Trenner-Lyle’s analysis draws attention to the difficulties of party management in that period but also to the extent that Cameron’s relationship with his own backbenchers was a complex and difficult one. In the 2010–15 Parliament Cameron was to some extent protected from the critics on his right both by the phalanx of Liberal Democrat MPs supporting the Coalition and by the fact that the Tory right and the Labour Party would rarely combine to defeat the government. While the return of single-party government and the small size of the majority in the 2015 Parliament may serve to induce more intra-party discipline, habits of dissent remained entrenched among Cameron’s right-wing critics. The leadership took measures to try to protect itself (and the government’s fragile majority) from its internal party critics by the adoption of a tight discipline within the government and the cultivation of better relations with backbenchers. Nevertheless the agenda of contentious issues facing the government – especially the management of the European referendum – was hazardous for party unity and Party divisions will take a long time to heal even after Brexit.

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David Cameron and Conservative renewal

The continuing discontent over Europe is taken up by Philip Lynch and Richard Whitaker in their chapter. The European issue has wreaked havoc in the Conservative Party for nearly five decades, and Euroscepticism, as Lynch and Whitaker observe, has become an element of its DNA. As they also note, the centre of gravity in the Party has moved so that the debate is now overwhelming between shades of Euroscepticism. One element of the modernisation agenda was to transcend the damaging image of a divided party by broadening Conservative concerns, away from a perceived obsession with Europe. Unfortunately for Cameron, this strategy was always vulnerable to attack from traditionalist critics who were sceptical of the modernisation project as much as of the European one. Equally importantly the clever linkage by UKIP of the European issue to immigration, and the Cameron strategy of moving towards the centre ground of British politics, created space on the right of the Conservative Party for UKIP to exploit. Even if the UKIP threat is not entirely to the Conservative vote, its shrill challenges on Europe made it hard to deflect the issue. The Conservative return to government with a soft Eurosceptic agenda of renegotiation inevitably created a series of salient controversies which hard Eurosceptics could exploit. The continuing combustibility of the European issue for the Conservative Party was heightened by conflict within the EU, a sense exacerbated by the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis and by the eruption of the migration problem in Europe in 2015. By early 2016 Cameron had been forced to bow to pressure from his backbenchers for a referendum on UK membership of the EU but despite this the issue continued to fracture the Party. Cameron’s successor now has the problem of how to reunite the Party since the Brexit vote has not necessarily closed the issue. The European fissure and the threat of UKIP not only aroused passion among Tory backbenchers. They also created deep divisions at the Party grass roots. The Party activists were also less than enthusiastic about elements of the renewal agenda itself seeing some of its elements as either baffling (the Big Society) and misguided or morally wrong (same-sex marriage). Cameron’s leadership, though in many ways successful, saw intense and bitter conflict over the shift towards social liberalism. The Conservative grass roots in short have frequently felt their views count for little and that they were being ignored by the leadership. As a result, the relationship between Cameron and the voluntary party was on occasion tense and confrontational. More generally, the role of the Party membership has been affected by a number of factors which have rebalanced the relationship with the parliamentary elite and the leadership. These factors, as Tim Bale and Paul Webb show, include a decline of deference within the Party partly because of c­ onstitutional reforms attempting to produce more internal democracy and partly because of the extent to which the activists after 1997 held the parliamentary party to blame for the Conservative Party’s woes. By the same token, some advocates of modernisation and strategists who have noted the changing context of party competition have questioned how far traditional forms of party activity are really needed in

Introduction19 the twenty-first century. Bale and Webb bring new evidence to bear on the ideological orientation of party members and they draw attention to new opportunities for voice within the Party through websites such as ConservativeHome, which have strengthened the grass-roots activists’ ability to get their views across to the media. Importantly also Bale and Webb note the impact of declining membership numbers and the extent to which efforts to compensate for reduced organisational resources in today’s Conservative Party have led to an experiment with new forms of activism – the so-called multi-speed membership party (Scarrow, 2014). In their concluding chapter the editors return to the multi-stage process of party renewal and its legacy especially in the light of the 2016 referendum and its aftermath. In this context the final chapter assesses how far the Cameron renewal project has changed the Conservative Party and it assesses what, if anything, can be gleaned about the likely direction of travel of the Conservative Party in the next decade. References Ashcroft, M. (2005) Smell the Coffee: A Wake Up Call for the Conservative Party, London: MAA. Ashcroft, M. (2010) Minority Verdict: The Conservative Party the Voters and the 2010 Election, London: Biteback. Ashcroft, M. and Oakeshott, I. (2015) Call Me Dave: The Unauthorised Biography of David Cameron, London: Biteback. Bale, T. (2008) ‘A Little Bunny Hugging and a Bit More Bunny Boiling? Qualifying Conservative Change under Cameron’, British Politics 3(3): 270–99. Bale, T. (2009) ‘Cometh the Hour Cometh the Dave: How Far is the Conservative Party’s Revival All Down to David Cameron?’ The Political Quarterly 80(2): 222–32. Bale, T. (2010) The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron, Cambridge: Polity. Bale, T. (2012) The Conservatives since 1945: The Drivers of Change, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bale, T. (2015) Five Year Mission: The Labour Party under Ed Miliband, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ball, S. and Seldon, A. (eds) (2005) Recovering Power: The Conservatives in Opposition since 1867, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Carr, R. (2014) One Nation Britain: History, the Progressive Tradition and Practical Ideas for Today’s Politicians, Farnham: Ashgate. Cowley, P. (2002) Revolts and Rebellions: Parliamentary Voting under Blair, London: Politicos. Cowley, P. (2005) The Rebels: How Blair Mislaid His Majority, London: Politicos. Dalton, R. (2004) Democratic Choices Democratic Challenges: The Erosion of Political Support in Advanced Industrial Democracies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dalton, R. and Wattenburg, M. (2000) Parties without Partisans, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dalton, R. and Welzel, C. (2014) The Civic Culture Transformed: From Allegiance to Assertive Citizens, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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D’Ancona, M. (2013) In It Together: The Inside Story of the Coalition Government, London: Viking. Denham, A. and O’Hara, K. (2007) ‘The Three “Mantras”: Modernisation and the Conservative Party’, British Politics 2: 167–90. Dommett, K. (2015) ‘The Theory and Practice of Party Modernisation: The Conservative Party under David Cameron 2005–2015’, British Politics 10(2): 114–30. Dorey, P., Garnett, M. and Denham, A. (2011) From Crisis to Coalition: The Conservative Party 1997–2010, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Fowler, N. (2008 (2010, revised ed.)) A Political Suicide: The Conservatives’ Voyage into the Wilderness, London: Politicos. Ganesh, J. (2014) George Osborne: The Austerity Chancellor, London: Biteback. Gilmour, I. (1992) Dancing with Dogma: Britain under Thatcherism, London: Simon and Schuster. Harmel, R. and Janda, K. (1994) ‘An Integrated Theory of Party Goals and Party Change’, Journal of Theoretical Politics 63(3): 259–87. Hayton, R. (2012) Reconstructing Conservatism: The Conservative Party in Opposition 1997– 2010, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hayton R. and Kerr, P. (2015) ‘Whatever Happened to Conservative Modernisation?’ British Politics 10: 114–30. Hirschman, A. (1970 (1990)) Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organisations and States, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hoffman, J. (1964) The Conservative Party in Opposition 1945–51, London: MacGibbon and Kee. Jones, N. (2010) Campaign 2010: The Making of the Prime Minister, London: Biteback. Kettell, S., Kerr, P. and Hayton, R. (2015) Special Issue: Conservative Party Modernisation from Opposition to Government, British Politics 10. Lee, S. and Beech, M. (eds) (2009) The Conservatives under David Cameron: Built to Last? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Maude, F. (2002) ‘Modernise or Die’, R.A. Butler memorial lecture, 21 March 2002. Maude, F. (2012) ‘Ten Years of Party Modernisation: Looking Back and the Challenges Ahead’, Speech to Policy Exchange, 7 March 2012. Norman, J. (2010) The Big Society: The Anatomy of the New Politics, Buckingham: University of Buckingham Press. Norris, P. (2011) Democrat Deficit: Critical Citizens Revisited, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Norton, P. (1978) Conservative Dissidents: Dissent within the Parliamentary Conservative Party 1970–1974, London: Temple Smith. Norton, P. (1980) Dissension in the House of Commons 1974–79, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ramsden, J. (1987) ‘A Party for the Owners or for the Earners: How Far Did the Conservative Party Really Change after 1945?’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 37: 49–63. Scarrow, S. (2014) Beyond Party Members: Changing Approaches to Partisan Mobilization, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seawright, D. (2010) The British Conservative Party and One Nation Politics, London: Continuum.

Introduction21 Seldon, A. and Finn M. (2015) The Coalition Effect, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seldon, A. and Snowden, P. (2015) Cameron at 10: The Inside Story, London: William Collins. Strafford, J. (2013) ‘The Decline and Fall of the Conservative Party’, Open Democracy UK, 16 August 2013. See www.opendemocracy.net/UK. Walters, S. (2001) Tory Wars: The Tories in Crisis, London: Politicos.

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David Cameron’s leadership and party renewal Gillian Peele

Writing on the tenth anniversary of David Cameron’s victory in the Conservative leadership election, Paul Goodman, the editor of the influential online site ConservativeHome, noted that on some measures Cameron’s decade in the leadership made him the second most successful Conservative leader in the last hundred years (ConservativeHome, 6 December 2015). Yet, as Goodman’s article also un­­ derlined, there is a sense in which Cameron’s leadership remains puzzling and problematic: for many observers his fundamental beliefs remained unclear. There is thus a sense that he was either echoing the title of the ConservativeHome article, something of a political chameleon or a leader with a series of differing, indeed contradictory, impulses. Nor is there any agreed interpretation of the effect of his leadership. In some ways he has succeeded brilliantly against the odds in renewing the Conservative Party, taking it back to a dominant position in the British political system and delivering, as a powerful prime minister, a style of governance which has restored Conservative governing credibility. For critics, however, there remains the question of how securely based these achievements are and what the historical verdict on Cameron’s leadership will be. As the United Kingdom entered a phase of acute internal controversy over the impact of leaving the European Union, the legacy of his leadership for the longer-term future of the Conservative Party is far from certain. This chapter explores the relationship between David Cameron’s leadership, including those contradictory impulses and tensions, and the revitalisation of the Conservative Party, the renewal that is the subject of this book. Academic interest in leadership, and especially in political leadership, has burgeoned in recent years (Rhodes and t’Hart, 2014). Leadership is a multidimensional concept involving the interaction of individuals and the context in which they operate. That interaction in turn raises a host of questions which will continue to challenge scholars in the field (for an excellent overview see Elgie, 2015). For the limited purposes of this chapter, three points from the leadership literature should be borne in mind at this stage. The first is the difficulty of providing a comprehensive and objective account of the personality, skills, traits and other factors which are displayed by an individual leader and determining how, if at all, they have shaped his or her actions.

David Cameron’s leadership and party renewal23 This d­ ifficulty is acute for the study both of historical figures and contemporary figures. In the case of living politicians, especially if they are still in office, the problem is compounded by the likelihood that perspectives on that leader may be subjective or self-interested, biased or partial and (inevitably) short-term and incomplete. Biographical studies which may provide an important source of understanding are likely to suffer from these limitations. Thus the available studies of David Cameron are useful but necessarily flawed in some respect. An early study of Cameron originally written in 2007 while containing many useful insights takes the analysis only up to 2012 (Elliott and Hanning 2007; 2nd ed., 2012). Two excellent recent studies (which had at least some cooperation from officials) focus on Cameron’s role in government concentrating on the period of Coalition. Although largely positive about Cameron’s role, they are cautious in their judgments about how history will judge him and effectively take the story up until 2015. The study by Lord Ashcroft (a former Party treasurer and co-chairman) and journalist Isabel Oakeshott did not enjoy official cooperation and has to be read against the background of a less than happy relationship between Ashcroft and Cameron (Ashcroft and Oakeshott, 2015). The second point from the recent leadership literature which we need to bear in mind is the importance of followers in the process of leadership (Kellerman, 2008). The interaction of leaders and followers is a subtle and evolving process: leaders attempt to influence the beliefs and actions of followers but followers through their expectations and attitudes influence the behaviour of and constrain leaders. Party leadership is additionally complex because there are multiple constituencies – ­different segments inside the Party and the external but crucial element of the electorate. In the effort to drive through any policy, conflicting responses from these different audiences may be expected and require different responses. The final preliminary point about leadership is the difficulty of evaluating whether a given leader has been successful given that, as James and Buller note, the context of the exercise of leadership may differ radically over time (James and Buller, 2015). James and Buller, in a collection containing a series of insightful chapters on individual Conservative leaders (Clarke et al., 2015), provide an extremely useful set of comparative criteria for evaluating party leadership in a framework they call ‘statecraft’. These criteria – developing a winning electoral strategy, displaying governing competence, maintaining party management, securing political argument hegemony and bending the rules of the game – constitute an effective checklist for evaluating party leadership, and I return to them briefly at the end of the chapter. Notwithstanding the complexities and difficulties surrounding the concept of leadership, the tasks of leadership in any organisation, including a political party, can be simplified to four: analysing and interpreting the situation in which the organisation finds itself; identifying an agenda for dealing with the situation, which covers both goals and mechanisms for implementing them; communicating that agenda in a compelling and attractive vision and narrative; and mobilising followers

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behind that agenda. As we shall see, the idea that the Conservative Party needed radical reconstruction – that it needed modernising – played an important role in Cameron’s performance of all four tasks but it was constrained, adapted and reconfigured in the light of the reception from followers inside the Party. The role of leadership is clearly crucial to a project of party modernisation or reconstruction since the vision and strategy for effecting widespread change must be articulated and driven through from the top (Harmel and Janda, 1994; Bale, 2012). While there have been some examples of party leaders taking a detached view as significant party change was initiated (Winston Churchill in the immediate post-war period of Conservative reconstruction comes to mind), the leadership is usually the key driver in the process. While all large organisations including political parties necessarily involve a degree of collectivity in their decision-making and implementation processes, morale will be lowered if the top leadership does not actively buy into and give direction to its overall strategy. In a political party the leader’s own vision and values, agenda-setting powers and skill at party management as well as his or her energy and powers of communication are thus obviously key variables in determining the success of any effort to reconstruct the party and sell it to the electorate. Indeed in the increasingly personalised political system of the early twenty-first century, the political leader is the most important expression of what the party represents, the brand on offer to the voters. Party leaders, however, face two directions – inwards to their party and outwards to the electorate. In the case of Cameron’s leadership, his own basic priorities and values sometimes seemed opaque to the elements of his Party; and, while there has been much success in terms of bringing the Party back to government and restoring its competitive position within the wider electoral system, the process has not been straightforward. Cameron’s leadership was at times been subject to intense internal opposition, some of it reflecting a difference over values and policy, some of it stemming from a sense that Cameron was not giving enough attention to Conservative Party opinion. Although speculation about ousting him was never sufficiently serious to threaten his position, it never entirely disappeared. To some extent Cameron attempted to quash much of this speculation by announcing that he would hand over the leadership before the next election in 2020. Nevertheless early 2016 saw public discussion about whether he could continue if he were to lose the European referendum and indeed Cameron realised that he had to resign in June 2016. The relationship between Cameron’s leadership’s and party renewal is not a straightforward one. The different dimensions of the early modernisation agenda have shaped perceptions of Cameron’s leadership, both positively and negatively, despite the dilution of elements of that agenda after 2008. On the positive side it contributed to his achieving the leadership by making him seem the candidate most capable of grappling with the Conservative Party’s decline and producing an optimistic scenario for its future; it gave him a credible narrative and strategy for the

David Cameron’s leadership and party renewal25 early years of his tenure. Elements of it, especially the need to move towards a more socially representative set of standard-bearers and the shift towards a more liberal position on moral issues, steered the Party in a direction consonant with the movement of public opinion. On the negative side, it created – or reinforced – pockets of suspicion and opposition within the parliamentary party and the Conservative voluntary organisation and also in sections of the conservative media. When aspects of the modernisation project were sidelined, it generated scepticism about Cameron’s real political purpose and his underlying principles. Cameron’s leadership and the way he handled the process of renewal are thus interdependent and reinforcing features of Conservative politics and the debate about its character over the last decade. Neither Cameron’s leadership nor the renewal agenda were static, however. As was noted in the Introduction, the modernisation project went through a number of different stages since the heady early days of Cameron’s leadership as the initial bold experiments and vision were deflected first by the onset of the financial crisis in 2008 and then by the formation of a coalition government dedicated to implementing an austerity programme to revive the economy. Within the Coalition government itself there were also important shifts as some key personnel, notably Steve Hilton, a key advocate of a radical modernisation agenda, and Andrew Cooper, found their influence waning, and others, notably the election strategist Lynton Crosby, acquired enhanced power in the run-up to the 2015 election. With the election of a Conservative government in 2015 there were hints of a search for a broadened and inclusive appeal based on ideals which echoed the ‘One Nation’ strand of conservatism and expressed newer thinking about aspiration and achievement in British society. On the other hand, the signs of innovative strategic rethinking in Conservative philosophy and rhetoric have been paralleled with significant elements of continuity with what might be seen as Thatcherite Conservative positions. Not surprisingly critics have over the whole period questioned the extent to which Cameron was genuinely committed to the vision he articulated in the immediate post-2005 years and whether he had or had not a distinctive philosophy which separates him from his immediate predecessors. Just as the early modernisation agenda evolved into a broader process of renewal and consolidation, so Cameron’s leadership style and his handling of policymaking and party management also developed. Most obviously his authority within the Party expanded as he established his position and took the Party from the opposition to government first in Coalition and then in its own right. The enhanced authority brought by being prime minister was vitally important in securing his position within the Conservative Party; but the handling of the office has also been crucial in allowing the Conservative Party to reassert its governmental competence and in providing it with the electoral advantage of having a leader who has demonstrated prime ministerial qualities, one of the key factors shaping a party’s electoral strength. In the election of 2015 Cameron was consistently rated as the leader who

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would make the best prime minister and this seems to have been one of the deciding factors in the Party’s narrow 2015 victory (Cowley and Kavanagh, 2015). Leadership and the contemporary Conservative Party Scholars of leadership, however much they stress the importance of personality and political skills in understanding its exercise, necessarily also emphasise the context in which leadership operates. A variety of factors are relevant here: the specific culture and traditions of the Conservative Party, the wider environment of the political system as a whole and the kaleidoscopic set of political events which confront any political leader. Leaders of modern political parties, as we have noted, have to satisfy a number of different constituencies which may have markedly divergent values and preferences and different levels of attention. Even within a single political party there may be profound differences between what generates support or opposition within the parliamentary ranks and what plays well with the ordinary party members. And of course what appeals to party stalwarts and activists may not appeal to the voters as a whole, creating real conflict between the immediate pressures of party opinion and the need to respond to voters’ agendas. Thus, while Cameron, in an early effort to de-emphasise the highly divisive question of Europe, tried to shift the focus to issues that might be of more immediate importance to the broader electorate, the salience of Europe for his backbenchers made such a strategy difficult to implement. Similarly in the highly controversial struggle over the issue of same-sex marriage during the Coalition government of 2010–15, Cameron had to balance the intensely antagonistic views of sections of the Conservative Party membership and backbenchers with broader support for reform among the public at large. Traditionally the Conservative Party has been seen as giving its leaders extensive authority, allowing them to set their own stamp on policy and to select key officials such as the Party Chairman. Even with the reformed organisational arrangements put in place by William Hague, the hierarchical structure of the Conservative Party remained marked, to the anger of some constituency activists and indeed to many backbenchers who wanted a more consultative and democratic ethos (Strafford, 2013). In fact, the position of Tory leaders, though powerful, has always been more vulnerable than a superficial reading of the situation might suggest. The Conservative Party in Parliament has been ruthless in its willingness to remove leaders who lose the capacity to deliver electoral success. Few Conservative leaders have enjoyed consistent consensual support and many have experienced debilitating bouts of intra-party opposition to their position. The culture of a political party is not static and can change subtly as a result both of leadership cues, internal developments and changes in the wider society. Over the past two decades the Conservative leader has regularly confronted demands for greater responsiveness from the Party. Thus there have been a series of changes to the machinery of leadership selection (and equally importantly, deselection) which

David Cameron’s leadership and party renewal27 have occurred over the period since 1965 (Denham and O’Hara, 2008; Quinn, 2012). These changes to the rules have altered the ease with which challenges to a Tory leader may be mounted and, by introducing a role for the wider Party membership, they have altered the dynamics of leadership politics. However, as Denham and O’Hara emphasise, in many ways the crucial element of support remains that of the Conservative Party in Parliament and the crucial factor for maintaining legitimacy the prospect of winning a general election (Denham and O’Hara, 2008). Despite the victory under the rules, Cameron himself experienced periods when his leadership was anything but secure and it was not clear what, if anything, he had a mandate for as a result of his leadership campaign (Denham and O’Hara, 2007, 2008). Indeed, as will be argued later, one of the most intriguing features of his leadership was the continuing lack of warmth between himself and sections of his own party, especially the right. Although the various strands of the right, including the Cornerstone, No Turning Back and the 92 Group factions, originally endorsed him, they became persistent critics of his leadership. More generally the Party has changed much of its ethos and culture, shedding a good deal of the deference and self-discipline which used to govern its internal proceedings. Factionalism and ideological conflict had become a given of Conservative life since the mid-1990s. This shift of ethos was inherently damaging for a party which had tried to keep its internal divisions cloaked, but by the early years of the twenty-first century its public impact was heightened by the ability of groups and individuals to use the digital revolution and social media to advance their cause. An important part of the shifting ethos of the Conservative Party after 1977 was the very fact of being in opposition. Without the aura of being prime minister, Conservative leaders have found themselves struggling to maintain morale. The tenure of Conservative Opposition leaders since 1997 has been brief and the assumption has taken root that a leader who loses an election will resign. There were also shifts in the understanding of what style of leadership was appropriate for the Conservative Party in the early twenty-first century. One of Margaret Thatcher’s legacies to the Conservatives was an image of leadership which was hard to reproduce. For many of her admirers she was the leader who epitomised how the role should be exercised: with clarity of vision and values and a remarkable degree of electoral success. The reality of her period as leader may have been less ideal with intense intra-party divisions and profound doubts emerging from inside her governments about the conduct of government and policymaking. Nevertheless, after 1990 and especially after 1997, her leadership acquired iconic qualities to which subsequent leaders found it hard to relate. Cameron always knew he had to try to move on from Thatcher’s leadership and to create a new version of conservatism that could address very different agendas. Yet he was always inevitably acutely aware of the extent to which direct attacks on her legacy would be dangerous within the Party.

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Cameron was also deeply conscious of the example of Blair’s leadership which set its own model of how to reconstruct a political party. Blair’s capacity to project a new direction for his party and to embrace the future were also powerful factors in Cameron’s thinking. Indeed it was widely thought that Cameron had used Blair’s modernisation ‘as a kind of textbook model’ for changing the Conservatives (McAnulla, 2010; O’Hara, 2007). There were, however, obvious problems in acknowledging any debt to Blair’s example, not least the widespread distaste for the Labour leader in Conservative circles. Indeed, Cameron himself, once in government, seemed to react very strongly against Blair’s informal style of premiership. Although some scholars point to his moving back towards a more personalised premiership even in Coalition, his governments seem to have reintroduced as far as possible more formal decision-making processes (Bennister and Heffernan, 2012). Cameron’s leadership had to negotiate these changes in the culture and context of the Conservative Party as well as handling a series of difficult problems, some of which, such as the future of the Union with Scotland and the UK’s relationship with Europe, were not merely deeply divisive within the Party but threaten fundamental aspects of the Conservative Party’s identity. Cameron as a modernising candidate for the leadership Cameron’s leadership bid was ultimately to be based on a radical modernisation strategy but his projection of himself as the candidate for change was something which evolved over 2005. Cameron’s own stance was not as far-reaching when he first contemplated standing for the leadership as it became later. Ashcroft and Oakeshott quote the disappointment of James O’Shaughnessy and Andrew Cooper (both figures were to become leading advisors to Cameron later) at a speech delivered to the Policy Exchange in June 2005 (Ashcroft and Oakeshott, 2015: 236). Although Cameron described himself as ‘a moderniser’, there was ‘little meat on the bone’ and he at that stage played down his plans for radical reform (ibid.). Cooper, as the founder of the polling company Populus, and indeed Ashcroft, were well aware of the extent of the distaste for the Conservative brand which had developed. The need to detoxify the Party was accepted also by Francis Maude and other modernisers who had grasped the extent to which association with the Conservative party might damage policy proposals. According to Ashcroft and Oakeshott, however, Cameron had to be convinced by Michael Gove and George Osborne, fellow members of the so-called ‘Notting Hill set’ of political friends, to reframe his 2005 leadership campaign around a radical modernisation theme. Steve Hilton had been energetically ‘putting his heart and soul into it’, although ‘Cameron’s drive was less apparent’ (ibid.: 242). This account of Cameron’s embrace of a modernisation strategy might suggest that his approach was always tactical rather than the result of commitment. Equally, it suggests a politician who makes up his mind slowly and deliberately and who is determined to retain flexibility and some detachment.

David Cameron’s leadership and party renewal29 The Cameron campaign for the leadership was brilliantly orchestrated, once he had committed himself to running; the launch of his leadership bid and his speech to Conference in October of 2005 overturned David Davis’s position as the clear front-runner. In his 2005 Conference speech Cameron emphasised the need for change: … we have got to change and modernise our culture and attitudes and identity. When I say change, I am not talking about some slick rebranding exercise; what I am talking about is fundamental change, so that when we fight the next election … we have a message that is relevant to people’s lives today, that shows we are comfortable with modern Britain and that we believe our best days lay ahead.

Although Cameron’s victory cannot be straightforwardly attributed to any consensus about the future direction of policy and strategy, there was a sense that at last the Conservatives had found someone who could win. (There was also, as ConservativeHome pointed out, an important sense in which both Michael Howard and David Davis himself had helped create Cameron’s triumph, the former by his delayed resignation and the latter by his failure to make allies on the Tory benches.) The ebb and flow of support for Cameron’s leadership during the years after 2005 mirror the changing perceptions of his leadership as electorally successful (or not) and doubts about whether some of the risky decisions of his period as leader (notably the referenda on the Alternative Vote and Scotland) would end successfully for the Party. But they also reflect a degree of fundamental and recurring doubt about the beliefs and considerations driving Cameron himself, the extent of his strategic vision and his long-term goals. Cameron as leader Cameron’s leadership offered the modernisers in the Party a new legitimacy, and a new opportunity. It also symbolically offered a fresh image. At 39, Cameron had been the youngest of the candidates and he found himself a relatively young party leader, a factor which he was able to turn to his advantage. In his 2005 Conference speech he made much of the need to appeal to younger voters, saying, ‘I want to switch on a whole new generation’ (Cameron, 2005). Although the long years of Labour government after 1997 meant that Cameron had no ministerial experience, his career had provided him with inside knowledge of how the government machine worked. He had briefed John Major for Prime Minister’s Questions while a young researcher at Central Office and had been special adviser to Norman Lamont at the Treasury and had seen at first-hand the humiliating ejection of Britain from the ERM. One important factor for the future of Cameron’s relationship with his parliamentary colleagues was his relative lack of experience in Parliament at the time he made his 2005 leadership bid. He had first been elected to Parliament in 2001 and had thus fought only two elections by the time he became leader. Previous leaders

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had run for the office on the basis of a longer time in Parliament: Thatcher became leader after nearly 16 years’ service in Parliament, while Cameron’s immediate predecessor, Michael Howard, had served 20 years. John Major had clocked up 11 years before becoming leader in 1990 and Iain Duncan-Smith had served nine years. William Hague, who was even younger than Cameron when he became Party leader at the age of 36 in 1997, had, however, been in Parliament for eight years and had served in Major’s 1990–97 government. One consequence of Cameron’s relative newness in Parliament was that he was not widely known by his parliamentary colleagues, despite Michael Howard’s deliberate promotion of both Cameron and Osborne to key front-bench roles after the 2005 election. Such a meteoric rise was bound to fuel some resentment but it may also have meant that Cameron was less attuned to the culture of the parliamentary party than he would have been had he been on the Tory benches for longer. Michael Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott in their unauthorised biography of Cameron point also to the fact that the difficulties of Cameron’s home life, notably the need to care for his disabled son Ivan, kept Cameron away from Parliament a good deal in the evenings and that, while other backbenchers ‘were forming lasting bonds and alliances, he would frequently have to leave work early to tend to Ivan’ (Ashcroft and Oakeshott, 2015: 193). Cameron’s leadership in Opposition Defining himself as a moderniser was only the starting point of a major exercise in Party reconstruction. The Party needed to rethink its ideas, policies and organisation. Much of the detail of this early period is explored fully in later chapters, especially those by Richard Hayton and Peter Dorey. Clearly Cameron wanted to transcend elements of Thatcherism but he had also to take care that he did not antagonise key sections of the Party. For much of recent Conservative history there has been a strand of conservatism which has emphasised its centrist and liberal elements. Frequently this strand of conservatism has adopted the label of ‘One Nation conservatism’, despite the very diffuse values associated with this Conservative tendency and indeed the effort of Labour under Ed Miliband to capture the tradition itself (Seawright, 2010). Although Cameron was after the 2015 election to reclaim the ideals of ‘One Nation’ for the Conservative Party, he had to use the label with care. And indeed the early ideas associated with his modernising appeal, especially the themes promoted by Steve Hilton, including localism, bureaucracy and environmentalism, were in many ways more radical than the ideas customarily associated with One Nation conservatism because they seemed to envisage much less of a role for the state than One Nation conservatism had traditionally espoused. Also, as Ashcroft and Oakeshott emphasise, much of the drive and the initiatives in this early phase came not from Cameron himself but from Steve Hilton, although Hilton’s restless and creative energy proved difficult to reconcile with later c­ onstraints on the Party and the demands of government.

David Cameron’s leadership and party renewal31 For Cameron Conservatives needed more than fresh ideas, however. Electorally it would have to reach out to groups not normally associated with the Conservative Party and to present the Party as more socially inclusive. Cameron in his 2005 Conference speech had noted that the Party was in third place among the under-35s, had lost support among women voters and had lost support from public servants who no longer thought the Conservative Party was on their side. While there was no explicit retreat from free market economics, there was a recognition that the electorate was concerned about the quality of public services and that some  neglected themes, especially the environment and foreign aid, needed to be addressed. Britain was seen as having become socially dysfunctional and ‘broken’ and Cameron urged that it should take on board a range of interlocking issues, including family breakdown, crime and poverty. On moral issues Cameron and the modernisers wanted to combine support for the traditional family with tolerance towards non-traditional life styles. The approach was to try to move the  Conservatives from the synthesis associated with the Party under Thatcher (neo-liberal economics, nationalism and moral traditionalism) towards a more socially liberal and individualistic creed, although one which encouraged aspiration. In terms of background, style and presentation Cameron although in many ways a different generation from earlier leaders, had much in common with traditional Tory grandees, many of whom had promoted a broad, middle-of-the-road conservatism in order to foster national unity and minimise class divisions. Cameron’s social background was a cause of some suspicion among the parliamentary party and offered cartoonists and opponents immediate opportunities to attack him as being ‘posh’ and a ‘toff’ out of touch with ordinary people. Cameron’s Oxford education (he obtained a first in PPE) was not unusual but he was the first leader since Sir Alec-Douglas-Home to have been at school at Eton. Cameron’s father was a stockbroker and Cameron himself grew up in the affluent part of the home counties. Although the Conservative Party had once been very comfortable with leaders from a privileged social background (and class consciousness remained a factor in the way both Heath and Thatcher were treated by elements of the Party), the Party had changed since 1979. Cameron looked and sounded more like the traditional Conservative in contrast to the somewhat more meritocratic and even populist style which had gained ground since the Thatcher years. Cameron’s upper middle-class background, whether fairly or unfairly, shaped perceptions of his leadership. It struck some critics as inappropriate to the cut and thrust of modern electoral politics, especially when it became apparent that many in his personal inner circle were from a similarly narrow and socially exclusive background. The ‘posh’ image thus fuelled resentment among those who felt excluded or not fully part of his entourage and was deployed by opponents who found ­themselves in disagreement with him on other grounds.

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The smooth and polished image which Cameron seemingly exuded has thus been something of a double-edged sword. For critics he appeared too complacent, even arrogant. Part of the continuing debate about what Cameron really stood for and what drove him echoes the early criticism that he was all style and no substance. Since then of course his management of the Coalition government and his unexpected 2015 election victory weakened that criticism substantially. And the image of self-confidence and calm could be a strength in the maelstrom of politics. Even if the surface composure may be somewhat misleading, it could be reassuring to the public and to the Party to have a cool presence at the helm. Few leaders have come to the office of Conservative leader in as difficult circumstances as David Cameron in 2005. He had the task of rallying a party which was deeply divided and demoralised by its failure to make electoral headway against Labour and seemed to have lost its instinct for winning. Yet the seemingly desperate position of the Conservative Party in 2005 presented the newly elected leader with an opportunity to take bold actions and challenge accepted policy positions. The modernisation agenda which he advocated at the very beginning of his leadership was a radical, but somewhat scattergun, bid to transform the Conservatives into a Party which could recapture the centre ground of British politics. Cameron’s own position on many of the key issues of the modernising agenda as they developed was instrumental and pragmatic rather than doctrinal. He was always insistent that his was not an ideological frame of mind. As Matthew d’Ancona notes, Cameron was ‘not totally suited to the task he had set himself’. In d’Ancona’s view the principal characteristic that is required of a party moderniser is persistence but, although the early energy of Cameron’s Conservative detoxification process was ‘remarkable’, that energy ‘did not endure’ (d’Ancona, 2015: 403). D’Ancona sees Cameron as essentially ‘a pragmatist by temperament, supple in negotiations, and confident rather than confrontational’. Cameron disliked being ‘hemmed in, [preferring] strategic versatility to the implacable obstinacy that is required of the true moderniser’ (ibid.). The role of ideology has frequently been seen as suspect in Conservative circles but in the period of Mrs Thatcher’s leadership, the reconstruction of political principle and the promotion of intellectual arguments – the battle of ideas – took on a new importance in Conservative circles, a development that was not confined to the right in the United Kingdom (Peele, 1984). Indeed it is interesting that for much of the late 1970s and 1980s, it was on the right not the left in the UK and the US that there was an explosion of intellectual debate, especially about the evolution of capitalism and the superiority of markets to state-based solutions. Cameron in the early years of his leadership gave emphasis to issues and causes which had not figured prominently in the Conservative lexicon in the previous three decades. In his first speech to the Conservative conference as leader he hammered policy themes in a way which included new concerns such as carbon reduction and environmentalism as well as more familiar topics such as taxes and defence. In the

David Cameron’s leadership and party renewal33 early period he also gave lectures which explored topics not normally at the top of Tory priorities. Thus in Oxford in June 2006 he gave a speech on fighting global poverty (Cameron, 2006a), while the next month he gave the Chamberlain lecture on communities. Here he took as his theme general well-being and designated the community as the ‘space between work and family, between business life and domestic life, between the market and the home’ (Cameron, 2006b). The point here is that in this early period, in addition to revisiting such key issues as the role of the state, Cameron was thinking very broadly about quality-of-life issues and was addressing audiences beyond the normal Conservative ones. There was also a sense in which Cameron’s own thinking and that of his immediate circle wanted to force the Party to engage with new problems in a global context, such as climate change and world poverty. Hilton’s agenda involved social inclusiveness, localism and decentralisation and used the idea of the voluntary sector and social activism as an alternative to state provision, an idea encapsulated in the notion of the Big Society. Reviewing party policy as a whole was obviously a high priority for Cameron and he approached the task in a way designed to ‘think the unthinkable’ and challenge all existing assumptions. A series of policy review groups was established to bring fresh thinking to the whole policy spectrum. These groups recruited relative outsiders such as Zac Goldsmith to stimulate new thinking; but they also interacted with sympathetic think tanks, including of course Policy Exchange and the existing Conservative Research Department. How far these initiatives would have produced a genuinely novel synthesis which Cameron could have spearheaded with conviction and enthusiasm remains an unanswered question. Hilton himself may have put his finger on the degree of Cameron’s own commitment to a modernising agenda when he noted that there were two sides to Cameron, a radical side (which Hilton loved) and a more conservative side, which he hated (Seldon and Snowden, 2015). The explosion of the global financial crisis in 2008 made the Party reorder its priorities and focus on getting the economy back to health, jettisoning much but not all of the Party’s earlier commitment to match Labour’s public spending commitments and diluting a good deal of the modernisation agenda. Later the advent of Coalition government brought its own pressures and squeezed out any space for the kind of radical approach Hilton favoured. In some ways this retreat from the early modernisation agenda (which is discussed in detail elsewhere, especially in Peter Dorey’s chapter) might have been expected to make Cameron’s life easier by shedding elements of an approach which was viewed negatively by substantial sections of the Party, including by some of Cameron’s closest colleagues (George Osborne for example was sceptical of some of the more radical modernising ideas promoted by Hilton and especially sceptical of some of the environmental agenda which he famously is said to have labelled ‘green crap’). However, major resistance to Cameron’s modernising agenda had already surfaced, reinforced by fierce opposition in the constituency parties to the

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so-called ‘A’ list, the mechanism whereby Cameron wanted to make Conservative parliamentary candidates look more like British society by increasing the number of women candidates and ethnic minority candidates. In addition to the rumbling from the constituency parties about candidate selection there were other issues confronting Cameron’s leadership in the 2005–10 Parliament, most notably his handling of the expenses crisis. Cameron took a strong stand but some of those backbenchers affected both resented the way it was handled in their case and felt that slightly different rules had been applied to his friends than to many long-serving backbenchers. Personal relationships between Cameron and the parliamentary party, which were never particularly warm, were soured by the expenses issue. Equally importantly, the expenses scandal brought the whole parliamentary system to an all-time low in terms of public opinion and at the 2010 election a very large percentage of MPs decided not to stand again (Hine and Peele, 2016). The expenses scandal was to have an adverse effect on British politics, reducing support for orthodox parties and diminishing trust in politicians. The 2010 election and Coalition Cameron’s failure to secure a majority in 2010 was attributed by many, and not just his most obvious critics, to the absence of a clear line from the top. The Conservative message in the eyes of many candidates had been muddled and ideas such as the Big Society failed to play well on the doorsteps. The formation of a Coalition government in 2010 changed the context of Cameron’s leadership once again. On one level the return of the Conservatives to power after so long in Opposition was a triumph. To others the decision to enter a Coalition with the Liberal Democrats was unpalatable and the lack of consultation with Tory MPs underlined the autonomy the Party leadership assumed. There was a strong suspicion that dependence on the Liberal Democrats, far from being a necessary price to pay for return to government, brought Cameron the freedom to ignore the views of the right of the Conservative Party. Certainly, as is described in detail in the chapter by Philip Cowley, Mark Stuart and Tiffany Trenner-Lyle, parliamentary dissent within the 2010–15 Parliament was extensive, underlining the intense opposition to Cameron in some parts of the parliamentary party, notwithstanding the endorsement the right had given him at the very beginning of his leadership. The very fact of Coalition deprived the leadership of some of the customary tools for pacifying critics, especially patronage, in that the number of government posts available was inevitably reduced because of the need to accommodate the Liberal Democrats in government. The successful formation of a Coalition owed much to Cameron’s own political style, his willingness when necessary to be bold and decisive, and his ability to work with opponents. The personal chemistry which developed between him and Nick Clegg was key to the successful formation of a Coalition government in the first

David Cameron’s leadership and party renewal35 place and vital to its continuance, sometimes in difficult circumstances. Yet that personal chemistry was not so evident in relation to the wider Conservative Party either in Parliament or in the country. The need to make compromises and to tone down partisan rhetoric, so necessary in Coalition, was much disliked by many backbenchers and activists. The incidence of dissent within the Conservative Party in Parliament rose significantly during the 2010–15 Parliament and intersected with a growing sense of hostility from party activists who felt that Cameron had little sympathy with them. Cameron had anticipated opposition from his backbenchers and had tried to head it off. The unsuccessful effort early in the parliament to alter the rules governing the 1922 Committee saw Cameron forced to retreat from a heavy-handed attempt to enlarge the membership by allowing ministers to participate fully in its proceedings. Cameron also suffered repudiation from his own backbenchers when they elected Graham Brady as chairman. As one authority on the role of the 1922 Committee put it, the relationship between the leader and the Committee has generally been more ‘correct than warm’ (Norton, 2013: 31). The same authority points to the fact that efforts by Cameron to persuade the Executive of the 1992 that groups such as the right-of-centre Cornerstone needed ‘reining in’ did not go down well (Norton, 2013: 51, and Bale, 2010: 338–9). Tensions over a range of issues, including the desirability of Coalition itself, which emerged during Cameron’s leadership, surfaced during 1922 Committee meetings. The differences of outlook between the 1922 Committee and the leadership underlined the Committee’s jealously guarded independence of the leadership and the usefulness of the Committee as a vehicle for the expression of backbench opinion. Europe, the issue which had caused such damage to the Conservatives in the period since Thatcher, returned as a threat to Cameron’s leadership. As is documented later, the divisions of the Party in Parliament over Europe saw Cameron humiliated and angered. He had hoped to defuse the issue but it clearly was not going to go away, and in the 2010–15 Parliament the rise of UKIP unnerved many Tory MPs. Finally, Cameron in January 2013 promised the referendum that was to prove fatal to his leadership. One episode which caused intense unhappiness throughout the Party was the debate over same-sex marriage. This stemmed directly from Cameron’s own beliefs and his conviction that the Party needed to move towards social liberalism and away from moral authoritarianism and traditionalism. Lifestyle issues had become increasingly controversial in the Party since Hague’s leadership (Hayton, 2010). Support for same-sex marriage was seen as an essential signal that the Conservatives had come to terms with contemporary social attitudes (McManus, 2011). It was an issue which had powerful support from the modernising elements in the Party, including Francis Maude, although some other cabinet ministers, notably Iain Duncan Smith and Owen Paterson, were resolutely opposed to the initiative. Cameron’s route to endorsing same-sex marriage was distinctive. He endorsed

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it as an extension of the availability of an institution he profoundly believed in – marriage – and his speeches to Conservative conference underlined that point. In October 2011, when he announced that there would be consultation on the legalisation of same-sex marriage, he argued that this was necessary because of the ‘ties that bind us’. He did not, he said, support same-sex marriage despite being a Conservative but rather because of being a Conservative. Cameron had come to this view not from a straightforward belief in equality for minorities but because he was a firm believer in the institution of marriage and the stability it could provide. Unfortunately for many Conservative activists the proposal was a step too far. It was either seen as unacceptable in principle, a damaging distraction or both. Tory MPs claimed their activists were incensed by the initiative, arguing it had caused an exodus of members from the constituency parties. There certainly had been a decline in Conservative Party membership since the 1990s but it had seemed to accelerate faster after 2005. Inevitably Cameron’s critics were quick to blame him and the modernisation agenda for the declining numbers. The issue showed Cameron’s ability to ignore criticism from within his own Party, although he may have underestimated the anger it would generate. The passage of the bill introducing same-sex marriage through the House of Commons was achieved on a free vote which saw 133 Conservative MPs (almost half of the Party) voting against it. Both in Parliament and in the wider Party the issue at least for a time caused deep divisions. In government Cameron’s style as prime minister grew more confident. From the beginning he was anxious to develop a different approach to the premiership to that of Brown and Blair and, at an earlier stage, Thatcher. He wanted to avoid Brown’s sometimes bullying micro-management and the personalised leadership he had observed in the Thatcher and Blair styles. He also wanted to avoid the internal friction which had marked the relationship between Brown and Blair. Initially he wanted to run a government where ministers were left to pursue their policies with a relatively light rein and the Number 10 Policy Unit was reduced in strength in the early years of the Coalition. However, a series of policy weaknesses in which Cameron appeared to be ‘behind the curve’ led to a reversal of this approach and a beefing up of central capacity in government (Bennister and Heffernan, 2012). These areas of policy weakness included NHS reforms and the privatisation of National Forestry land, but also involved apparently being taken by surprise by the eruption of riots across the country in 2012. It was not so much that Cameron had wanted to decentralise control to departments across the board (in some areas such as defence and security he created new machinery), rather as a category machineryof-government questions did not claim his attention and he was suspicious of governmental reorganisations (Seldon and Snowden, 2015). Only when matters began to go awry as in 2012 was he persuaded to focus on machinery issues. Cameron brought to Downing Street a circle of staff and close colleagues who had been with him since he achieved the leadership, many dating back to his Oxford

David Cameron’s leadership and party renewal37 days or earlier. The group who constituted the inner circle was tight knit and loyal. For that reason alone the group would probably have occasioned suspicion and jealousy among colleagues who felt excluded. However, there was in addition the fact that many of the members of the inner circle seemingly shared Cameron’s privileged background, enabling critics in the Party to attack Cameron’s advisers for not being in touch or representative enough. When the decision was taken to strengthen the Number 10 Policy Unit under Jo Johnson, brother of Boris Johnson, there was fierce criticism of the appointment because it brought another Etonian into Cameron’s entourage. Cameron’s administrative style also caused some observers puzzlement. He was very much more comfortable with formal governing processes than was either Blair or Brown or indeed Thatcher (Brown did not use red boxes and Blair, like Thatcher, was impatient with the use of cabinet). However, some critics have suggested that his decision-making has something of the ‘essay crisis’ about it, pulling things together at the last minute. He was not an obsessive workaholic like Mrs Thatcher and his determination to carve out quality time for relaxation and family led some to accuse him of being too laid back in the job. The 2010–15 Coalition was an unusual episode in British government and it was a mark of Cameron’s skill that he held it together. Along the way, however, there were moments when his leadership of the Party was far from secure. And on three key constitutional issues – the Alternative Vote, Scotland and Europe – the stakes were extremely high, not merely for his leadership and for the Conservative Party but for the country. 2015 onwards The unexpected victory in the May 2015 election was, on one level, an obvious vindication of Cameron’s leadership. There were, however, two starkly divergent interpretations of the election. For some the election was an endorsement of Cameron’s modernisation strategy since pulling the Conservative Party back towards the centre had allowed it to pick up voters who had abandoned both the Liberal Democrats and Labour. Lord Finkelstein for example saw 2015 as a hinge or realigning election in which it was not the right but the left which had split (Finkelstein, 2015). On this assessment the successful Conservative Party renewal had benefitted from the edging of the Party towards a more socially liberal and centrist position and from Cameron’s style of governance. While it might have lost some votes to UKIP, Labour’s working-class base was as vulnerable to the UKIP campaign as were the Conservatives. By contrast Tim Montgomerie, writing in The Times, argued that the election victory had nothing to do with Cameron’s efforts to modernise the Party: ‘husky-hoody-hugging conservatism wasn’t even on the ballot paper’ nor were same-sex marriage or the commitment to protect foreign aid. Rather, according to Montgomerie, the result had everything to do with the

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concentration on economic issues brought about by Lynton Crosby’s disciplined electoral strategy and ‘an attractive and eventually energised Tory leader selling pretty conventional Tory policies’ (Montgomerie, 2015). The debate about the meaning of 2015 will remain pertinent, reinforced by attempts to understand the implications of Labour’s seeming descent into civil war. Cameron’s own speeches after the victory suggested return to some, but not all, of the modernising language and agenda which marked his early leadership. But it was more focused on internal policy issues and has a new emphasis on turning the Conservative Party into the party of working people as well as on social responsibility and rights, themes which his successor must develop. The European issue continued to threaten Cameron’s leadership and the harmony of his government. In January 2016 Cameron, after strong arguments from Eurosceptic cabinet ministers and from Graham Brady, the Chair of the 1922 Committee, agreed to allow a suspension of the convention of collective responsibility so that cabinet advocates of Brexit could argue their position without having to resign. The decision underlined how disruptive the European issue has been within Conservative ranks and how far Cameron has had to balance the imperative of maintaining party unity after the referendum against his ability to provide clear leadership on a matter of national interest. Conclusion Cameron adopted a modernisation strategy for the Conservative Party as a means of reviving its electoral competitiveness and to take it back into government. Although he adapted and modified that strategy in the period of his leadership, he succeeded in moving the Party to a more centrist position and in taking it back to government. His tactical skill as a leader, and no little luck, have put the Conservative Party in a much stronger electoral position than when he took over in 2005. On this, the first of the criteria of successful leadership highlighted by James and Buller, he has surely achieved his goal (James and Buller, 2015). He has not (and probably would not claim to have) reconstructed the Party’s ideology, but he has broadened its scope by keeping in tandem the Osborne-driven strategy for economic regeneration (with its emphasis on encouraging aspiration and rewarding work) with a movement towards social liberalism. The nudge towards social liberalism may have been at some cost to himself in terms of Party relationships, but it surely places the Conservatives in a better position to appeal to the changing British electorate. However sceptical about ideology Cameron himself may be, the Conservative Party under his leadership has moved back into a position where it can win the battle of ideas, reinforced by active and well-funded think tanks on the right. While he has not been able to eradicate intra-party division (and some would say his style of leadership was too insensitive to Party concerns), he has managed to navigate some internal divisions of the Party. Taking the Party back to government,

David Cameron’s leadership and party renewal39 albeit first in Coalition, went a substantial way towards re-establishing the Party’s record for governmental competence. On the four tasks of leadership outlined earlier, Cameron’s record still remains open to very different judgements. His early period as leader saw the advocacy of the modernising agenda as the remedy for the Conservative Party’s ills. That analysis was overtaken by other concerns, and another agenda, that of austerity, dislodged many of its original concerns. Cameron’s personal commitment to mobilising behind the original modernising agenda may have waned as a result both of events and the pressures of government after 2010. Yet some elements were maintained – notably the shift on same-sex marriage, enhanced diversity at all levels of the Party and the commitment to foreign aid. The language and style of the Conservative appeal has softened in many respects, though not all; and Cameron’s somewhat detached and conciliatory stance facilitated cross-party appeal. Whether he could have done any more given the Party’s constraints on his room for manoeuvre and the uncertain electoral mood is an open question. The historical judgment on his leadership will in large part be shaped by the loss of the referendum, a vote which influenced the conduct of his successor. Theresa May inherits a Party in much stronger condition than in 2005 and a party that has, within the art of the possible, been revitalised. References Ashcroft, M. and Oakeshott, I. (2015) Call Me Dave: The Unauthorised Biography of David Cameron, London: Biteback. Bale, T. (2010) The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron, Cambridge: Polity. Bale, T. (2012) The Conservatives since 1945: The Drivers of Change, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bennister, M. and Heffernan, R. (2012) ‘Cameron as Prime Minister: The Intra-executive Politics of Britain’s Coalition Government’, Parliamentary Affairs 2012: 1–24. Cameron, D. (2005) Leadership Acceptance Speech, December 2005. Cameron, D. (2006a) ‘Fighting Global Poverty’, speech delivered at Oxford, 29 June 2006. Cameron, D. (2006b) ‘Communities’, The Chamberlain Lecture, 14 July 2006. Clarke, C. et al. (eds) (2015) British Conservative Leaders, London: Biteback. Cowley, P. and Kavanagh, D. (2010) The British General Election of 2010, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cowley, P. and Kavanagh, D. (2015) The British General Election of 2015, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. D’Ancona, M. (2015) ‘David Cameron’, in Clarke, C. et al. (eds), British Conservative Leaders, London: Biteback, 397–410. D’Ancona, M. (2013) In It Together: The Inside Story of the Coalition, London: Viking. Denham, A., and O’Hara, K. (2007) ‘The Three Mantras: Modernisation and the Conservative Party’, British Politics 2(2): 167–90.

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Denham, A. and O’Hara K. (2008) Democratising Conservative Leadership Selection: From Grey Suits to Grass Roots, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Elgie, R. (2015) Studying Political Leadership, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Elliott, F. and Hanning, J. (2007 (2nd ed. 2012)) Practically a Conservative: The Rise of the New Conservative, London: Fourth Estate. Finkelstein, D. (2015) ‘UKIP is Eating Away at the Heart of Labour’, The Times, 18 November. Harmel, R. and Janda, K. (1994) ‘An Integrated Theory of Party Goals and Party Change’, Journal of Theoretical Politics 63(3): 259–87. Hayton, R. (2010) ‘Conservative Party Modernisation and David Cameron’s Politics of the Family’, Political Quarterly 81(4): 492–500. Hine, D. and Peele, G. (2016) The Regulation of Standards in British Public Life: Doing the Right Thing? Manchester: Manchester University Press. James, T. and Buller, J. (2015) ‘Statecraft: A Framework for Assessing Conservative Leaders’, in Clarke, C. et al. (eds), British Conservative Leaders, London: Biteback, 31–56. Kellerman, B. (2008) Followership: How Followers Are Creating Change and Changing Leaders, Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press. McAnulla, S. (2010) ‘Heirs to Blair’s Third Way? David Cameron’s Triangulating Conservatism’, British Politics 5: 283–14. McManus, M. (2011) Tory Pride and Prejudice: The Conservative Party and Homosexual Law Reform, London: Biteback. Montgomerie, T. (2015) ‘It’s a Myth That Tory Modernisation Won the Day’, The Times, 14 May 2015. Norton, P. (2013) The Voice of the Backbenches, London: Conservative History Group. O Hara, K. (2007) After Blair: David Cameron and the Conservative Tradition, Thriplow: Icon. Peele, G. (1984) Revival and Reaction: The Right in Contemporary America, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Quinn, T. (2012) Electing and Ejecting Party Leaders in Britain, Basingstoke: Macmillan Palgrave. Rhodes, R. and t’Hart, P. (2014) The Oxford Handbook of Political Leadership, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seawright, D. (2010) The British Conservative Party and One Nation Politics, London: Continuum. Seldon, A. and Finn, M. (2015) The Coalition Effect 2010–2015, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seldon, A. and Snowden, P. (2015) Cameron at 10: The Inside Story, London: William Collins. Strafford, J. (2013) ‘The Decline and Fall of the Conservative Party’, Open Democracy UK, 16 August 2013. See www.opendemocracy.net/UK.

2

Constructing a new conservatism? Ideology and values Richard Hayton Introduction Following three severe election defeats, the Conservatives elected David Cameron as leader on an explicitly modernising platform. His agenda for change encompassed revitalising the Party image through a concerted effort to rebrand the Party, an extensive review of policy and ideological repositioning towards the centre ground. While these three strands are of course intertwined, this chapter will focus on the last, namely the attempt to distance the Conservatives from the legacy of Thatcherism and cultivate a new form of conservatism with wider electoral appeal. It argues that despite some rhetorical distancing from the Thatcher era, Cameron largely failed to alter the trajectory of contemporary conservatism, which remains essentially neo-Thatcherite. Ultimately this has undermined the modernisation project that he hoped would define his leadership, limiting the effectiveness of his rebranding strategy and shaping the policy agenda that his government were able to pursue. The chapter begins with a discussion of the Thatcherite ideological inheritance that shaped Conservative Party politics following the rout suffered at the 1997 general election. It then focuses on the attempts made by Cameron to reposition the Party ideologically as Leader of the Opposition from 2005, and critically appraises the germane academic literature on Conservative modernisation. The chapter then moves on to examine Conservative Party ideology in office since 2010, suggesting that although forming the Coalition provided the Conservative leader with significant freedom of manoeuvre in statecraft terms (Hayton, 2014), conversely it limited Cameron’s scope to radically alter his party’s ideological core. Finally, the chapter offers an assessment of some of the contemporary ideological debates within the Party, and speculates about the future direction of conservatism in the light of the 2015 election result. The Thatcherite inheritance There was a time when it was common to regard the Conservative Party as non-ideological (Hayton, 2012: 7). This pretence was conclusively displaced by

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the Thatcher era, when the Party ‘became noted for its attachment to ideology’ (Gamble, 1996: 20). By the mid-1990s it was clear that a radical and enduring ideological shift had occurred in the Conservative Party, with Thatcherism assuming a position of hegemonic dominance. The main features of the Thatcherite outlook are well known: a neo-liberal approach to economic issues, a moralistic social authoritarianism and a commitment to a rather narrow conception of national sovereignty, manifested particularly as Euroscepticism (Gamble, 1994; Heppell, 2002). Thatcherism was more than an ideological viewpoint, however. It was also a successful electoral statecraft strategy (Bulpitt, 1986) and a style of leadership associated closely with Thatcher herself (King, 1985). It was this potent mixture of ideological vigour, formidable leadership and electoral success that, following her eviction from office by the Party, fuelled the Thatcher myth and the Conservatives’ fixation with Thatcherism. Somewhat ironically, the ascension of Thatcherite thinking within the PCP consequently occurred following Thatcher’s removal from power, reaching a position of dominance after the 1997 landslide defeat of the Major government. Analysing the PCP towards the end of her tenure, Philip Norton found that ‘Mrs Thatcher has not crafted a party that is inherently Thatcherite in terms of attitude and composition’ (1990: 58). By contrast a study of the 2010 intake of MPs found the Party to be predominantly Thatcherite (Heppell, 2013). Some analysts have argued that the effect of this ideological transformation has been to render the Conservative Party essentially un-conservative. Mark Garnett, for example, has suggested that it has become ‘a liberal organisation, with a nationalistic twist’ (2003: 112), and more recently that the Conservative Party ‘has been shorn even of residual elements of conservative ideology, as traditionally understood’ (2015: 159). The interpretation of Thatcherism as an ideological creed alien to conservatism is characteristic of the One Nation ‘Wets’ who fought against Thatcher within the Party (Hayton, 2012: 27–31). However, as I have discussed elsewhere (2012, 2015), Thatcherism is more accurately conceived as an ideological position that is part of conservatism more broadly understood. The New Right (encompassing Thatcherism) is a school of thought within conservatism, which remains a distinctive ideological family committed to a limited form of politics (O’Sullivan, 2013). As such it is worth noting that the word ‘conservatism’ is used here primarily in reference to the Conservative Party, but that is not to say that that conservatism is simply shorthand for the positions taken by the party – rather it is to suggest that ‘the two are intimately linked’ (Norton, 2008: 324). Philip Norton has argued that ‘the Conservative party has a set of beliefs that comprise British Conservatism and those beliefs have been moulded and developed over time by Conservative politicians and thinkers, as well as by some who are not Conservatives’ (2008: 324), and the focus of this chapter is on conservatism in this sense. Comprehending Thatcherism as part of an essentially conservative intellectual tradition is not to deny the profound impact that it has had on the Conservative Party. For the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, ‘Thatcherism can be seen

Constructing a new conservatism?43 as the first attempt to modernise British conservatism, by discarding the Butskellite consensus and acting from a consistent philosophical foundation’ (2007: 686). The effect on thinking within the Party was thrown into stark relief after the crushing 1997 general election defeat, as the Conservatives struggled to come to terms with either the scale of this loss or the extent of the changes that would be needed to challenge New Labour’s capture of the centre ground of British politics. The grip Thatcherism retained over intra-party deliberations was illustrated by the way in which successive Conservative leaders reverted almost by default to policy positions and electoral tactics designed to appeal to the Party’s core vote. William  Hague (1997–2001), Iain Duncan Smith (2001–3) and Michael Howard (2003–5) all made preliminary and somewhat tentative efforts to renew the ideational basis of contemporary conservatism, but proved unable to formulate a cogent new narrative for their party (Hayton, 2012). A number of factors contributed to this pattern, including their own unease over the potential costs of a more radical approach, dissent amongst shadow ministers and backbenchers, pressure from Party members and parts of the media, and an apparent lack of responsiveness from the electorate. Most importantly, however, the essentially Thatcherite outlook that prevailed throughout most of the PCP limited the parameters of debate thereby restricting the Party leadership to one tributary of conservative thought. This manifested itself in underdeveloped policy statements that exhibited the main traits of Thatcherite ideology identified above, notably a firmly Eurosceptic defence of national sovereignty; a traditionalist stance on social policy questions related to welfare, criminal justice, equal rights and marriage; and commitments to tax-cuts and a smaller state. The extent to which the Party under David Cameron reappraised these positions is assessed in the following sections. Transcending Thatcherism? Modernisation and ideological repositioning, 2005–10 The election of David Cameron in December 2005 was widely greeted as the moment the Conservative Party finally stepped out of the shadow of Thatcherism. As the leader column in one national newspaper noted the day after his election, Cameron’s claim that ‘there is such a thing as society … crucially and symbolically draws a line between his Toryism and that of Margaret Thatcher’ (The Guardian, 2005). Academic analysis of the leadership election suggested that Cameron had transcended ideological divisions to secure support from across the PCP, including from ‘wets and dries, Europhiles and Eurosceptics, and social liberals and social conservatives’ (Heppell and Hill, 2009: 399). This marked a break from the pattern established in previous leadership elections since Thatcher’s departure, in which the PCP had voted more noticeably along ideological lines. Cameron’s ability to overcome this trend was attributed by Timothy Heppell and Michael Hill to his personal charisma and perceived ‘electability’ (ibid.), indicating that Conservative

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MPs had elevated their desire to win the next general election over their preference for a leader who necessarily reflected their own political beliefs. While it is undoubtedly the case that Cameron succeeded in cultivating a crossparty appeal, part of his strategy for doing so involved courting the more strongly Thatcherite elements of the PCP by offering them reassurances on a number of key issues. Most notably on the issue of European integration, which remained a touchstone question for many Conservative MPs, Cameron pledged during his leadership election campaign that he would pull his party’s MEPs out of the European People’s Party (EPP). Many Conservative MPs had voiced unhappiness with the Party’s affiliation to what they regarded as a federalist grouping, and both Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard had looked to renegotiate the terms of membership during their tenures as party leader. In the 2005 leadership campaign Liam Fox vowed to leave the group if elected, and Cameron moved to match this undertaking, which ‘helped him secure sufficient support from the right of the party (e.g. from much of the Cornerstone Group) to see off the challenge of Fox and then David Davis (Lynch and Whitaker, 2008: 34). Cameron also moved to offer reassurance to the PCP’s traditionalist wing in relation to social morality through an emphasis on the importance of marriage. Cameron deliberately presented himself as a ‘family man’ and stressed the value he placed on marriage as a societal institution, and as the most desirable environment for raising children (Hayton, 2010). In one of the few other specific commitments he made during the leadership election campaign, he announced that a future Conservative government under his leadership would introduce a new allowance to recognise marriage in the tax system. This helped bolster his support across the Party, and alleviate doubts about Cameron from those who do not share his inclination towards social liberalism. In spite of these carefully crafted signals during the leadership election, the central message of Cameron’s campaign was that his candidature represented change, and that the Conservative Party must change to win. He explicitly embraced the notion of modernisation, and in doing so advocated making a break with the past. In ideological terms this meant detaching himself from the legacy of Thatcherism, which his predecessors had all been unable to do. As Stuart McAnulla has argued, Cameron ‘sought to distance himself from the perceived excessive individualism of Thatcherism, through stressing repeatedly that “there is such a thing as society” … [and] he also drew upon the “one nation” theme within conservatism that Thatcher had arguably eschewed’ (2012: 168). Cameron pursued this strategy of rhetorical distancing consistently and effectively, and academic interpretations of the early years of his leadership in particular consequently emphasised the degree to which he had apparently repositioned the Conservatives ideologically. Kieron O’Hara (2007: 315) for example, saw the Cameron project as ‘a leftward move to the postBlair centre’. Peter Dorey, whilst cautioning that the Conservative leader would face an uphill battle with the right of his party to accomplish his ­modernisation agenda

Constructing a new conservatism?45 in full and meet the expectations it had raised about ‘a new mode of ­conservatism for the early 21st century’ (2007: 164), observed that David Cameron has toiled tirelessly during his first year as Conservative leader to reposition the Party ideologically, and revive the ‘one nation’ strand which atrophied during the 1980s and 1990s. In so doing, he has explicitly eschewed Thatcherism, and effectively apologized for many aspects of it, while explicitly abandoning many of the policies implemented during the Thatcher–Major premierships. (2007: 162)

Cameron’s basic strategy when he assumed the party leadership was, as Heppell (2014: 138) noted, ‘to make the Conservatives appear more centrist and position them close to the location of the median voter’. However, whether this strategic relocation was underpinned by a fundamental ideological shift is more questionable. Downplaying certain issues, for instance, does not necessitate any modification of the underlying position, even though it may help create the impression that it has changed, or at least that those issues are no longer regarded as so important to the Party’s identity. So Cameron’s plan to ‘move away from prioritizing the issues associated with Thatcherism – that is taxation, immigration and Euroscepticism’ (ibid.: 139) in fact emulated that which Iain Duncan Smith had attempted to pursue (albeit without a great deal of success) four years earlier (Hayton and Heppell, 2010: 430). Similarly, changing the way in which certain issues are discussed, for example through the moderation of language and tone, does not require policy positions to be greatly revised. One case in point is immigration, which had been the centrepiece of some sustained negative campaigning by the Conservatives at the 2005 election. Cameron chose instead to speak positively about the benefits immigration can bring, but did not noticeably shift Conservative policy in practice, which remained to substantially reduce net inward migration (Hayton, 2012: 99). Relatedly, spending more time talking about issues not closely associated with your party might help to broaden its electoral appeal and improve its image, but may not require a change of ideological approach – even if one is implied. According to Neil Carter, Cameron’s embrace of the environment as his ‘signature issue’ was primarily a tactical manoeuvre, but also one of ‘great symbolic importance’ that suggested the Party ‘would not (always) prioritise business interests over the wider public good’ (Carter, 2009: 233–4). Climate change became a particular focus of attention and in 2006 Cameron made a highly publicised visit to a Norwegian glacier to observe the effects of global warming, resulting in a memorable photo opportunity with a pack of huskies. However, as Ben Glasson (2012) has argued, the notion of ecological modernisation adopted by Cameron and others ‘transforms the threat of climate change into an opportunity, a new motor of neoliberal legitimacy’ and professes ‘no contradiction between sustainability and the present socioeconomic order’. As such, although the ‘vote blue, go green’ agenda was not one universally welcomed in Conservative circles, it has not (in the way Cameron has pursued it) represented a threat to the Party’s core ideological positions.

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This brings us to the heart of the Conservative Party’s ideology in terms of its commitment to a neo-liberal political economy and a limited state. At no point during his tenure as Leader of the Opposition did Cameron seek to loosen the hold of the neo-Thatcherite perspective on the Party’s approach to economic questions, with Conservative hostility to Labour’s neo-Keynesian response to the global financial crisis soon being made explicit as events unfolded (Hayton, 2012: 119–35). Martin Smith (2010: 818) has argued that the crisis laid bare the ‘fundamental differences between the parties over the role of the state and the relationship between the state and the market’, with the Conservatives promulgating the idea of the ‘Big Society’ as an alternative to the public sector. Prior to the financial crisis the Conservatives had pledged to match Labour’s spending plans in an effort to persuade voters they could be trusted with the public services, particularly the NHS (Smith, 2010: 827). Cameron had also been seen to shift his party’s position on the issue of poverty, moving to accept that it could not simply be defined in absolute terms, but that relative measures (as preferred by New Labour) were necessary (Heppell, 2014: 141). For Hickson (2009: 360) this shift on inequality suggested something of a revival of the One Nation tradition, but still one tempered by ‘a strong anti-state attitude’. Taken together, this apparent change of stance on poverty and the promise to protect the public services could have been seen as evidence that Cameron was  returning to a form of One Nation conservatism, which appreciated the positive role the state could play in society. Whatever the motivation, wooing public sector workers and their families certainly seemed like an astute electoral strategy, given that in 2005 this group represented ‘over 40 percent of the electorate’ and a key segment for the Conservatives to target (Sanders, 2006: 172). The plan to shield the public services was discarded, however, in the light of the financial crash, which the Conservatives presented as a debt crisis with ‘big government’ the primary culprit (Conservative Party, 2010: vii). This line of reasoning suggested that the solution lay in a dose of fiscal conservatism and a Thatcherite retrenchment of the state. As Peter Dorey discusses at length in the following  chapter, in the run-up to the general election Cameron attempted to present this as a reimagining of the relationship between the state, society and individuals, rather than a crude austerity-driven onslaught on the public sector. The ‘Big Society’ narrative consequently became central to the Conservatives’ electoral strategy and was presented as something of an ideological middle way between Thatcherism and New Labour, and envisaged a flourishing of non-state actors (see Chapter 3). The notion of the Big Society has proved to be flimsy at best, and vulnerable to the charge that it is a Trojan horse for cuts to public services (Kisby, 2010: 490). However, it is worth briefly reflecting on the development of the concept here as it is indicative of the debate about the ideological direction of conservatism after Thatcher. Dorey and Garnett (2012) trace the intellectual roots of the Big Society

Constructing a new conservatism?47 narrative to the work of a number of Conservative figures in the 1990s and 2000s, notably Douglas Hurd, David Willetts, Ferdinand Mount, Damian Green, Oliver Letwin, Iain Duncan Smith and Philip Blond. Kevin Hickson (2010) also identified Duncan Smith, Willetts, Letwin and Blond as key influences on conservatism under Cameron. What links these individuals is their concern with re-engaging conservatism with civil society and overcoming the perception that the Party has little to say or offer beyond a commitment to individualism and free markets. The neo-Thatcherite position adopted by Cameron essentially echoes that outlined by Willetts in his work on civic conservatism in the early 1990s (Hayton, 2012: 31–5). It does not entail a rejection of Thatcherism, but emphasises that ‘there is more to conservatism than the free market’ (Willetts, 1994: 9), even if a particular stress on the latter was a necessary response to the problems faced by the UK in the 1970s and 1980s. For Willetts, markets and communities should not be seen as incompatible, but post-Thatcher the Conservatives needed to find new language to explain how they can support each other (ibid.). This contrasts somewhat with the ‘Red Toryism’ of Phillip Blond, which offered a more radical critique of what another prominent proponent of the Big Society, Jesse Norman, called ‘the market fundamentalism of the last three decades’ (Norman, quoted in Dorey and Garnett, 2012: 290). Blond’s target is modern liberalism as a whole, which he blames for producing ‘both state authoritarianism and atomised individualism’ in the post-war era (Blond, 2009). In Cameron’s advocacy of a Big Society, Blond detected the potential for a socially conservative ‘new communitarian Tory settlement’ built on a radical localism, involving much greater community ownership of assets (ibid.). As discussed in what follows on the Big Society in the next section, Blond (2012) has since lambasted Cameron for failing to pursue the red Tory agenda in office. However, it was a hopeless misreading of Cameron’s positioning as leader of the Opposition to ever think he would embark on an anti-liberal crusade in government. In promising to be ‘as radical a social reformer as Mrs Thatcher was an economic reformer’, David Cameron (quoted in Jones, 2008: 315) was never suggesting undoing the Thatcherite economic reform programme. Rather, his position was premised on the notion that with the advent of New Labour the Conservatives had essentially won the argument on the economy, so needed to find a new way to define themselves on social issues (Hayton, 2012: 102–3). In summary, in the 2005 to 2010 period in ideological terms the Conservatives under Cameron did not transcend Thatcherism in a significant way. A number of steps were taken to signal change and to rhetorically distance the Party from the Thatcher era, including moving onto territory associated with New Labour and downplaying traditional Thatcherite themes. However, the ideological parameters of conservatism remained essentially Thatcherite and were not fundamentally challenged, and consequently reasserted themselves in the light of the economic downturn from 2008 onwards.

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David Cameron and Conservative renewal Liberal conservatism and the politics of Coalition, 2010–15

If Cameron’s modernisation project had only been partially delivered in Oppo­ sition, some of its proponents hoped that the formation of the Coalition with the Liberal Democrats would facilitate its completion in office, with one MP – Nick Boles – quickly proposing the two parties adopt an electoral pact in 2015 (Hayton, 2014: 10). He later explained that he ‘believed that if we could get the Liberal Democrats to yoke themselves to us for a full two terms in government, we would in time be able to persuade most of them to merge their party into a truly liberal Conservative Party’ (Boles, 2013). For Boles and other ‘Cameroons’, modernising the Conservative Party was therefore essentially about shifting its ideological core firmly in a liberal direction. Such a strategy, they believed, would widen the Party’s electoral appeal by capturing more centrist voters. As I have noted elsewhere (Hayton, 2014: 11), a number of analysts have highlighted the presence of ideological common ground between the two Coalition parties, and this certainly appears to have been a factor in the successful conclusion of the Coalition negotiations following the general election (Beech, 2011; McAnulla, 2012). This convergence reflected movement not only by Cameron and the Conservative leadership in a socially liberal direction, but also amongst key Liberal Democrats towards a firmer economic liberalism. In their foreword to the Coalition Agreement, the new Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister felt able to declare that ‘We share a conviction that the days of big government are over; that centralization and top-down control have proved a failure’ (quoted in Beech, 2011: 267). Writing soon after its formation, Matt Beech suggested that ‘the shared outlook and values’ of the Cameron–Clegg Coalition were ‘neoliberal political economy and an attitude of social liberalism’ while the ‘common enemies’ were ‘economic egalitarians and social conservatives’ (2011: 270). Shortly after the general election the new prime minister outlined this ‘liberal conservatism’ in a television interview with the BBC journalist Andrew Marr. He said, ‘I’ve always described myself as a Liberal Conservative. I’m Liberal because I believe in freedom and human rights, but Conservative – I’m sceptical of great schemes to remake the world.’ In the same interview he went on to describe the Coalition as a ‘progressive alliance’ (BBC, 2010). In Opposition and in office Cameron consistently linked his ‘liberal conservative’ outlook to the notions of progress and modernity, juxtaposing it against reactionary and traditionalist viewpoints. Nonetheless to interpret this as a wholesale abandonment of conservatism, as some observers such as Garnett (2015) have done, would be mistaken. Cameron elucidated his philosophy at greater length in a 2007 speech, and was keen to underline that it drew mutually from both the ideological traditions of its moniker. He stated that he was a liberal as he is ‘sceptical of the state’ and trusts ‘in the freedom of individuals to pursue their own happiness, with the minimum of interference from government’; but also a Conservative as he believes ‘that there is a historical

Constructing a new conservatism?49 understanding between past, present and future generations, and that we have a social responsibility to play an active part in the community we live in’ (quoted in Beech, 2011: 269). This equation of conservatism with social responsibility implies a critique of Thatcherism for not delivering sufficiently on the latter, suggesting that the social authoritarianism of the Thatcher era had failed in its objectives and is incompatible with a liberally inclined twenty-first-century society. To the extent that liberal conservatism contains a critique of Thatcherism it is in relation to these themes, although its intensity is checked by the fact that it is framed against what many Conservatives would regard as a ‘crass caricature’ (McAnulla, 2012: 167) of Thatcherism. In a 2006 speech to Demos, David Cameron had in fact argued that Thatcher had ‘increasingly worried that the new, open economy was not tackling problems of family breakdown, crime, poor schooling, drug dependency and the decline of respect in parts of our inner cities’, and that she ‘made a famous speech invoking religion as a means of enriching our sense of social obligation’ (2006). The parallels with the rhetoric of the Big Society and the stated need to ‘mend our broken society’ (Conservative Party, 2010: iii) are obvious. As such, it is clear that Cameron regarded his liberal conservatism as consistent with the Conservative Party’s ideological inheritance from Thatcher, even if the specific policies required had evolved with time. Ryan Shorthouse, director of the Bright Blue think tank which has been a vocal supporter of Cameron’s modernisation agenda, has sought to highlight the intellectual roots of liberal conservatism. Shorthouse (2013) rejects the charge that liberal conservatism is ‘simply political triangulation’ driven by electoral expediency. For him, it is a liberal philosophy with a positive view of human nature: a belief that ‘people are fundamentally good’. It is also a progressive one that holds ‘that the future will be better than the past’. Nonetheless, it draws on ‘rich Conservative traditions’ and retains a ‘Burkean’ scepticism that is wary of ‘definitive dogmatism’. The timing of Shorthouse’s intervention, in February 2013, is significant. At that point in time the Coalition’s public standing was at a low ebb as the economy remained in the doldrums and George Osborne’s programme of fiscal austerity was increasingly being blamed for exacerbating rather than solving the deficit problem, while other aspects of the government’s agenda associated with modernisation (such as equal marriage for gay couples) were proving unpopular with more traditionalist Conservative members and supporters, some of whom were turning towards the UK Independence Party. Shorthouse therefore sought to argue that liberal conservatism (and by implication modernisation) had an enduring relevance that has survived the economic crash and the onset of the politics of austerity. The austerity agenda was driven as much by politics as by economic considerations. As Andrew Gamble (2015: 42) has argued, austerity was a key feature of the Conservative Party’s statecraft after the 2010 general election, and was used to ‘redefine the terms of the debate on economic policy, enabling the Coalition to

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blame the recession on Labour and to create a new narrative to bolster its claim to economic competence’. In some ways this proved to be an astute political strategy which co-opted the Liberal Democrats in the Conservative agenda, created a dividing line with the opposition and provided an over-arching framework within which many other policy debates could be framed (Hayton, 2014). However, by exposing the Conservatives’ attachment to neo-liberal political economy to full view it brought into question the sincerity of their commitment to modernisation and liberal conservatism. With deficit reduction through fiscal retrenchment established as the number one priority for the Coalition, perhaps inevitably the language adopted by Conservative politicians become rather more hard-edged than during the earlier years of the Cameron leadership, emphasising the ‘tough choices’ the government had to make. On welfare policy for instance, which had been identified by the Chancellor of the Exchequer as an area that could be targeted for significant spending cuts (ostensibly to help protect spending in other areas), Osborne and other Coalition ministers deployed rhetoric redolent of the Thatcher era. As an example, framing the issue in terms of ‘workers versus shirkers’ and ‘strivers versus skivers’ was an attempt to inflame a sense of perceived injustice or even outrage about benefit claimants, in contrast to the more understanding and moderate language the Party had used in Opposition (Hayton and McEnhill, 2014: 107). In the chapter that follows Peter Dorey argues that the policy agenda pursued by the Conservatives in Coalition – not only in relation to welfare, but also notably in terms of economic management and public sector reform – represents a reversion to Thatcherite type, and that this amounts to an ‘abandonment’ (Chapter 3) of the modernisation strategy Cameron had earlier pursued. While I do not diverge from the thrust of his assessment of the Conservative policy programme in office, which carries a number of clear Thatcherite hallmarks, the case advanced here is that this does not mark a deep rupture with the notion of modernisation the Conservative leadership promulgated in Opposition, particularly if this is conceived in terms of its ideological underpinnings, namely liberal conservatism. Returning to O’Sullivan’s (2013) definition of conservatism as a limited form of politics, we can locate Cameron’s ideology within this designation, at the same time as acknowledging (as David Cameron has) the considerable influence of liberal ideas on his outlook. Some aspects of the modernisation strategy have been undermined by the politics of austerity, notably the effort to rebrand the Party as concerned with more than economics and to rhetorically distance it from Thatcherism. However, there is no fundamental inconsistency in ideological terms between the liberal conservatism of the Coalition and that pursued by Cameron in office. The core Conservative commitment to a neo-liberal political economy was never challenged in Opposition (Hayton, 2012), so its reassertion following an economic downturn was to be fully expected. Given the Conservatives’ success in dominating the Coalition’s statecraft (Hayton, 2014), we can view its ideology as derived essentially from Conservative ideas (Lakin, 2013: 476).

Constructing a new conservatism?51 Dorey (Chapter 3) also suggests that the ideological make-up of the PCP was a key factor influencing the policy positions of the Cameron–Clegg government. As noted earlier, research has demonstrated that the 2010 intake of Conservative MPs was largely Thatcherite (Heppell, 2013) and some of the most intellectually active elements of the PCP have been characterised as forming a ‘new New Right’ movement (Lakin, 2014). The 2010 Parliament has also witnessed unprecedented levels of backbench dissent, with the fact that the government is a Coalition seemingly been taken by some MPs as a licence to rebel frequently (Cowley and Stuart, 2012). The Conservative leadership therefore has appeared mindful of ‘the perceived need to pacify the Party’s more right-wing MPs, members and supporters, particularly in the light of a noteworthy rise in support for the UK Independence Party’ on their right flank (Hayton, 2014: 16). This factor has consequently limited Cameron’s scope to radically alter his party’s ideological core and embark on a genuinely farreaching modernisation of conservatism. While significant political capital was expended on the totemic issue of equal marriage for gay couples, few other issues have pushed the boundaries of conservatism beyond its Thatcherite comfort zone. The analysis offered here of Cameron’s liberal conservatism indicates that this was never his intention, premised as it was on building on, rather than critiquing, the Thatcherite legacy. Conclusion: twenty-first-century conservatism This chapter has made a number of key claims. The first is that Thatcherism is best understood as part of the conservative tradition of limited politics, so while radical and transformative in a number of important ways, it remains part of the intellectual family of conservatism. The second is that the ideological legacy of Thatcherism has continued to animate and define the Conservative Party’s ideational debates since the 1990s, including in the period from 2005 onwards that has been the focus of this chapter. As such, the principal claim of the chapter is that the liberal conservatism advanced by David Cameron remains essentially neo-Thatcherite, and that the modernisation agenda pursued since 2005 has not pushed contemporary conservatism beyond these parameters. The novel element in neo-Thatcherism is its recognition of the need for the Conservative Party to stress the fact that it has concerns beyond the economic sphere and the deployment of a more civicorientated language to express these. However, this has not involved challenging the core tenets of the Thatcherite ideological inheritance, and arguably helps justify and buttress the continued primacy of neo-liberalism. In this sense the modernisation of the Party is incomplete, if modernisation is understood to include a reorientation of ideological outlook. While in Opposition (and to a lesser extent in office) Cameron engaged in rhetorical distancing from Thatcherism, notably consistently declining to describe himself as a Thatcherite, this has not amounted to ideological repositioning. It was largely premised on the claim that Thatcherism was right for

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its time, but that circumstances have moved on and created new demands for the Conservatives to respond to. The core facets of Thatcherism were identified at the outset as a neo-liberal approach to economic issues, a moralistic social authoritarianism and a commitment to a rather narrow conception of national sovereignty, manifested particularly as Euroscepticism. Each of these elements remains clearly visible in the Conservative Party after a term of Coalition government. The reassertion of a neo-liberal political economy has been discussed above in relation to the politics of austerity. The hold Euroscepticism retains over the PCP has been illustrated both by Cameron’s veto of a putative EU treaty at the European Council of December 2011, and by the pledge to renegotiate UK membership of the European Union and hold an in–out referendum by 2017 (Goes, 2014). And while in some ways the authoritarianism of Thatcherism appears to have been abandoned in the face of new social norms (for example in relation to equal rights for gay people), a moralistic tone is still very much a feature of Conservative rhetoric on issues such as welfare and marriage. In short, after almost a decade of Cameronite leadership the construction of a coherent and qualitatively new conservatism remains largely unfulfilled. This chapter consequently rejects the thesis advanced by Beech (2015: 3) that ‘Cameron’s political thought is essentially a form of liberalism albeit communicated to the electorate as liberal conservatism.’ Rather, Cameron’s liberal conservatism, like Thatcherism, should be located within the Conservative ideological tradition of a limited form of politics. In contrast Beech (2015: 4) argues that, ‘While Cameron’s Conservatives exhibit some traditional conservative attitudes, compared in relation to a sizable portion of the Parliamentary Conservative Party, and many grass-roots activists, they are consistently liberal … The politics of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition is essentially a right-wing liberalism’ (Beech, 2015: 4). This view contains echoes of the One Nation critique of the Thatcher era, which identified an un-conservative (neo-)liberal ideology and coterie as somehow capturing the Conservative Party so that it was no longer the vehicle for conservatism, as they saw it. The irony of course is that the ‘conservative’ parliamentarians and activists that Cameron’s liberal project is contrasted with by Beech are, by and large, traditionalist Thatcherites – the group being defined as un-conservative by One Nation Tories a generation earlier. Cameron’s liberal ideology, Beech contends, has three main strands: economic liberalism, social liberalism and liberal interventionism (in foreign policy). As such he accepts that Thatcherism forms the central basis of the Cameronite approach to economic issues, suggesting that the Coalition has ‘arguably gone further in rolling-back Britain’s welfare capitalism’ (Beech, 2015: 5) but – following the One Nation interpretation – for him this reinforces its liberal, rather than conservative, basis. The central thrust of Beech’s argument rests, however, on the divide between modernisers and traditionalists on social and moral issues, where notable divisions

Constructing a new conservatism?53 in the PCP (and wider party) have been apparent for quite some time (Hayton, 2010). The particular focus of his attention here is the issue of equal marriage for same-sex couples, for which he can ascertain no ‘reason to embark upon such a divisive, controversial and un-conservative policy’ apart from a desire ‘to change a key aspect of British society – the definition of marriage – in line with their liberal ideology’ (Beech, 2015: 9). As such this view gives no credence to the justification offered by Cameron himself, namely that he believed that Conservatives should seek to strengthen the institution of marriage, and that equalising the rights of same-sex couples would have that effect (for an extended discussion of this issue, see Hayton and McEnhill, 2015: 136–9). Moreover, a wider assessment of the Coalition’s social policies, for example in relation to welfare, makes it difficult to sustain the case that the approach was not strongly informed by conservative ideas (McEnhill, 2015). What, then, can we say about the future trajectory of conservatism in the UK, in the light of the 2015 general election result? Winning the election with an overall majority was a triumph of Conservative Party statecraft – the acme of the successful exploitation of the Liberal Democrats as a junior governing partner. Not only was this a vindication of David Cameron and George Osborne personally, but also of the liberal conservatism they promulgated, which proved to be more electorally resilient in the face of the rise of UKIP than many on the right of their party had feared. Yet, an assessment of the fate of Cameron’s modernisation strategy cannot but conclude that across a range of defining policy areas it was either abandoned or significantly curtailed (Kerr and Hayton, 2015; Dorey, Chapter 3). As Steve Buckler and David Dolowitz (2012) have explored, ideological repositioning does not take place in a vacuum but is a highly contextualised process, dependent upon interpretations and calculations by political actors who find themselves in everevolving circumstances. As discussed above, Conservative modernisation did not fundamentally challenge the ideological legacy of Thatcherism within the Party, so in the context of the financial crisis, fiscal retrenchment and the demands of party management as part of a Coalition government, its failure to secure far-reaching change is unsurprising (Dommett, 2015). What remains is a liberal conservatism in which the liberal element is derived from Thatcherite individualism, underscoring the importance of individual self-reliance across both economic and social policy spheres. The election of the first majority Conservative government since 1992 provided David Cameron with the opportunity to define his liberal conservatism free of the constraints of Coalition. He soon found, however, that the challenge of governing with a small parliamentary majority is as much of a restraint on his freedom of action as the need to compromise with the Liberal Democrats between 2010 and 2015. The commitments the Conservative Party made during the general election campaign to hold a referendum on membership of the European Union, scrap the Human Rights Act, reduce net migration to the tens of thousands, cut

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a further £12 billion per annum from the working-age welfare bill, extend the ‘right to buy’ to housing association tenants and reduce income tax whilst also not increasing other taxes such as VAT, hardly suggested a party leadership beholden to liberal, rather than conservative, ideals. To the extent that the Conservative election campaign contained a positive message, this focused on individual aspiration, for example in relation to home ownership; and families, for example in relation to childcare provision, rather than grander visions about society as a whole.  The  brief  section  of the manifesto that discussed the ‘Big Society’ concentrated on volunteering by individuals and the offer to give teenagers a chance to improve their skills by undertaking ‘National Citizen Service’ (Conservative Party, 2015: 45). The conservatism advanced by the Party over the coming years will likely be one that is a broadly consistent with the Thatcherite legacy on which it rests. At heart, rather unsurprisingly, the Conservative Party remains a conservative one. Acknowledgements I am very grateful to Matthew Lakin, Libby McEnhill, Paul Webb and the editors of this volume for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. References BBC (2010) ‘David Cameron – I am a liberal Conservative’, interview transcript, The Andrew Marr Show, 16 May. Beech, M. (2011) ‘A Tale of Two Liberalisms’, in Lee, S. and Beech, M. (eds), The Cameron–Clegg Government: Coalition Politics in an Age of Austerity, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 267–79. Beech, M. (2015) ‘The Ideology of the Coalition: More Liberal Than Conservative’, in Beech, M. and Lee, S. (eds), The Conservative–Liberal Coalition: Examining the Cameron– Clegg Government, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–15. Blond, P. (2009) ‘Rise of the Red Tories’, Prospect Magazine 155, www.prospectmagazine. co.uk/features/riseoftheredtories. Blond, P. (2012) ‘David Cameron has lost his chance to redefine the Tories’, The Guardian, 3 October, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/03/cameron-one-nationu-turn-tory-tragedy. Boles, N. (2013) ‘Which Party Should a Liberal Vote for in 2015?’, speech at Bright Blue, 19  November, http://brightblue.org.uk/index.php/medias/speeches/item/241speech-by-nick-boles. Buckler, S. and Dolowitz, D. (2012) ‘Ideology Matters: Party Competition, Ideological Positioning and the Case of the Conservative Party under David Cameron’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 14(4): 576–94. Bulpitt, J. (1986) ‘The Discipline of the New Democracy: Mrs Thatcher’s Domestic Statecraft’, Political Studies 34(1): 19–39.

Constructing a new conservatism?55 Cameron, D. (2006) ‘Modern Conservatism’, speech at Demos, 30 January. Carter, N. (2009) ‘Vote Blue, Go Green? Cameron’s Conservatives and the Environment’, Political Quarterly 80(2): 233–42. Conservative Party (2010) Invitation to Join the Government of Britain, London: Conservative Party. Cowley, P. and Stuart, M. (2012) ‘A Coalition with Wobbly Wings: Backbench Dissent since May 2010’, revolts.co.uk briefing paper, www.revolts.co.uk/Wobbly%20Wings. pdf, 3 January 2013. Dommett, K. (2015) ‘The Theory and Practice of Party Modernisation: The Conservative Party under David Cameron, 2005–2015’, British Politics 10(2): 249–66. Dorey, P. (2007) ‘A New Direction or Another False Dawn? David Cameron and the Crisis of British Conservatism’, British Politics 2(2): 137–66. Dorey, P. and Garnett, M. (2012) ‘No Such Thing as the “Big Society”? The Conservative Party’s Unnecessary Search for “Narrative” in the 2010 General Election’, British Politics 7(4): 389–417. Gamble, A. (1994) The Free Economy and the Strong State, 2nd ed., Basingstoke: Macmillan. Gamble, A. (1996) ‘An Ideological Party’, in Ludlam, S. and Smith, M. (eds), Contemporary British Conservatism, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 18–36. Gamble, A. (2015) ‘Austerity as Statecraft’, Parliamentary Affairs 68(1): 42–57. Garnett, M. (2003) ‘A Question of Definition? Ideology and the Conservative Party, 1997–2001’, in Garnett, M. and Lynch, P. (eds), The Conservatives in Crisis, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 107–24. Garnett, M. (2015) ‘Review: Reconstructing Conservatism? The Conservative Party in Opposition, 1997–2010’, Global Discourse 5(1): 156–60. Glasson, B. (2012) ‘Gentrifying Climate Change: Ecological Modernisation and the Cultural Politics of Definition’, M/C Journal 15(3), www.journal.media-culture.org.au/index. php/mcjournal/article/view/501. Goes, E. (2014) ‘The Coalition and Europe: A Tale of Reckless Drivers, Steady Navigators and Imperfect Roadmaps’, Parliamentary Affairs 67(1): 45–63. Guardian, The (2005) ‘The Tories have given themselves a chance’ (leader column), 7 December, www.theguardian.com/politics/2005/dec/07/conservatives.toryleadership 2005. Hayton, R. (2010) ‘Conservative Party Modernisation and David Cameron’s Politics of the Family’, Political Quarterly 81(4): 492–500. Hayton, R. (2012) Reconstructing Conservatism? The Conservative Party in Opposition, 1997– 2010, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hayton, R. (2014) ‘Conservative Party Statecraft and the Politics of Coalition’, Parliamentary Affairs 67(1): 6–24. Hayton, R. (2015) ‘Reply: The Strange Survival of Tory Conservatism’, Global Discourse 5(1): 163–6. Hayton, R. and Heppell, T. (2010) ‘The Quiet Man of British Politics: The Rise, Fall and Significance of Iain Duncan Smith’, Parliamentary Affairs 63(2): 425–45. Hayton, R. and McEnhill, L. (2014) ‘Rhetoric and Morality – How the Coalition Justifies Welfare Policy’, in Atkins, J. et al. (eds), Rhetoric in British Politics and Society, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 101–15.

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Hayton, R. and McEnhill, L. (2015) ‘Cameron’s Conservative Party, Social Liberalism, and Social Justice’, British Politics 10(2): 131–47. Heppell, T. (2002) ‘The Ideological Composition of the Parliamentary Conservative Party 1992–97’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 4(2): 299–324. Heppell, T. (2013) ‘Cameron and Liberal Conservatism: Attitudes within the Parliamentary Conservative Party and Conservative Ministers’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 15(3): 340–61. Heppell, T. (2014) The Tories: From Winston Churchill to David Cameron, London: Bloomsbury. Heppell, T. and Hill, M. (2009) ‘Transcending Thatcherism? Ideology and the Conservative Party Leadership Mandate of David Cameron’, Political Quarterly 80(3): 388–99. Hickson, K. (2009) ‘Conservatism and the Poor: Conservative Party Attitudes to Poverty and Inequality since the 1970s’, British Politics 4(3): 341–62. Hickson, K. (2010) ‘The Ideology of the New Conservatism’, paper presented at the APSA British Politics Group conference, Washington, D.C. Jones, D. (2008) Cameron on Cameron: Conversations with Dylan Jones, London: Fourth Estate. Kerr, P. and Hayton, R. (2015) ‘Whatever Happened to Conservative Party Modernisation?’ British Politics 10(2): 114–30. King, A. (1985) ‘Margaret Thatcher: The Style of a Prime Minister’, in King, A. (ed.), The British Prime Minister, 2nd ed., London: Macmillan. Kisby, B. (2010) ‘The Big Society: Power to the People?’ Political Quarterly 81(4): 484–91. Lakin, M. (2013) ‘The Ideology of the Coalition: More “Muscular” Than “Liberal”?’ British Politics 8(4): 476–90. Lakin, M. (2014) ‘After Cameron: The New New Right and the Unchaining of Britannia’, Global Discourse 4(1): 71–89. Letwin, O. (2003) The Neighbourly Society: Collected Speeches, 2001–3, London: Centre for Policy Studies. Lynch, P. and Whitaker, R. (2008), ‘A Loveless Marriage: The Conservatives and the European People’s Party’, Parliamentary Affairs 61(1): 31–51. McAnulla, S. (2012) ‘Liberal Conservatism: Ideological Coherence?’ in Heppell, T. and Seawright, D. (eds), Cameron and the Conservatives: The Transition to Coalition Government, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 166–80. McEnhill, L. (2015) ‘From Opposition to Coalition: The Conservative Party and the Politics of Welfare Reform, 2005–2015’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Huddersfield. Norton, P. (1990) ‘The Lady’s Not for Turning, but What About the Rest? Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party 1979–89’, Parliamentary Affairs 43(1): 41–58. Norton, P. (2008) ‘The Future of Conservatism’, Political Quarterly 79(3): 324–32. O’Hara, K. (2007) After Blair: David Cameron and the Conservative Tradition, London: Icon Books. O’Sullivan, N. (2013) ‘Conservatism’, in Freeden, M., Sargent, L.T. and Stears, M. (eds),  The  Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 294–311. Sanders, D. (2006) ‘Reflections on the 2005 General Election: Some Speculations on How the Conservatives Can Win Next Time’, British Politics 1(2): 170–94.

Constructing a new conservatism?57 Scruton, R. (2007) The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Shorthouse, R. (2013) ‘Why liberal conservatism isn’t dead’, The Spectator, 20 February, http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2013/02/why-liberal-conservatism-isnt-dead. Smith, M. (2010) ‘From Big Government to Big Society: Changing the State–Society Balance’, Parliamentary Affairs 63(4): 818–33. Willetts, D. (1994) Civic Conservatism, London: Social Market Foundation.

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Policies under Cameron: modernisation abandoned Peter Dorey Integral to the process of ideological revision and ostensible repositioning examined by Richard Hayton in the previous chapter, the early years of David Cameron’s leadership entailed a broad-ranging review of Conservative Party policy. Professing the need to ‘move on’ from Thatcherism and discarding the Conservatives’ apparent ‘nasty party’ image, Cameron immediately, upon being elected leader, initiated a systematic review of the Party’s policies, with the apparent intention of either modifying them, or adopting new ones which took account of changing circumstances, coupled with new or more salient challenges and shifts in public opinion since the 1980s. The electorate needed to be convinced that the Conservatives could successfully address the most salient issues and problems of the early twenty-first century, which, in turn, seemingly made it essential that the Conservative Party appeared to have undergone a process of modernisation. Policies which were deemed essential or electorally attractive in the 1980s were not necessarily adequate or appropriate in the first decade of the new millennium. However, shortly after the completion of this review, two events occurred outside the Conservative Party which seriously undermined two of the premises which had underpinned the reappraisal of the Party’s policies. First, in 2007, Tony Blair resigned as Labour Party leader and prime minister, to be succeeded by the rather less charismatic or popular Gordon Brown. Second, the following year, the global financial crash occurred, with far-reaching and deeply damaging consequences for Western economies. Part of Cameron’s modernisation strategy had been predicated on the Conservative Party’s need to provide an electorally attractive alternative to New Labour and Blair, but once Blair resigned, this particular imperative was rendered much less important. More importantly, Cameron’s initial articulation of a new, progressive and seemingly compassionate conservatism had been based on expectations of continued economic growth, which in turn would generate the revenues to match Labour’s expenditure on public services, and tackle poverty. The 2008 global crash and consequent economic downturn, plunging the British economy into deficit, obviated this perspective, and instead shifted the terms of political debate to the necessity of cutting public expenditure and ‘reforming’ public services in order to secure financial savings.

Policies under Cameron: modernisation abandoned59 Many Conservatives felt much more comfortable ideologically with this post2008 scenario, having never been happy with Cameron’s apparent desire to present himself as a Mark II version of Blair, and the associated strategy of competing on New Labour’s terrain, rather than putting clear blue water between the Conservative Party and Labour. Once Blair had been replaced by the less popular Gordon Brown, and the terms of political debate switched to ways of cutting, rather than continually increasing, public expenditure, many Conservatives were convinced that they could revert to the anti-state, anti-public sector, anti-welfare stance of Thatcherism, and acquire considerable public support in the process. Crucially, after his early efforts at crafting a more compassionate and ostensibly progressive mode of conservatism, Cameron himself seemingly did little, once he became prime minister, to challenge this drift back to the comfort zone of Thatcherism. Consequently, his Party spent five years in government (albeit in Coalition with the Liberal Democrats) pursuing a range of policies pertaining to deficit reduction, public sector reform and welfare retrenchment, which Margaret Thatcher herself would surely have been proud. In this context, much of the erstwhile modernisation strategy steadily dissipated, although Cameron himself remained – and still remains – something of an enigma ideologically, with Conservatives themselves occasionally complaining that they did not know what exactly he believed in, or what mode of conservatism he subscribed to: sometimes he sounds like a pugnacious Thatcherite, and yet at other times he alludes to his Party’s emollient One Nation tradition, just as he did in his victory speech following the Conservatives’ surprise win in the 2015 general ­election – before unveiling a tranche of policies for the new Parliament which again seemed more redolent of Thatcherism, and thus the antithesis of what the earlier modernisation strategy had ostensibly betokened. To gauge the extent to which the policies pursued under Cameron’s leadership represented the embodiment or abandonment of ‘Conservative modernisation’, we can consider them at three discrete analytic levels: policy content, policy process and policy rhetoric. The first of these considers the extent to which particular policies constituted a discernible departure from (and perhaps a reversal of) neoliberalism and Thatcherism, or a continuation of them. Meanwhile, the policy process in the context of Cameron’s advocacy of Conservative modernisation refers to the extent to which policies were formulated on the basis of consultation with the relevant interests or ‘street-level bureaucrats’. Was the adversarial and often confrontational approach of the Thatcher–Major (and Blair) governments towards professionals replaced by a consensual approach, one which fostered dialogue and trust? Finally, the policy rhetoric aspect of ‘Conservative modernisation’ considers the extent to which the dominant discourse deployed towards public sector professionals was more conciliatory, and that applied to welfare claimants more compassionate, in contrast to the rebarbative rhetoric routinely invoked by Cameron’s predecessors.

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The Conservative Party’s policy review Immediately upon being elected Party leader, David Cameron inaugurated a major policy review, which seemingly confirmed his commitment to Conservative modernisation, particularly with regard to ideology, as discussed in the previous chapter. This review comprised six thematic groups, although for reasons of space, our concern is with the four focusing on domestic policy issues, as illustrated in Table 3.1. Described by James O’Shaughnessy, formerly one of David Cameron’s most senior personal policy advisers, as ‘undoubtedly the biggest wholesale review of the Party’s policy for thirty years’, the groups were tasked to report by the end of 2006 (O’Shaughnessy, 2009: 102). Their findings and recommendations were intended to contribute towards the development of the Party’s policy programme in readiness for the 2010 general election. Table 3.1  The four domestic policy review groups and the issues they were to consider Title

Policy issues

Chair(s)

Economic  Competitiveness

deregulation higher education and skills pensions public sector efficiency science, technology, engineering and mathematics transport energy health education social care social housing climate change energy food, farming, rural affairs built environment transport waste water well-being family breakdown educational failure economic dependency consumer debt addictions (drink and drugs) voluntary sector

John Redwood

Public Services Improvement

Quality of life

Social Justice

Source: Dorey, Garnett and Denham, 2011: 93–4.

Simon Wolfson

Baroness Perry Stephen Dorrell John Selwyn Gummer Zac Goldsmith

Iain Duncan Smith

Policies under Cameron: modernisation abandoned61 Crucially, many of these themes had not been traditionally associated with the Conservative Party, and as such, their selection further reflected Cameron’s commitment to crafting a post-Thatcherite variant of conservatism by promoting environmental issues, quality-of-life and social justice. The extent to which this policy review seemed to herald a more conciliatory, inclusive and potentially One Nation mode of Conservative politics was indicated by the diverse, often non-partisan and expert, membership of most of the four domestic policy groups, and which was in stark contrast to policy development under Margaret Thatcher’s leadership, when ‘outsiders’ were only usually co-opted into policy development if they were ideologically aligned to Thatcherism, and therefore viewed as ‘one of us’. The ensuing policy proposals proffered by the four groups, as outlined in Table 3.2, were ideologically eclectic, and arguably offered something commensurate with all ideological strands or tendencies in the Conservative Party, although John Redwood’s economic policy group was clearly Thatcherite in its policy ­proposals – and notably received a somewhat lukewarm response from Cameron, who merely observed that as a Conservative, he was instinctively in favour of lower taxes, but only when they were affordable. For example, the Public Services Improvement Group urged closer partnership between professionals and patients in the provision of health care, and a streamlined, more ‘light touch’ approach to OFSTED’s regime of school inspections. The Group also urged a restoration of professional autonomy and discretion more generally for front-line staff. This clearly implied a more consensual mode of policymaking in the spheres of education and health, as did the concomitant call to reduce bureaucracy and targets in the public sector. This would both enable professional staff to devote more time to front-line duties and core activities, rather than box-ticking and form-filling, and in turn, simultaneously improve the quality of the service provided to the public, while also signalling to public sector workers that they were being trusted, without the need for constant monitoring and micro-management. On the other hand, the policy group also proposed that it should be made easier for parents and charities to establish schools, which would provide an alternative to those managed by local education authorities, and in so doing, increase competition to expand choice and raise standards. A similar call was advanced by the Social Justice policy group, which also echoed the call for a reduction in education bureaucracy in order to alleviate teachers from administrative burdens. With regard to welfare provision, meanwhile, the Social Justice Policy group evinced a blend of compassion and coercion, carrot-and-stick or ‘tough love’, for while it recommended more support (in the form of counselling and structured advice) for parents who were themselves struggling, it also urged more stringent ‘availability for work’ conditions for the unemployed, and suggested that lone parents should be considered available for work once their child(ren) reached

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Table 3.2  Key recommendations of the four ‘domestic’ policy review groups Policy review group and title of report

Key policy recommendations

Economic Competiveness Policy Group, Freeing Britain to Compete: Equipping the UK for Globalisation

Cut corporation tax to 25% for large companies and to 20% for small firms Significantly raise the threshold at which the 40% rate of income tax was paid Abolish inheritance tax Abolish Capital Gains Tax on assets held for more than 10 years Cut red-tape and regulations on businesses Reform health and safety legislation to reduce its costs and complexity for employers Restore Britain’s ‘opt out’ from the EU’s Social Chapter, and significantly amend the EU’s Working Time Directive Abolish the nine English Regional Development Agencies Cut the number of quangos and civil servants. Increase private sector road-building and toll-charging Grant health professionals greater autonomy and discretion by reducing bureaucracy and targets Encourage partnerships between professionals, health service providers and patients Pursue a more proactive approach to public health by promoting healthy foods and in exercise programmes Remove licenses from shops prosecuted for selling alcohol and cigarettes to those under-age Make it easier for parents and/or charitable bodies to establish ‘Pioneer Schools’ which could compete against existing local authority schools Restore professional authority to teachers in the classroom, and reduce bureaucratic interference and micromanagement Treat teachers as partners, and consult them prior to introducing new education reforms or setting targets Create a new professional body, headed by a Chief Education and Skills Officer, to consult and liaise between government and the education profession Entrench the right of head teachers to exclude disruptive pupils Establish a Royal College of Teachers, for experienced and senior teachers Merge the functions of the Teacher Development Agency, the General Teaching Council and National College of School Leadership into one generic body

Public Services Improvement Group, Restoring Pride in Our Public Services

Policies under Cameron: modernisation abandoned63 Policy review group and title of report

Quality of Life Policy Group, Blueprint for a Green Economy

Social Justice Policy Group, Breakthrough Britain: Ending the Costs of Social Breakdown

Key policy recommendations Devise less bureaucratic modes of accountability and audit of schools and teachers, thereby reducing and streamlining inspections by OFSTED Reduce the number of targets imposed on schools and teachers by Whitehall Simplify or streamline the ‘key stage’ tests taken by pupils at 7, 11 and 14 A moratorium on all plans for motorway and trunk road widening pending a comprehensive review of the costs and benefits of road transport Curb airport expansion plans, and encourage more rail usage instead of reliance on domestic and short-haul (nearcontinent) flights Reform environmental taxes so that ‘the polluter’ pays Lower council taxes for ‘green’ homes and lower business rates for ‘green’ offices Council tax discounts for people who recycle Reform of the tax and benefits system to support and reward marriage More extensive ‘parenting education’ and counselling Strengthening ‘contact arrangements’ (vis-à-vis children) when parents separate or divorce ‘Front-loading’ Child Benefit to the early years A Minister of Cabinet rank with responsibility for representing the interests of families at the highest political level Enhanced obligation on the unemployed actively to seek work Greater decentralisation and contracting-out of employment services, with results-based payment schemes for these service providers. Expecting lone parents to work once their children are in fulltime education A ‘Home-School Charter’ stipulating the reciprocal rights and responsibilities of parents, pupils and teachers Encourage and help poorer parents to become more actively involved in their children’s educational development, partly through creating a ‘Home-School Support Champion’ in socio-economically deprived areas £500 annual credits for extra tutorial support and additional courses (such as music lessons) for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, conditional on their parents having fulfilled their obligations with regard to the HomeSchool Charter (Continued)

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Table 3.2  (Continued) Policy review group and title of report

Key policy recommendations Make it easier for parents and the ‘third sector’ to establish new schools Reducing education bureaucracy so that schools can focus more on teaching properly Improved professional training for Head Teachers Encourage closer links between schools and local businesses and/or the community Integrate addiction services to facilitate a more holistic approach Expand the role of the third sector in delivering public services at local level Establish a Minister of the Third Sector, who would sit in the Cabinet

Source: Dorey, Garnett and Denham, 2011: 97–8.

school age (which would reduce their entitlement to social security benefits). The group also echoed the call for greater ‘third sector’ involvement in administering public services, while also proposing closer links between schools and local businesses. Crucially, though, the Social Justice Policy Group advanced a more nuanced account of poverty than the ‘lazy’, ‘workshy’ or ‘feckless’ labels which many Conservatives had readily applied to most of the poor, although the focus on lifestyle factors and individual circumstances – rather than structural or systemic influences – remained. The various recommendations for granting a larger role to the ‘third sector’ in the provision of sundry public and welfare services were to become an integral component of David Cameron’s subsequent advocacy of the ‘Big Society’, while also assuming enormous significance in the context of the post-2008 financial crisis and ensuing era of austerity. Conservative policy developments, 2008–10 Having launched the policy review during a period of seemingly strong economic growth and prosperity (and while Tony Blair was still prime minister), the global financial crash of 2008 naturally posed a problem for the Conservative leadership’s erstwhile commitment to modernisation and policy renewal. The policy stance up to that point, predicated on the basis that the economy would continue to expand and thereby generate the tax revenues necessary to fund further investment in ­services such as education and health, was rendered redundant virtually ­overnight.

Policies under Cameron: modernisation abandoned65 However, for Cameron et al. to have immediately urged a return to explicitly Thatcherite economics, and a concomitant ‘shrinking’ of the state, risked appearing both opportunistic and hasty, for it would have implied that Cameron’s erstwhile advocacy of a post-Thatcherite conservatism had been cosmetic and superficial, and that Thatcherism was really the Party’s default position. Instead, therefore, it was announced, in mid-November 2008, that the Conservatives would no longer seek to match Labour’s planned increases in public expenditure, because the straitened economic circumstances bequeathed by the global financial crash now rendered such plans unsustainable, However, the Conservative leadership was keen to depict this as a pragmatic adjustment to the Party’s economic policy, not a U-turn or reversion to Thatcherism. Cameron also pledged that when the recession was over, Conservative economic policy would strike a judicious balance between increasing public expenditure and cutting taxes. This was described as ‘sharing the proceeds of economic growth’ – although the actual phrase had previously been deployed by George Osborne in 2007 – and thus sought to meld the traditional Conservative commitment to lower taxes with the post-Thatcherite pledge to spend more on public services, albeit no longer at the same rate as Labour had intended. This would, in turn, enable the next Conservative government gradually to reduce the share of GDP consumed by public expenditure, wholly in accordance with the Party’s traditional commitment to a limited state. However, once the scale and severity of the post-2008 economic downturn became apparent, the Conservative Party’s stance shifted further, as Cameron promoted the concept of the ‘Big Society’, whereby a range of non-state actors would be encouraged to ‘deliver’ sundry public services and welfare provision. This would entail a burgeoning network of charities, not-for-profit organisations, philanthropists, ‘third sector’ bodies and voluntary groups becoming involved in administering some of the activities hitherto performed by the public sector and the welfare state. In so doing, Cameron intimated that this would constitute a Conservative ‘third way’ between Thatcherite antipathy towards public services on the one hand, and Labour’s apparent belief that such services could only be provided by the state. Cameron’s advocacy of the Big Society was therefore intended simultaneously to rebut the Thatcherite notion that ‘there is no such thing as society … only individuals’, while also denouncing Labour’s preference for ‘big government’ (Dorey and Garnett, 2012). Cameron subsequently explained that the Big Society ‘includes a whole set of unifying approaches – breaking state monopolies, allowing charities, social enterprises and companies to provide public services, devolving power down to neighbourhoods’ (Cameron, 2010). Thus did the ‘Foreword to the Conservatives’ 2010 election manifesto promise a change ‘from big government to Big Society’, and ‘from state action to social action, encouraging social responsibility … supporting

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social enterprises with the power to transform neighbourhoods’ (Conservative Party, 2010: vii, viii). Conservative policies under Cameron, 2010–15 It might have been expected that entering into Coalition with the ‘progressive’ Liberal Democrats following the Conservatives’ failure to achieve an overall parliamentary victory in May 2010 would have provided a fillip to the modernisation programme extolled by Cameron. However, in most respects, the opposite proved to be the case, as the exigencies of governing in the context of a serious economic recession, and the primacy ascribed to deficit reduction in the lifetime of one Parliament, resulted in a more hostile approach to the public sector and welfare provision than had been alluded to in Opposition. Certainly, many of the policies and accompanying speeches by Conservative Ministers were redolent of Thatcherism, rather than the more conciliatory or compassionate mode of conservatism alluded to by Cameron in the early years of his leadership. The Conservative-dominated Coalition pursued a comprehensive programme of public sector and welfare reform, coupled with privatisation and cuts in both corporation and (the higher rate of) income tax, while increasing VAT. All of these policies were deemed integral to the interrelated objectives of eradicating the post-2008 deficit, shrinking the state, facilitating the expansion of the private sector (which had allegedly been ‘crowded-out’ by Labour’s expansion of the state) and rewarding ‘wealth creators’ on whom economic growth and recovery so heavily depended. While all of these objectives and policies were wholly commensurate with Conservative philosophy in general, the zeal with which they were pursued after May 2010, and much of the rhetoric which was invoked to legitimise them, was certainly more reminiscent of the Thatcherite mode of conservatism than that intimated by Cameron’s earlier advocacy of modernisation. The post-2008 economic situation provided the Conservative leadership with a clear rationale for a range of broadly Thatcherite economic and social policies, but which could, when challenged or criticised, be presented as an unavoidable necessity compelled by dire financial circumstances, rather than a calculated and conscious choice. This left commentators confused about how far or how deeply Cameron actually believed in Conservative modernisation. Had it merely been a cynical public relations exercise to increase the Party’s electoral support in the 2010 general election, or did he genuinely believe in it (still), but find that economic exigencies and/or ministerial antipathy derailed modernisation? Cameron himself did little to clarify his own views, as his keynote speeches oscillated between the combative and the conciliatory; between eulogising Thatcher(ism) and extolling One Nation conservatism, depending on the issue and the audience he was addressing. Rather than providing a detailed discussion of all of the policies pursued by

Policies under Cameron: modernisation abandoned67 the Conservative-led Coalition since 2010 (a task which would require a book, rather than an individual chapter!), I will here focus on the most important, these spanning three key policy spheres, namely public expenditure, taxation and deficit reduction; public sector reform; and welfare reform. Apart from their intrinsic importance, it is also the case, of course, that the first of these policy issues has serious implications for the other two. Public expenditure, taxation and deficit reduction Not surprisingly, the 2008 global financial crash imbued economic policy with even more importance than usual, and meant that Cameron and Osborne’s commitment to ‘sharing the proceeds of economic growth’ was superseded by a programme of austerity to reduce, and ultimately eradicate, the deficit. However, while the need to cut public expenditure in a recession is ostensibly a purely economic imperative, the decisions about which departmental budgets and policy programmes or public services to cut, by how much and how quickly, are invariably imbued with partisan political objectives. Similarly, determining the balance between cutting public expenditure and raising taxes (to secure more revenues with which to reduce the deficit and pay off more of the national debt) is not simply a technocratic decision, but also reflects the ideological proclivities and priorities of the politicians involved. Thus it was that upon entering government in May 2010, much of the Con­ servative modernisation project seemed to be quietly abandoned, certainly in terms of economic policies, which clearly had serious implications for other spheres of domestic policy. Cameron had previously claimed that ‘we’re all in this together’, a declaration readily interpreted at the time as another signifier of a return to One Nation Toryism and as an indication that the sacrifices endured by reducing the deficit would be shared among all sections of British society. However, from the outset, Conservative Chancellor George Osborne made clear his intention to eradicate virtually all the deficit by 2015 – within the lifetime of a single Parliament. Indeed, deficit reduction was placed at the heart of the Coalition’s ‘Programme for Government’. With the government borrowing £149 billion in 2010–11 to cover the shortfall between expenditure and Treasury receipts, this objective clearly entailed major reductions in public expenditure and Departmental budgets, with some Departments forecast to face cuts of 25% over the next four years. These major economic savings would pari passu achieve another key Conservative (and particularly Thatcherite) objective, namely ‘rolling back the state’, as the reduced spending on public services created new or increased scope for ‘independent’ providers to take over service provision – seemingly in accordance with Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ vision. However, what compounded the severity and scale of these cuts was that Osborne also won the argument with his Liberal Democrat counterparts about

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the balance to be struck between public expenditure cuts and tax increases vis-àvis deficit reduction. Whereas the Liberal Democrats had proposed a 70:30 ratio (70% of deficit reduction to be funded from cuts in public expenditure and 30% by increased taxation), the Conservatives’ 80:20 ratio initially prevailed, although it was subsequently adjusted to 77:23. As George Osborne argued when presenting his first (2010) Budget, ‘The country has overspent; it has not been under-taxed.’ Osborne subsequently cut the top rate of income tax from 50% to 45%, but argued that because such a high tax rate encouraged more tax evasion by wealthy individuals, its reduction would yield a corresponding diminution in tax evasion, whereupon the Treasury would actually receive increased tax revenues. Of course, Osborne could have chosen to tackle tax evasion much more rigorously instead, but like most Conservatives, he was strongly opposed to the 50% tax rate anyway (which could readily be depicted as a symbol of Labour’s alleged ‘politics of envy’ towards the rich and its ‘anti-business’ hostility towards wealth-creators), so it was not surprising that he opted to cut it, rather than enforce it more rigorously. At the same time, corporation tax was to be cut each year, from 26% in 2010–11 to 21% in 2014–15, in accordance with the commitment to creating a favourable environment for private sector investment, expansion and wealth creation, and thereby generate economic growth and employment. This was also intended to offset the 100,000s of jobs which would, it was readily acknowledged (with illconcealed glee), be culled as the public sector was significantly pared back. However, these two tax cuts were countered by an increase in the rate of VAT, from 18% to 20%. This was highly significant, because as a tax on consumption or purchases, VAT is ‘regressive’, in that the lower a person’s income, the higher the proportion of that income a VAT payment represents: a £40 VAT payment for someone with an income of £200 per week is a bigger proportion of that income than for someone with a weekly income of £2,000. The simultaneous cut in income tax benefitting the highest earners while increasing ‘regressive’ VAT was redolent of Geoffrey Howe’s first budget in 1979, at the start of Thatcher’s premiership, when the top rate of income tax was cut from 83% to 60%, while VAT was raised from 8% to 15%. The Conservatives’ continued adherence to neo-liberal economics was also apparent in sundry proposals for further privatisation, although some of these (such as Britain’s public forests) were subsequently abandoned in the face of strong opposition from various sources. The most notable privatisation was that of Royal Mail, although it was actually the Liberal Democrats’ Vince Cable, as Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, who was politically responsible for implementing this controversial state sell-off. Another privatisation was that of the East Coast train company, operating train services between London and Edinburgh, which had been taken back into to public ownership in 2009 (and whose commercial success had been such that it paid the Treasury more than £1 billion during the subsequent five years), but which was, in autumn 2014, returned to private ownership, via a

Policies under Cameron: modernisation abandoned69 consortium comprising Stagecoach and Virgin, but with the former owning a 90% stake. Meanwhile, privatisation (by stealth or otherwise) continued apace in the public sector, with many of Britain’s prisons now managed by private companies (Grimwood, 2014), while in 2014 the Ministry of Justice awarded contracts to two private companies (Sodexo and Interserve) to operate just over half of Britain’s probation service. Senior Conservatives invariably claimed that the combined and cumulative objective of these budgetary measures and concomitant privatisations was not merely to eradicate the deficit, crucial though this obviously was, but to establish a framework for strong private sector growth and a dynamic market economy which would generate sustained growth and employment. As during the Thatcher era, the aim was to remove obstacles to the smooth operation of ‘the market’ in virtually all sectors of society, which therefore necessitated rolling back (or restructuring) the state. This had major implications for the public sector and the welfare state alike, which together consumed over half of total public expenditure, and were also deemed major obstacles to a flourishing market economy and individual selfreliance respectively. Public sector reform Although Cameron and other Conservative modernisers berated the Blair–Brown governments for their top-down and target-driven approach to public sector reform, the Conservative-led Coalition continued with the inherited trajectory of reforms in education and health, entailing a widening, deepening and acceleration of the previous Labour governments’ permanent revolution in the public sector, which had itself evinced considerable continuity with Thatcherism. Furthermore, the same objectives and accompanying neo-liberal discourse were invoked to explain and justify the myriad reforms of the public sector; accountability, choice, competition, efficiency, promoting consumer interests, raising standards, transparency and value-for-money. Of course, all of these objectives were imbued with added resonance in the context of the budgetary cuts imposed on many public services, which were thus expected to achieve more with less – itself a key criterion of efficiency. It was also notable that whereas Cameron and fellow modernisers initially posed as friends or allies of public sector professionals vis-à-vis New Labour’s hyperactive interference and plethora of Whitehall ‘initiatives’, this conciliatory stance was largely abandoned in the context of austerity, so that Conservative rhetoric invariably echoed Thatcherite claims that the public sector was bloated, complacent, feather-bedded, inherently inefficient, parasitic on the wealth-creating private sector, unproductive and wasteful of resources. In effect, the Conservative mantra once again became ‘public sector bad, private sector good’.

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Certainly, the hostility displayed towards the public sector since 2010 was in stark contrast to the Conservative modernisers’ advocacy, when in Opposition, of constructive dialogue with public sector professionals, and the professed commitment to pursuing reform through consultation and cooperation, rather than through ministerial decrees and Whitehall diktats. In the context of the pre2010 pledges of a consensual and inclusive approach to public sector reform, Conservative modernisation was, with occasional exceptions or U-turns, subsequently jettisoned both in terms of policy style (imposition and confrontation) and policy rhetoric (derogatory and denigrating), which was perhaps not so surprising given that the policy content of public sector reforms remained firmly within a neoliberal paradigm which invariably viewed non-state actors as inherently superior. Consequently, the most notable feature of the Conservatives’ pursuit of public sector reform from 2010 was the renewed commitment to ‘marketisation’, either in the guise of further embedding the principles and practices of the private sector into such services as education and health, or by encouraging and enabling ‘independent’ (invariably private) providers to become directly involved in service provision and delivery. Initially at least, many senior Liberal Democrats were content to accede to such reforms, reflecting the strong influence of the ‘Orange Book’ tendency in their Party, which wanted to ‘roll back’ the state and extend ‘the market’ in a manner more redolent of classic liberalism, rather than the social liberalism which had recently dominated the Party. Education The most significant policy in the sphere of secondary education was the enthusiastic advocacy of ‘free’ schools, whereby it was intended that businesses, employers, parents, philanthropists and sundry community or voluntary groups, including religious bodies or churches, would establish and manage schools. This was wholly commensurate with the continued determination to reduce further the role of Local Education Authorities (LEAs), a process whose antecedents lay with the Thatcher governments’ attempts to reduce, downgrade or bypass altogether (Labour-controlled) LEAs during the 1980s. In accelerating the process of marketisation in secondary education and further downgrading the role of LEAs, Michael Gove (Education Secretary until July 2014) also perpetuated the criticisms of the teaching profession and their unions, which his Conservative and New Labour predecessors had routinely articulated. There were allegedly too many ‘bad’ teachers who were failing to provide pupils from poorer backgrounds with an adequate education, either due to professional incompetence, out-dated teaching methods (child-centred learning) or because too many teachers had low expectations of working-class children, and so failed to encourage or inspire them; working-class parents were never admonished for failing to instil an appreciation of learning and reading in their children, it was always the fault

Policies under Cameron: modernisation abandoned71 of schools and teachers. Here again, therefore, we discern the abandonment of Conservative modernisation, both in terms of policy style and policy rhetoric, in preference for an approach which bore many similarities with Thatcherism’s contempt for the teaching profession. Teachers generally were treated as adversaries who had to be directly confronted and defeated, rather than treated as partners in the pursuit of improved standards in public service provision. Furthermore, the ‘education establishment’ was invariably characterised as left wing, and thus ideologically opposed to such policy objectives as increasing competition between schools, extending parental choice and raising academic standards. During his tenure as Education Secretary, Gove referred to ‘the blob’ (bloated education bureaucracy) which was collectively comprised of much of the teaching profession, teachers’ unions, local education authorities, university education departments and many others involved in training teachers. Gove also attacked ‘Marxist’ teachers who opposed his education reforms, and derided them as ‘enemies of promise … a set of politically motivated individuals who have been actively trying to prevent millions of our poorest children getting the education they need’ (Gove, 2013). These ritual denunciations of the teaching profession were faithfully echoed by pro-Conservative newspapers and, on sundry occasions, the leaders of OFSTED, thus ensuring that teachers continued to be subjected to what an academic expert on education once termed ‘a discourse of derision’ (Ball, 1990: 18; see also Dorey, 2014). However, in a July 2014 Cabinet reshuffle, Gove was replaced by Nicky Morgan, who immediately declared that, although she was committed to maintaining the trajectory of education reforms enacted since May 2010, she also wanted to foster a more constructive and conciliatory relationship with the teaching profession, so that changes and continual improvements were achieved through ‘a partnership of many: of teachers and governors and parents and businesses and unions and government and many others’ (Morgan, 2014). Her stance was clearly much more commensurate with Cameron’s advocacy of Conservative modernisation when in Opposition, and as such exacerbated the continued confusion – not least among his own colleagues – about the extent to which Cameron himself still supported ‘modernisation’, and if so, how he interpreted or defined it. Elsewhere, with regard to higher education, the Conservative-dominated Coalition tripled student fees, from £3,000 per annum to £9,000 (at least in England), while cutting the teaching grant for arts and humanities by about 80%. Not only was this a contribution towards the Coalition’s deficit reduction programme, it was also intended to transfer more power to students by transforming them into consumers. The (Conservative) Minister of State for Universities, David Willetts, eagerly envisaged that students would henceforth become much more discerning in their choice of university and/or degree, while also being more assertive in complaining about poor teaching and low academic standards generally.

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This was another manifestation of the ‘marketisation’ of the public sector, and the ideological conviction that transforming service users into consumers or ­customers would create or increase competition and thereby raise standards. Here again, we see the Thatcherite (and, it must be said, New Labour) mantra that ‘consumer choice + institutional competition = higher standards’. The other initiative introduced with the express intention of increasing competition between universities, and thus simultaneously expanding student choice and raising academic standards, was the liberalisation of the higher education sector by encouraging ‘independent’ institutions and private companies to award degrees, often of a more vocational or professional nature. As well as ensuring that higher education made a contribution towards deficit reduction via a major cut in the teaching grant, the overall intention of intensifying ‘marketisation’ in this sector was to compel universities to compete more vigorously for students through raising academic standards and improving other aspects of their educational provision, or face the likelihood that declining applications would result in a loss of income from fees, and, ultimately, the closure of ‘uncompetitive’ departments. In this respect, universities are to be no different to supermarkets in competing for customers by offering a better service or more value-for-money than their rivals. The National Health Service (NHS) One of the most controversial public sector reforms enacted by the Conservative led-Coalition was symbolised by the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, which replaced ten strategic health authorities and 152 Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) with consortia of general practitioners (GPs) or clinical commissioning groups. The intention was to enable these consortia and groups to commission care packages directly for their patients or local populations, rather than having to negotiate with the PCTs, and in so doing, empower those who actually provided health care, albeit under the supervision and strategic oversight of a NHS Commissioning Board, while also reducing tiers of bureaucracy and thus cutting administrative costs. However, this seemingly innocuous reform was rendered controversial for two particular reasons. The first, according to one academic critic, was that although GPs would, via these consortia, ‘take charge of the £60 billion health budget … [because] … few GPs know how or have the time to run complex budgets, they will “naturally” turn for help to the private health companies circling the NHS like sharks waiting to feed’ (Hall, 2011: 720). The second source of controversy was that the 2012 Act explicitly decreed that charities and other ‘independent’ (private) providers should be entitled to provide health care alongside extant NHS bodies and staff. This, it was maintained, would yield greater choice for patients, and raise standards of health care due to the increased competition that would ensue, while also helping to reduce NHS ­waiting lists as patients could be treated by a wider variety of health care providers. The

Policies under Cameron: modernisation abandoned73 Act also stipulated that ‘Monitor’, the body previously responsible for regulating NHS Trusts, would become an economic regulator promoting ‘managed competition’ by overseeing the involvement of ‘willing providers’ in delivering health care. Certainly, since the introduction of the Health and Social Care Act, a third of NHS contracts have been awarded to private sector bodies, although in terms of costs, these only represented 6.1% of the NHS budget (BBC News, 2014). The legislation was temporarily suspended en route through Parliament, as the Conservative-led Coalition hastily announced a review of the bill, in response to mounting criticism from the medical profession and Liberal Democrats alike, not least Baroness (Shirley) Williams and Lord (David) Owen, himself a former GP. This review did yield a few modifications to the bill – one of the most notable being that Monitor would be responsible for ‘preventing anti-competitive behaviour’ (rather than promoting competition) – but the final version was still radical enough for Timmins to describe it as ‘by far the most controversial piece of NHS legislation in more than two decades’ (Timmins, 2012: 5), to the extent that it is deemed to have caused the Conservatives to ‘lose public confidence on an issue that was crucial to David Cameron’s detoxification of the Conservative party’ (Riddell and Ham, 2012: 7). Of course, had Lansley consulted with the medical professionals, and fostered a partnership in pursuing reform, in the manner that Cameron’s Conservative modernisation programme had originally pledged, the 2012 Act might well have proved less controversial, and the Health Secretary himself might not have been replaced (by Jeremy Hunt) a few months later. Welfare reform In opposition, David Cameron’s perorations concerning the scale of poverty and widening inequality in ‘Broken Britain’ – for which he audaciously blamed the Blair–Brown governments – coupled with his denunciations of bankers’ bonuses, seemed to reinforce the impression that he wished to revive the Conservatives’ pre-Thatcher One Nation tradition. However, three discrete factors yielded a much tougher approach to welfare provision from 2010 onwards, since when there was little evidence of the ‘compassionate conservatism’ and ‘progressive’ approach to tackling poverty previously alluded to by Cameron and other Conservative modernisers. First, the dominant perspective of Iain Duncan Smith’s Social Justice policy group (2006, 2007) and his think tank, the Centre for Social Justice, was that most poverty in Britain is largely attributable either to the behaviour, lifestyles or personal conduct of individuals themselves, or to the ‘dependency culture’ which the welfare state itself allegedly fostered. This perspective clearly militated against either increasing social security benefits or pursuing other redistributive policies to transfer wealth from the rich to the poor, in order to alleviate poverty and reduce inequality.

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However, there is one crucial caveat here, namely that Smith was also cognisant that the operation of the social security system itself rendered it ‘rational’ for some claimants to remain unemployed, due to the scale of benefit withdrawal they experienced if they did accept a low-paid job. In this respect, Smith acknowledged that many of the unemployed genuinely wanted to work, but would find themselves worse off if they did so, because they would immediately become ineligible for most benefits, thereby resulting in a net loss of income. It was to address this perennial problem that Smith wanted to introduce a system of ‘universal credit’, which would replace most other welfare benefits, and would operate a ‘taper’ so that claimants who accepted low-paid job employment would continue to receive some social security – their ‘work allowance’ – until their earnings reached a particular level; they would always be better-off working than signing-on, regardless of how low their wage. The second reason why the Conservatives pursued a radical approach to welfare reform from 2010, and undoubtedly the most obvious, was the economic context, namely the aforementioned priority ascribed to eradicating the deficit. In 2010–11, the expenditure of the Department of Work and Pensions was £160 billion (out of total public expenditure of £692 billion), thus representing 23% of all government spending. It was therefore hardly surprising that social security should be targeted for major savings in public expenditure and inter alia deficit reduction, particularly as the government also wanted to improve old age pensions, albeit raising the retirement age as a quid pro quo. This was to have serious implications for Smith’s ostensibly more enlightened approach, which seemed more commensurate with Cameron’s earlier modernisation strategy and its ostensibly progressive approach to tackling poverty. Consequently, Smith and Osborne had an increasingly fraught political relationship, with the Work and Pensions Secretary unhappy at the Chancellor’s ‘skivers versus strivers’ and ‘shirkers versus workers’ rhetoric, the latter evident in Osborne’s speech to the Conservative Party’s 2012 conference, when he asked (rhetorically), ‘Where is the fairness … for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits?’ This remark linked to the third factor underpinning the Conservatives’ welfare reform programme from 2010, namely public opinion, for sundry attitude surveys and opinion polls during the 2000s had consistently revealed a widespread belief that many, if not most, of the unemployed were merely lazy, and could find work if they tried hard enough. The same surveys and polls repeatedly reported that much of the public was convinced that social security rates are too high, welfare benefits too easily obtainable and that many claims for social security are fraudulent (see Dorey, 2010, for an account of increasing public hostility towards the poor and the unemployed in the first decade of the twenty-first century). In this context, the economic arguments for cutting welfare payments and imposing much more stringent eligibility criteria on social security claimants was

Policies under Cameron: modernisation abandoned75 underpinned by the populist appeal of such measures among much of the working population; this imbued many of Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms with considerable legitimacy, while minimising public sympathy for the poor and the unemployed, although I reiterate the above point that many of the speeches criticising the unemployed and their alleged indolence were actually made by Osborne, rather than Smith himself. Cameron himself tended to remain above the fray, seemingly willing to defer to his Chancellor, and reinforcing a growing perception that Osborne was actually the most powerful person in the Coalition – the power behind the throne – rather than the prime minister himself. This, of course, further shrouded Cameron’s own views in mystery, and again cast doubt on his commitment to modernisation in terms of moving beyond Thatcherism towards a more compassionate or One Nation mode of conservatism. Like reform of the public sector, welfare reform continued to be couched within a neo-liberal paradigm, and legitimised by a corresponding individualist discourse which portrayed the poor as wholly responsible for their plight. For example, a ‘cap’ was placed on how much an individual claimant could receive in social security benefits in any financial year, in tandem with an annual limit on the amount of Housing Benefit they could claim. Given the public antipathy towards the poor and unemployed, such curbs have proved highly popular, particularly as many newspapers regularly regaled their readers with inflammatory reports of claimants receiving tens of thousands of pounds in social security each year and/ or living in large, luxurious, accommodation (paid for via Housing Benefit) which ordinary working people could not afford on their average wages or salaries. Another prominent (and, again, widely popular) welfare reform was the socalled ‘bedroom tax’, imposed from April 2013. As part of the Conservatives’ narrative that too many claimants unfairly and unnecessarily lived in large (and thus more expensive) property, Housing Benefit was reduced by 14% for claimants who have one bedroom more than they are deemed to need, and 25% if they have two extra bedrooms. As with the general cap on Housing Benefit, the intention was that claimants with ‘too many’ bedrooms would either have to pay the 14% or 25% deduction out of their other benefits, or move to smaller accommodation. In this context, welfare reform and the strict limits on the amounts paid to claimants was depicted as ‘fair’ to those in work, whose taxes were ultimately ‘subsidising’ the unemployed. Of course, this characterisation or distinction was also part of a discourse of divide-and-rule – workers versus shirkers, strivers versus skivers – whereby the resentments and frustrations of those in modestly paid or precarious employment were directed, not at bankers or the super-rich (the top 1%), but at the poor and the unemployed. Finally, a notable link between welfare reform and public sector reform during Cameron’s premiership was the increased role of private sector companies (often foreign) in conducting eligibility tests of various social security claimants. For example, until 2014, the French-owned company Atos conducted ‘Work Capability

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Assessments’ on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions when disabled people claimed social security, but since March 2015, these tests have been conducted by a US company, Maximus. This itself is part of a wider trend in education, health care and welfare provision, namely the changing governance of these services and sectors, and the continued dominance of neo-liberalism in shaping the direction and the detail of reform. This, in turn, means that the erstwhile boundaries between the public and private sectors continually become ever-more blurred and opaque, thereby obfuscating accountability and transparency – even though these were often cited as additional objectives of reform. The dissipation of Conservative modernisation under Cameron This brief overview of three key spheres of policy pursued by the Conservatives under David Cameron’s leadership since December 2005 illustrates the degree to which the Party in government largely abandoned modernisation, and adopted a predominantly neo-liberal Thatcherite stance. The ‘modernisers’ initial advocacy of a more progressive or compassionate conservatism, and Cameron’s concomitant allusion to a revival of One Nation Toryism, coupled with the commitment to a more consensual approach to policymaking and reform, increasingly dissipated after the 2008 global financial crash. Of course, the economic situation and the overriding policy objective of eradicating the deficit are crucial factors in explaining the mode of conservatism subsequently adopted by the Party after 2010, but it is certainly not enough to claim that ‘it’s the economy, stupid’. To do so would to be to fall prey to the overly economistic, determinist and structuralist accounts often advanced by unreconstructed Marxists, and as such, would downgrade the role of agency; in this context, the ideological stance and political perspectives of senior Conservatives, including Cameron himself. As Hayton argued in the previous chapter, in spite of his stated concern to foster a rapprochement with the public sector, and his expressed concern about poverty and growing inequality, David Cameron remained broadly Thatcherite in his economic perspective and core beliefs, committed as he was to the primacy of ‘the market’, an instinctive preference for private sector solutions to societal problems (rather than paternalistic intervention by governments), a commitment to lower direct taxes and, ultimately, a limited state: he continued to operate from within a neo-liberal framework, even if his public pronouncements were usually less strident than Thatcher’s, and he refrained from eulogising influential intellectuals like Friedrich Hayek or Adam Smith in his speeches. The contraction of the state would pari passu allow the expansion of ‘independent’ actors, whereupon individuals, charities, philanthropists, voluntary bodies and private companies – Edmund Burke’s ‘little platoons’ – would play an increasing role in delivering public services and welfare to the ‘deserving’ poor instead of

Policies under Cameron: modernisation abandoned77 p­ aternalistic government. Not for Cameron the dirigisme of more genuine One Nation Conservatives like Harold Macmillan or post-1972 Edward Heath. Instead, he appeared wholly at ease presiding over a raft of economic policies, and reforms both of the public sector and welfare state, which Thatcher herself would surely have enthusiastically endorsed. Indeed, it is partly because Cameron often appeared so relaxed – ‘chillaxed’ – as prime minister that the ideological underpinnings of the Conservative-dominated Coalition’s policies were often overlooked or underestimated; he assiduously conveyed the public image of a non-ideological pragmatist whose governments merely pursued policies which are necessary and unavoidable, rather than underpinned by an ideology (Graham, 2015), the ultimate objective of which was irrevocably to complete the transformation of British society originally instigated by the Thatcher governments – and never significantly or seriously challenged by subsequent governments led by John Major and then Tony Blair. A more charitable explanation for the abandonment of modernisation is that ideological renewal or conscious party change are objectives which are more readily pursued when in Opposition, when there tends to be more time for critical reflection or reconsideration. Conversely, the unavoidable pressures and priorities of day-to-day decision-taking, crisis management and problem-solving in government invariably preclude philosophical ruminations and comprehensive reviews of a party’s policies. Yet it remains the case that many Conservatives never shared Cameron’s commitment to modernisation anyway (see, for example, Scholefield and Frost, 2011). Indeed, many in the Party believed that it was a major reason why the Conservatives failed to win an outright parliamentary majority in May 2010, and subsequently struggled to prevent swathes of its erstwhile ‘core vote’ defecting to UKIP (see Ashcroft, 2010; ConservativeHome, 2010; Montgomerie, 2010). For many such Conservatives, Cameron’s advocacy or modernisation was a blasphemous betrayal of Thatcherism; it was the great lady herself, not Tony Blair, whom Cameron should have emulated. For example, Heppell’s (2013) analysis of the ideological composition of the post-2010 parliamentary Conservative Party revealed that only 29.8% of Conservative MPs could be classified as ‘socially liberal’ – social liberalism being one of the key characteristics of the erstwhile ‘modernisers’. This, in turn, partly reflects the extent to which the Conservative Party had become more, not less, Thatcherite since 1990 (Bale, 2014). Thus, a survey of 126 Conservative candidates adopted for the 2010 general election revealed that a ‘majority of new Conservative candidates selected to fight the next election are unabashed supporters of Margaret Thatcher’s ideals’ (Porter, 2008). Meanwhile, some of those who were widely viewed as fellow Conservative ‘modernisers’ and close associates of Cameron personally, such as Steve Hilton and Andrew Cooper, departed for pastures new, while others who were thought to be

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intellectual proponents of modernisation, such as Philip ‘Red Tory’ Blond, simply seemed to disappear from public view. Consequently, much of the impetus for ‘modernisation’ dissipated after 2010 – not helped by the mid-term appointment of Lynton ‘dog whistle’ Crosby as the Conservative Party’s election strategist. Besides, for many on the Party’s right, ‘Conservative modernisation’ is an oxymoron; the whole point or purpose of conservatism is to defend and venerate tradition, and maintain (or restore, pace grammar schools and fox hunting) as many links with the past as practicably possible, while maintaining extant ‘natural’ inequalities. To jettison this Conservative Party raison d’être in a conscious and concerted attempt at pursuing modernisation and ‘progress’ is deemed to be precisely the dangerous chimera pursued by the left, with all the disastrous consequences that invariably and inevitably follow. Finally, the Conservative Party’s surprise victory in the 2015 general election seems unlikely to herald a revival of the ‘modernisation’ once promoted by Cameron, certainly not on the basis of the policies announced in the first days of the new government. Although Cameron claimed, in his victory speech, that he wanted to lead a One Nation government, this was almost immediately followed by pledges to introduce a further £12 billion in the welfare budget (albeit this was openly pledged during the election campaign), repeal the Human Rights Act, legalise fox hunting, place new restrictions on trade unions’ right to pursue industrial action, introduce tough new curbs on ‘extremists’, and increase the online surveillance powers of the police and security services. The Conservative government also, via the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, spent autumn 2015 engaged in a bitter and high-profile confrontation with the British Medical Association over plans to impose a new contract on junior doctors, entailing significantly worse terms and conditions of employment, in pursuit of continued NHS modernisation. The pursuit or pronouncement of such policies suggested that Cameron’s commitment to leading a modernised Conservative Party, and a ‘One Nation’ government, were about as convincing and sincere as Margaret Thatcher’s speech on the steps of 10 Downing Street immediately after her May 1979 election victory. Erroneously believing that she was quoting St Francis of Assisi, Thatcher declared that Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.

The subsequent doubts about whether St Francis was actually the original author of these words led the genuinely One Nation Conservative Ian Gilmour (1992: 268) to ask waspishly, ‘Was the sentiment she expressed as bogus as the source?’ Although Cameron’s privileged socio-educational background is certainly redo-

Policies under Cameron: modernisation abandoned79 lent of many former One Nation Tories, who were inculcated with a strong sense of noblesse oblige and paternalism, and therefore markedly different to Margaret Thatcher’s unashamedly provincial petit bourgeois background, ideologically and politically he is much closer to her than the One Nation Toryism he periodically alluded to, particularly with regard to his economic neo-liberalism and consequent disdain for the public sector and the welfare state. This, along with the altered economic context since 2008, the abandonment of New Labour very soon afterwards, the lack of enthusiasm among much of the Conservative Party and the departure of senior ‘moderniser’ colleagues close to Cameron (like Cooper and Hilton), has cumulatively led to the abandonment of Conservative ‘modernisation’ as originally conceived by Cameron. One might have hoped that the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party leader in September 2015 – following the longest suicide vote in history – would have encouraged Cameron to revive his previous commitment to Conservative modernisation, and thereby relocate his Party firmly on the vacant centre ground. Certainly, some Conservatives and sympathetic commentators argue that this is precisely what Cameron’s government had been doing since May 2015, but such assumptions seem to conflate his public pronouncements with the concrete policies being pursued by his Cabinet colleagues, and the rhetorical attacks on institutions such as the BBC; again, these are firmly within a neo-liberal paradigm and discourse with which Thatcher would have been entirely comfortable. Far from seizing upon Corbyn’s election as Labour leader as an opportunity to renew Conservative modernisation and recreate a genuinely compassionate or One Nation conservatism, Cameron and his Party seemed to decide that as Labour would be unelectable for the foreseeable future, and the Liberal Democrats had been totally trounced, there is now no political imperative for the Conservatives to adopt a more consensual or progressive stance. Instead, the assumption among many Conservatives is that they now have an ideal opportunity to finish the task originally initiated by Margaret Thatcher back in May 1979, and rid Britain not just of socialism, but its watered down variant, social democracy. In this context, what need was there for the Conservative Party to ‘modernise’? References Ashcroft, M. (2010) Minority Verdict: The Conservative Party, the Voters and the 2010 Election, London: Biteback. Bale, T. (2014) ‘Inside the Tory Mind’, Progress, 3 February. Ball, S. (1990) Politics and Policy Making in Education, London: Routledge. BBC News (2012) ‘Ofsted Chief Sir Michael Wilshaw: Teachers not Stressed’, 10 May, www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-18025202. BBC News (2014) ‘A third of NHS contracts awarded to private firms – report’, 10 December, www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-30397329.

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Cameron, D. (2010) ‘Speech: Our Big Society Plan’, 31 March, www.conservatives.com/ News/Speeches/2010/03/David_Cameron_Our_Big_Society_plan.aspx. Conservative Party (2010) Invitation to Join the Government of Britain, http://conservative home.blogs.com/files/conservative-manifesto-2010.pdf. ConservativeHome (2010) Falling Short: The Key Factors That Contributed to the Conservative Party’s Failure to Win a Parliamentary Majority, http://conservativehome.blogs.com/ files/electionreviewlee.pdf. Dorey, P. (2010) ‘A Poverty of Imagination: Blaming the Poor for Inequality’, The Political Quarterly 81(3): 333–43. Dorey, P. (2014) ‘Markets, Managerialism and Malice (towards Teachers)’, in Farrall, S. and Hay, C. (eds), The Legacy of Thatcherism: Assessing and Exploring Thatcherite Social and Economic Policies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dorey, P. and Garnett, M. (2012) ‘No Such Thing as the “Big Society”? The Conservative Party’s Unnecessary Search for “Narrative” in the 2010 General Election’, British Politics 7(4): 389–417. Dorey, P., Garnett, M. and Denham, A. (2011) From Crisis to Coalition: The Conservative Party, 1997–2010, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Friedman, M. (2002) Capitalism and Freedom, 40th anniversary ed., Chicago: Chicago University Press. Gilmour, I. (1992) Dancing with Dogma: Britain under Thatcherism, London: Simon and Schuster. Gove, M. (2013) ‘I refuse to surrender to the Marxist teachers hell-bent on destroying our schools’, The Daily Mail, 23 March. Graham, J. (2015) ‘After a decade of David Cameron, we still don’t know who he is’, The Guardian, 4 December, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/04/davidcameron-10-year-anniversary-conservative-leader. Grimwood, G. (2014) Prisons: The Role of the Private Sector, London: House of Commons Library, SN/HA/6811, http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/ SN06811/SN06811.pdf. Hall, S. (2011) ‘The Neo-Liberal Revolution’, Cultural Studies 25(6): 705–28. Heppell, T. (2013) ‘Cameron and Liberal Conservatism: Attitudes within the Parliamentary Conservative Party and Conservative Ministers’, British Journal of Politic and International Relations 15(3): 340–61. HM Government (2010) The Coalition: Our Programme for Government, Cabinet Office, www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/78977/Coali​ tion_programme_for_government.pdf. Jones, K. (2003) Education in Britain: 1944 to the Present, Cambridge: Polity. Klein, N. (2007) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, London: Allen Lane. Montgomerie, T. (2010) ‘Congratulations, Mr Cameron. Now learn the lessons of a dismal campaign’, The Guardian, 12 May. Morgan, N. (2014) Speech on ‘vision of education’, delivered at the University of Birmingham, 27 November, www.gov.uk/government/speeches/secretary-of-state-foreducation-our-plan-for-education, accessed 16 December 2014. O’Shaughnessy, J. (2009) ‘CRD under Cameron’, in Cooke, A. (ed.), Tory Policy-Making:

Policies under Cameron: modernisation abandoned81 The Conservative Research Department 1929–2009, London: Conservative Research Department, 101–6. Porter, A. (2008) ‘Tory MPs “still overwhelmingly Thatcherite”’, The Daily Telegraph, 25 June. Riddell, P. and Ham, C. (2012) ‘Foreword’ to Timmins, 2012. Scholefield, A. and Frost, G. (2011) Too ‘Nice’ to Be Tories? How the Modernisers Have Damaged the Conservative Party, London: Social Affairs Unit. Social Justice Policy Group (2006) Breakdown Britain: Interim Report on the State of the Nation, www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/UserStorage/pdf/Pdf%20Exec%20summaries/ Breakdown%20Britain.pdf. Social Justice Policy Group (2007) Breakthrough Britain: Ending the Costs of Social Breakdown, www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/UserStorage/pdf/Pdf%20reports/ BBChairmansOverview.pdf. Timmins, N. (2012) Never Again? The Story of the Health and Social Care Act 2012: A Study in Coalition Government and Policy Making, London: Institute for Government/The King’s Fund.

4

The Conservative Party and a changing electorate Matthew Burbank and John Francis Introduction Party modernisation, as discussed throughout this book, is primarily a tool to help a party regain power at the next or succeeding elections. Past Conservative modernisation programmes from 1945 to 1979 have proved to be successful if measured by the Party’s relatively quick return to power. After the1997 election defeat, the Conservatives found it difficult to devise an electorally persuasive modernisation effort until David Cameron won a plurality of seats for the Party in 2010 and a small, but vitally important, overall majority of seats in 2015. Table 4.1 shows the results from the 2015 general election for the major parties both nationally and by region. While the Conservative Party won 36.9% of the national vote (up less than 1% from the 2010 results), the Party had a net gain of 24 seats, giving it enough seats to control the House of Commons. As Table 4.2 shows, the Conservatives were able to pick up seats primarily from their former Coalition partner, the Liberal Democrats, even while losing some seats to Labour and one to UKIP. This chapter argues that the Cameron-led modernisation effort that began in 2005 and continued to evolve after the Coalition government was formed in 2010 was at best a modest success. In fairness, it was always going to be difficult to strengthen the Conservative Party’s electoral presence in a time of scepticism about what the Conservative Party represented, in an era of weakened party attachment to the main parties, and in a moment of rising appeal of smaller parties such as the SNP and UKIP who gave voice to voters who felt their concerns were not addressed by either the Conservatives or Labour. David Cameron became leader of the Conservative Party in 2005 after the Party had lost three general elections in a row. The Party’s expectation was that Cameron should return the Conservatives to office. A commitment to broadening the Conservative Party’s electoral appeal to voters was obviously crucial to Cameron’s modernisation strategy. The Party had not reached a 40% share of the electorate since 1992. Cameron sought to increase support generally but specifically concentrated on groups where the Party had become vulnerable: younger voters, women, minorities, voters outside the south of England and voters who had shifted from the Conservatives to Labour or the Liberal Democrats.

The Conservative Party and a changing electorate83 Table 4.1  General election results by region, 2015* Percentage

Seat

Party

Vote

Change

Seats

Change

United Kingdom (turnout 66.1%) Conservatives Labour UKIP Liberal Democrats SNP Green Others

36.9 30.4 12.6  7.9  4.7  3.8  3.7

+ 0.8 + 1.5 + 9.5 − 15.2 + 3.1 + 2.8

330 232   1   8  56   1  22

+ 24   − 26   +1   − 49 + 50    0

100% England (turnout 65.9%) Conservatives Labour UKIP Liberal Democrats Green Others

41.0 31.6 14.1  8.2  4.2  1.3

650   + 1.4   + 3.6 + 10.7 − 16.0   + 3.2

100% Scotland (turnout 71.1%) SNP Labour Conservatives Liberal Democrats Others

50.0 24.3 14.9  7.5  3.3

36.9 27.2 13.6 12.1  6.5  2.6  1.1

+ 30.0 − 17.7   − 1.8 − 11.3

25.7 24.5 16.0 13.9

56  1  1  1  0

+ 50 − 40   0 −10

59   + 0.6   + 1.1 + 11.2   + 0.9 − 13.6   + 2.1

100% Northern Ireland (turnout 58.1%) Democratic Unionist Sinn Fein Ulster Unionist Social Dem. and Labour

+ 21 + 15 +1 − 37   0

533

100% Wales (turnout 65.6%) Labour Conservatives UKIP Plaid Cymru Liberal Democrats Green Others

318 206   1   6   1   1

25 11  0  3  1  0  0

− 1 +3  0  0 − 2  0

40 +0.7 − 1.0 + 0.8 − 2.6

8 4 2 3

 0 −1 +2 0 (Continued)

David Cameron and Conservative renewal

84

Table 4.1  (Continued) Percentage Party Alliance UKIP Traditional Unionist Voice Others

Seat

Vote

Change

Seats

Change

8.6 2.6 2.3 6.4

+2.2 +2.6 − 1.6

0 0 0 1

−1 0 0

100%

18

* Parties listed by percentage of vote in 2015, and only parties that earned at least 2% of the national or regional vote are listed. Vote is percent of party’s national/regional vote in the 2015 general election, percent change is the change in vote from 2010 general election, seats are the number of parliamentary constituencies won, and seat change is the number of net seats gained or lost compared to the 2010 general election. The Speaker’s seat is included in the Others category in the UK and England results. Source: Created by the authors using data from BBC, 2015. Table 4.2  Constituency changes, 2015 Conservatives Gain* Lost Net

  35   11 + 24

From: To:

Liberal Democrats (27), Labour (8) Labour (10), UKIP (1)

Labour Gain Lost Net

  22   48   − 26

From: To:

Liberal Democrats (12), Conservatives (10) SNP (40), Conservatives (8)

To:

Conservatives (27), Labour (12), SNP (10)

From:

Labour (40), Lib Dem (10)

Liberal Democrats Gain    0 Lost   49 Net + 49 Scottish National Party Gain  50 Lost   0 Net + 50

United Kingdom Independence Party Gain 1 From: Lost 0 Net +1

Conservatives (1)

* Gain is the number of additional seats won in 2015 compared with 2010, lost is the number of seats lost compared with the 2010 election. Source: Created by the authors using data from BBC, 2015 and House of Commons, 2015.

The Conservative Party and a changing electorate85 Cameron needed to perform a delicate balancing act – to attract new and former  voters to the Conservative ranks without losing the existing set of Conservative loyalists. The commitment to recruit new supporters continued after  the 2010 election, reinforced by the Conservatives’ failure to secure a majority  in the House of Commons. The Conservative Party’s narrow majority in the 2015 general election is an important milestone in Cameron’s efforts. But this Tory  victory was at least as much a product of the dismal electoral showing of the Liberal Democrat Party in defending its role as the Conservatives’ Coalition partner, the weakness of the leadership of the Opposition Labour Party, and the dynamics of Scottish politics, as it was of Cameron’s modernisation programme. The Conservative modernisation effort over the period of Cameron’s leadership needs to be placed against the backdrop of important changes in electoral politics. These changes include weakened party attachment, a growing dissatisfaction with the major parties as too similar to each other, voter volatility and a willingness to support minor parties on a number of issues such as Britain’s European Union membership or immigration thought to be under-addressed by the two main parties. These issues inevitably complicated Cameron’s struggle to build a winning Conservative electoral Coalition. The direction that Conservative modernisation took had primarily been defined by the Party’s long-standing competition with Labour. Over much of the twentieth century and continuing into the twenty-first century, how the two parties have responded to one another has largely shaped the course of electoral politics in the United Kingdom. In some eras both parties have used ‘modernisation’ to describe shifts in policy and personnel which have seen both major parties competing at the centre ground of British politics. At other times, one of the two major parties has moved to differentiate itself from the other party by emphasising the distinctiveness of its position. The Conservative electoral success in the 1950s was attributed, in part, to the Party’s acceptance of the Labour government’s enactment of the post-Second World War welfare state. The Conservatives supported popular Labour-initiated programmes such as the National Health Service. The Conservatives accepted much of Labour’s welfare programme as well as much of Labour’s nationalisation programme. The Conservatives built their successful electoral appeal in the 1950s by making the argument that they could deliver economic growth, full employment, consumer choice and the maintenance of the welfare state. Beginning in the late 1970s and continuing through the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher led the Party to redefine its policy and governing stance by moving away from Labour’s policies and approach to governance. The Conservatives were deeply critical of the role played by the trade unions in the British economy and their influence within the Labour Party. The Thatcher-led Conservatives argued for lower taxes, a reduced role for government and market solutions to foster economic

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David Cameron and Conservative renewal

growth. Despite its radical agenda, the Conservative Party won four general elections from 1979 to 1992. The Labour Party, while in Opposition during the 1990s, restructured the role of trade unions in party decision-making, accepted much of the Thatcher market model and argued that they could manage the economy successfully and far more humanely than the Conservatives. It proved to be a successful strategy for Labour to move to the centre. Under Tony Blair, the Labour Party won a major victory in 1997 and remained in office until 2010, its longest period in power since it was founded. The Conservative modernisation efforts in the long years of the Blair era were uneven (Lynch and Garnett, 2003). The efforts did not result in victories and the Party’s frustration was reflected in frequent leadership changes. Successive party leaders struggled as to how best to define themselves in relationship to Labour’s successful self-portrayal as the party of the inclusive centre and veered between policies which might broaden their electoral base and policies which would consolidate the core vote. More than any other recent Conservative leader, Cameron argued for the Party to affirm its version of centrist politics by adopting the rhetoric, policies and governing style that would appeal to voters who no longer voted Conservative not only because they doubted the Party’s managerial skills but also because they found the Conservatives to be mean-spirited and far from inclusive. The Cameron-led Conservatives worked to broaden the Party’s appeal by encouraging more ethnic and racial diversity in candidate selection, addressing gender and lifestyle issues, targeting training programmes for younger voters and signalling support for same-sex marriage. This commitment to broadening the Conservatives’ appeal meant muting the Thatcher heritage even while retaining that heritage in a number of policy areas. But what came to matter in the run up to the 2010 election was the recession and whether or not Labour’s economic recovery policies were working. The country’s substantial economic difficulties gave the Conservatives the best opportunity to restore their old reputation as the party of good management – that they, not Labour, could be the better managers. Although it had its best electoral result since 1992, securing a parliamentary majority eluded the Conservatives in 2010. Despite its improved electoral performance, the Party was still unable to win more than the 40% of the national vote that it had received in general elections from 1979 to 1992 and ended up short of a governing majority. While David Cameron became prime minister, he was dependent upon a Coalition with the Liberal Democrats to form a majority. The electoral challenges for Cameron and the Conservatives remained significant in the run up to the 2015 election. Being in a Coalition government made it more difficult for Conservative leaders to promote the Party’s electoral self-interest. The Coalition was not entirely popular within the Conservative Party and, in the country, the priority accorded to spending cuts produced opposition. The Conservatives found that neither their policies nor leadership style attracted many new voters. While the

The Conservative Party and a changing electorate87 Conservatives percentage of the vote was up 3.8% nationally in 2010 over 2005, the Conservative vote in 2015 increased only 0.8% over 2010. As troubling as the limited success in attracting new voters was, the Conser­ vative  leadership found that a significant number of older Conservative voters were not as loyal to the Party as they had been in the past and were vulnerable to the escalating appeal of the newly resurgent UKIP. Cameron’s response to the perceived risk of losing supporters to UKIP involved adopting a stronger stance on curtailing immigration and renegotiating Britain’s membership in the European Union as well as holding a referendum on the future of Britain’s membership in the EU. The broader consideration for the Conservatives is that the British electoral landscape has become crowded. It has changed from the traditional Labour– Conservative competition with the Liberal Democrats playing a minor party role to a more complex system of multiparty competition. Other parties have joined the Liberal Democrats as political forces that can shift electoral outcomes. These parties include UKIP on the right and the new strategic presence of the Scottish National Party (SNP). In addition, there is the unpredictability of the numbers of unattached voters and of non-voters, both of whom can have an impact on which of the main parties takes the lead in forming a government. The increased complexity of the electorate has presented a major challenge to the Conservative Party during David Cameron’s leadership and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. We argue that to assess the Conservative Party’s attempt to modernise its electoral appeal requires an understanding of the changing nature of competition between the Conservative and Labour parties in an era of large-party decline. The changing nature of party politics The claim, according to Duverger’s Law, that first-past-the-post electoral systems institutionalise a two-party system has never fully applied in the United Kingdom. In the United States, the two main parties have dominated all levels of government and sustained electoral success does not occur outside the major parties. In Britain no such domination has existed: although the strength of the two main parties after the Second World War gave them a reputation as a duopoly, it was at best a limited duopoly. From the 1980s onwards, the rise of various minor parties has regularly threatened the prospects of one or the other of the two main parties from securing a majority in the House of Commons. The small Liberal Party never won enough seats to present much challenge to the post-Second World War duopoly. In 1981, the Social Democrats were formed by a small group of Labour MPs exiting a party they judged had moved too far to the left. The formation of the Social Democratic Party contributed to the pressure on Labour to move to the centre. The revival of the SNP in the 1970s had already started to force Labour to support the devolution of power to Scotland. Decades

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David Cameron and Conservative renewal

later, the rise of the SNP displaced Labour from its dominant position in Scottish parliamentary politics, most dramatically by reducing Labour to winning only a single seat in Scotland in the 2015 election. The rise of UKIP as initially a single-issue Eurosceptic party seemed to pose a threat primarily to the Conservatives, especially those dissatisfied with Cameron’s position on Europe. As UKIP broaden its message to include opposition to immigration and discontent over ‘politics as usual’ in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, however, it appears to have developed into the ‘political articulation of deep divides in British society – divides that have been building for decades’ (Ford and Goodwin, 2014b: 278). As Ford and Goodwin (2014a, 2014b) argue, UKIP has created an appeal to voters they call the ‘left-behind’ – older, white, working-class voters without the educational qualifications or skills to adapt easily to a post-industrial economy. This group, many of whom had previously identified with Labour, have ‘disconnected from traditional political parties because they feel these parties no longer represent or respond to their concerns’ (Ford and Goodwin, 2014b: 281). Thus, the rise of UKIP threatened not only the Conservatives but also Labour and, indeed, the established party system. In the 2015 general election UKIP was caught in the classic trap of a minor party that showed widespread support in national polls but was unable to translate that support into seats in the first-past-the-post system. UKIP was the third largest party nationally by popular vote share with 12.6% of the vote but won only one seat in the House of Commons (see Table 4.1). Nonetheless, the willingness of growing numbers of British voters to opt for minor parties has reduced the overall share of the two major parties to roughly two thirds of British voters. The decline of social class and changing partisan attachment As Labour replaced the Liberals as the chief competitor to the Conservative Party during the first half of the twentieth century, the social class cleavage that divided British society became the central feature of electoral competition. Early empirical studies of individual voting behaviour in Britain focused on the importance of social class as the basis for structuring both electoral competition and individual voting decisions (e.g. Butler and Stokes, 1974). In the 1950s and 1960s, the Labour Party appealed unashamedly to working-class voters and relied heavily on trade unions for financial and organisational support. Although Conservatives did not seek to position their party as the party of the middle class exclusively, in practice they drew heavily on middle-class voters for support. Still a minority of working-class voters supported the Conservatives and these voters were crucial for Conservative electoral success. In the 1964 general election, for example, 65.6% of the manual working class voted for Labour and only 26.3% voted for Conservatives, while among those in the professional and managerial class 68% voted Conservative and only 16% voted Labour (Crewe, Fox and Day, 1995: 19).

The Conservative Party and a changing electorate89 50 45

42

43

40 35

32

35

32

30

27

25

25

25

27 20

20

23 18

17

2005

2010

15 10 5 0 1964

1966

1970

1974 (Feb)

1974 (Oct)

1979

1983

1987

1992

1997

2001

Figure 4.1  The Alford Index of class voting, 1964–2010 Source:  Created by the authors using data from Denver and Garnett (2014: 68, 141); 2010 data added by authors.

While class was not the only social cleavage that mattered in the 1950s and 1960s, it was the most prominent. Beginning in the 1970s, however, the strong ties between social class and vote choice began to erode. One commonly used measure of the strength of class voting is the Alford Index, which can be calculated by taking the percentage of Labour votes among manual workers and subtracting the percentage of votes from nonmanual workers (Alford, 1963). The index ranges from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating higher levels of class voting. Figure 4.1 shows the Alford Index of class voting for British general elections from 1964 to 2010. The index shows a clear downward trend in class voting over this period. In 1964, the index had a value of 42, indicating that Labour got over 40% more support among manual workers than it got from non-manual workers. By 2010, however, the index had a value of 17, indicating that the difference in support for the Labour Party based on social class had decreased substantially. Although not a perfect measure of class voting (since it relies on the simple manual–non-manual worker distinction as a proxy for social class), the Alford Index does illustrate the decline in class-based voting over this nearly 50-year period. Of course, not all scholars have accepted the view that there had been a social class de-alignment beginning in the 1970s. In particular, in their study of the 1983 election, Heath, Jowell and Curtice (1985) made a strong case that social class-based voting had not weakened nearly as much some measures indicated once a more refined measure of social class (in place of the crude manual worker– non-manual worker dichotomy) and more advanced measures of class voting were

90

David Cameron and Conservative renewal

used. While the debate over how best to conceptualise and measure social class is an important one, the bottom line was that important changes in the relationship between social class and voting had occurred between the 1960s and the 1990s in Britain (e.g., Franklin, 1985; Heath et al. 1991; Robertson, 1984; Sarlvik and Crewe, 1983). The sources of the changing relationship between social class and voting included, most notably, changes occurring in the British economy. Beginning in the 1970s, the British economy was undergoing a transition from an industrial to a post-industrial economy. As a result, employment in traditional industries such as steelmaking, coal mining and shipbuilding declined dramatically and jobs in parts of the economy associated with white-collar employment and services, such as banking and the financial sector, increased. These economic changes typically meant that areas of the country that had been bastions of Labour support in the north of England, Scotland and Wales were losing jobs and population while there was growth in jobs and population in areas such as the south of England which were more Conservative in party preference. In addition to these large-scale changes in the economy, there were also changes in the way that political parties sought to appeal to voters. Among these changes were an increased emphasis on the importance of party leaders as the public face of both the Conservatives and Labour, more emphasis on campaigning and greater attention from voters to performance in government (Clarke et al., 2009; Kavanagh, 1995; Norris et al., 1999). These changes in the performance of political parties also served to erode the connection between social class and political party. One consequence of the weakening of the class–party connection was a change in how people identified with the major political parties. The concept of partisan identification, borrowed from studies of American voting behaviour (Campbell et al., 1960), has been used in the British Election Studies (BES) since their inception. The concept of partisan identification is generally measured with a survey question such as the one used in the 2010 BES: ‘Generally speaking, do you think of yourself as Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, [in Scotland/Wales: Scottish National / Plaid Cymru)] or what?’ Respondents who indicate a partisan identification are then asked a follow up question: ‘Would you call yourself very strong [party name], fairly strong or not very strong?’ These two questions help to identify the extent to which individuals identify with a political party and the strength of that party attachment. As the relationship between the major political parties and social class became more complex during the 1970s and 1980s, there was also evidence of major changes in partisan attachments. For example, in 1964 most national respondents identified themselves with either the Conservatives or Labour, and the largest portion of these individuals identified as ‘very strong’ Conservatives (19.9% of the total) or Labour (22.4%) (Crewe, Fox and Day, 1995: 47). During the elections of the 1970s and 1980s, there was some fluctuation in the number of people who

The Conservative Party and a changing electorate91 Table 4.3 Conservative, Labour and no party identification, 1992–2015 1992

1997

2001

2005

2010

2015

No party identification

9.5

7.1

12.8

21.4

14.7

14.9

Conservative identifiers (total)

39.8

27.5

22.4

22.2

26.9

29.8

Strength of identification (percentage of Conservative identifiers) Very strong 19.2 14.4 15.2 Fairly strong 52.6 46.5 48.9 Not very strong 28.0 39.8 35.8

11.7 43.4 44.9

12.1 50.0 37.7

14.6 54.1 31.1

Labour identifiers (total)

44.5

33.5

30.0

30.3

Strength of identification (percentage of Labour identifiers) Very strong 22.1 22.3 17.8 Fairly strong 45.3 45.9 49.4 Not very strong 32.5 31.6 32.6

16.6 41.0 42.3

17.1 44.7 37.4

21.2 50.2 28.0

32.2

44.7

Note: Conservative, Labour, and no party identifiers as a percentage of all valid responses and strength of partisan identification as a percentage of all valid responses (including don’t know). Source: British Election Studies, 1992-2015.

identified with either the Conservatives or Labour but the most evident trend was a clear weakening in the strength of attachment to both parties (e.g., Crewe and Thomson, 1999). Thus the number of ‘very strong’ identifiers declined markedly and the number of ‘fairly strong’ or ‘not very strong’ identifiers increased. The weakening attachment of citizens to political parties is important because the strength of partisan attachment is associated with greater interest in elections and higher voter turnout as well as a propensity to vote more consistently for a party’s candidates. Table 4.3 shows the patterns of Conservative and Labour identifiers and those with no partisan attachment between 1992 and 2015. Over this span of six general elections, the percentage of respondents with no partisan identification increased from less than 10% in 1992 to nearly 15% in 2015 (although down from the more than 20% who claimed no partisan identification in 2005). Over this time, Conservatives saw a decline in the percentage of respondents identifying with the Party from 40% to 30%. Labour saw similar fluctuations with an increase from 32% in 1992 to 44% in 2001 and then a decline to 30% in 2015. Both parties have seen some weakening of the strength of identifiers as well but this w ­ eakening of attachment is more evident for Conservatives than for Labour. In 1992, 19.2% of Conservative identifiers called themselves very strong while in 2015 only 14.6% did. For Labour, 22.1% of Labour identifiers called themselves very strong in 1992 and 21.2% did so in 2015. The weakening of partisan attachments is a source of concern for the parties as strong identifiers are more likely to vote and more likely to vote for

David Cameron and Conservative renewal

92

the Conservative (or Labour) candidate. Not very strong identifiers are more likely to either fail to vote or even to vote for candidates of other political parties. Judging from the 2010 and 2015 level of Conservative identifiers, Cameron’s modernisation programme has produced positive results and, consequently, Conservatives have nearly drawn even with the proportion of Labour identifiers. Still, the task for party leadership continues to be how to gain the consistent support of voters in an electorate that is more fluid that it was in the past. The changing role of ethnicity and gender in the electorate While the population of Britain has long been predominantly white, recent census data show that the population, especially in England, is becoming more ethnically diverse. According to the Office of National Statistics, 94.1% of people in England and Wales identified themselves as White British in 1991, but that number declined to 91.3% in 2001 and to 86% in 2011 (2012: 4). Thus, the proportion of non-white or mixed ethnicities constituted 14% of the population in 2011. Among the nonwhite ethnicities, the largest group were people of Indian ethnicity at 2.5% of the population, followed by Pakistani at 2.0%, Black African at 1.8%, and Caribbean Black at 1.1%. As the population has become more ethnically and racially diverse, so too has the electorate, and this development poses a continuing challenge for the Conservative Party. Table 4.4  Party identification and vote choice by selected ethnic groups, 2010 BlackBlackWhite* Indian Pakistani Bangladeshi African Caribbean Party identification None Conservatives Labour Liberal Democrats Other N

16.5 30.5 32.0 12.3  8.7 2617

10.8 17.1 59.4 11.2  1.5 527

11.8  8.9 59.1 16.5  3.7 619

16.7  9.4 62.4  9.8  1.7 245

12.3  5.0 76.2  5.4  1.1 478

14.5  5.5 73.3  5.5  1.2 543

Party vote Conservatives Labour Liberal Democrats Other N

36.9 30.6 21.9 10.6 2125

23.7 59.9 14.7  1.7 409

12.0 59.9 23.5  4.6 459

16.8 68.6 10.5  4.1 191

 7.0 85.0  6.7  1.3 300

 7.8 78.4 11.6  2.2 371

* White group includes respondents who identified as White British or other white. Sources: Data for white group from the 2010 British Election Study and data for the other groups are from the 2010 Ethnic Minority British Election Study.

The Conservative Party and a changing electorate93 Table 4.4 shows party identification and vote choice in 2010 by selected ethnic groups and reveals the magnitude of the problem for Conservatives in relation to securing support among ethnic minorities. Among people who identified ­themselves as White British, roughly 30% identified with the Conservatives in 2010 (only slightly less than Labour’s 32%). But, among members of other major ethnic groups, Labour had a decisive advantage in party identification with more than half of all of respondents identifying with the Labour Party. In contrast, only a small number of people who were not white identified with the Conservative Party. In terms of party identification, Conservatives did slightly better among people of Indian ethnicity at 17%, but only about 9% identified as Conservatives among people who were Pakistani or Bangladeshi and only about 5% among those who were of Black African or Caribbean ethnicity. A similar pattern held in terms of vote choice in 2010, where Conservatives achieved 37% of the vote among whites but saw much lower levels of support among the other ethnic groups (with the partial exception of voters of Indian ethnicity). Why have Conservatives done so poorly among minority groups in terms of either party identification or vote? Most research points to a widely held sentiment among ethnic minority voters that Labour has, in government, enacted legislation in support of ethnic minorities and that the Labour Party has been an advocate for addressing issues of discrimination (Heath et al., 2013; Saggar, 2000; Saggar and Heath, 1999; Sanders et al., 2014). As a recent study noted, Overall, then, our analysis of the party manifestos and party record is closely in line with our respondents’ perceptions. Our analysis suggested that historically the Conservatives and Labour Party have differed substantially in what they promise for minorities, and minorities’ perceptions are likewise that the parties differ substantially in how much they look after black and Asian interests. (Heath et al., 2013: 94)

While Labour Party manifestos have varied over elections in their expressed commitment to addressing the concerns of minority groups, Labour has for some time benefitted in electoral terms from ethnic groups based on the past actions of Labour governments and the general impression that the Labour Party is more supportive of the concerns of ethnic minorities. In contrast, the Conservative Party has often communicated a mixed message to voters of various ethnic minorities by making the argument that Conservative policies will help them economically but simultaneously insisting on strict limits on immigration. With respect to gender, Conservatives in the post-war period enjoyed the benefit of higher levels of support from women voters than from men. This phenomenon of stronger support for a right-wing party, termed the ‘traditional gender gap’, persisted in the United Kingdom. In contrast, the United States experienced what was has been called the ‘modern gender gap’ with women voting in higher proportions than men for the left-wing party (Inglehart and Norris, 2000). The size of the

David Cameron and Conservative renewal

94

t­ raditional gender gap in Britain varied during the post-war years but peaked in the early to mid-1950s when the difference between men and women in their support for the Labour and Conservative parties reached 17% in both 1951 and 1955 (Norris, 1999: 152). The advantage that Conservatives had with women voters declined from the 1960s and by the general elections of the 2000s the t­ raditional gender gap had shrunk to only a few percentages points (Campbell, 2012: 705). The decline of the traditional gender gap in British elections does not mean that gender has become unimportant; rather that its impact has become more complex. As Norris (1999) has pointed out, the advantage that women voters provided to the Conservatives has not simply disappeared but instead has become dependent on the age of voters. Table 4.5 illustrates this point using data from the 2015 general election. Among both men and women, younger voters tend to favour Labour and older voters tend to favour the Conservatives. But, among the youngest group, 18 to 24 year olds, Conservatives lost men by 9% while among women Conservatives lost to Labour by 20%. Among voters 55 years of age and over, Conservatives enjoyed a 15% advantage over Labour among men, but an 18% advantage among women. In sum, the nature of the gender gap depends on age – Labour has a decisive a­ dvantage among the youngest women voters but Conservatives have a similar advantage among older women voters. While changes in the ethnic composition of the electorate pose a long-term concern about the Party’s electoral appeal, the topic of gender has attracted more immediate attention from the Conservative Party. For much of the post-war period, Conservatives had an advantage with women due to their propensity to support Table 4.5  Differences in major party vote by gender and age, 2015* Men Age

Conservatives

Labour

Difference

32 35 38 40

41 32 32 25

   − 9  +3  +6 +15

18–24 25–34 35–54 55 and older

Women Age

Conservatives

Labour

Difference

24 31 32 45

44 40 35 27

− 20   − 9   − 3 +18

18–24 25–34 35–54 55 and older * Entries are percentage vote.

Source: Created by the authors using data from Ipsos MORI, 2015.

The Conservative Party and a changing electorate95 Conservative candidates and their tendency to turnout to vote. The traditional gender gap favouring Conservatives, however, has diminished considerably and is notable now only among older voters. The actions of the Labour Party to appeal to women voters contributed to the decline of the traditional gender gap and helped Labour to establish an advantage among young women voters. It was this challenge to develop a stronger appeal to women voters that motivated Cameron in his efforts to ‘feminise’ the Conservative Party after becoming party leader (Childs and Webb, 2011; Webb and Childs, 2012). Cameron’s efforts have shown some success in increasing the number of Conservative women candidates in winnable seats selected in both 2010 and 2015. Still, it can be argued that Cameron has done little more than stop the haemorrhaging of women voters to Labour (Annesley and Gains, 2014). Although the differences between women and men with regard to vote choice have diminished in recent elections, gender remains an important consideration for the electoral fortunes of the Conservative Party because men and women typically hold slightly different policy positions on important issues such as spending cuts and the need for increased taxation, and because men are more likely than women to defect to parties such as UKIP or the SNP (Campbell, 2012). The geography of the Conservative electorate Partisan support has long been influenced by geography. Which party wins a ­constituency – indeed, which parties even compete – depends in part on where it is. For the Conservative Party, two major developments have affected the geography of its support in the post-war period. The first of these developments has been the increasing importance of a north–south divide in British electoral politics. Put bluntly, this divide was between the relatively prosperous south of England, especially the area around Greater London, and areas in the north of England and in Scotland that were not prospering economically. The north–south divide became especially apparent after the Conservative election win in 1979 with Margaret Thatcher as party leader and her subsequent election victories in 1983 and 1987 (Johnston, Pattie and Allsopp, 1988), although there is evidence indicating that the basis of the north–south division had been in place since the election of 1955 (Curtice and Steed, 1982). The consequences of this division were that electoral support for the Conservative Party had shifted from a party that competed throughout Britain in the 1950s to a party whose support was increasingly concentrated in the south of England. A second, and related, development in the electoral geography of the Con­ servative Party has been an increasing divide between urban areas and suburban or rural areas. While the Conservative Party has historically been the strongest party in rural parts of the country, in the post-war period Conservatives have had an increasingly difficult time competing in heavily urban areas, especially in major cities outside London such as Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield. Of

96

David Cameron and Conservative renewal

course, to a certain extent the divisions between north and south and urban and rural reflected differences in the composition of social classes – with urban areas often being predominantly working class and suburban areas dominantly middle class. Still, there is good evidence to suggest that these regional differences in support for the Conservative Party reflected not only social class but also differences in attitudes on a range of issues, the differing impact of economic policies and long-standing cultural differences (Fieldhouse, 1995; Fisher, 2000; Johnston and Pattie, 2006). These large-scale changes in the nature of British electoral politics have opened the door to other changes in electoral politics. One notable development has been the increased importance of nationalist parties such as the Plaid Cymru in Wales and the SNP in Scotland. While smaller parties have difficulty competing with larger parties in a plurality electoral system, parties with a geographically concentrated appeal are often able to win seats because their supporters are concentrated in a few constituencies. The importance of this phenomenon was starkly illustrated in the 2015 election when the SNP, in the wake of its defeat in the Scottish referendum in 2014, won 50% of the popular vote in Scotland and all but three of the Scottish seats in the Westminster Parliament. Because its support was spatially concentrated, the SNP won 56 of 59 Scottish constituencies even though it got only 4.7% of the popular vote in the UK. In comparison, UKIP got nearly 13% of the national vote but won only one seat in 2015 because its support was spread across numerous constituencies. The strength of nationalist parties and new parties such as UKIP also increase the potential for tactical decisions by political parties (for example, by not competing in a constituency where the party may come in third and shifting resources to more competitive areas) and by voters (for example, selecting a second-choice candidate because a person’s preferred party has no chance of winning in a particular constituency). Thus, changes in the geography of electoral support in Britain may well serve to complicate rather than simplify electoral outcomes. To the extent that the modernisation initiative sought to present Conservatives as the national party (at least in mainland Britain excluding Northern Ireland), that goal has not been achieved. The Conservatives still confront challenges in strengthening their appeal in the north of England as well as overcoming their near exclusion from Scotland. Cohorts, ageing, and the Conservatives Older voters, particularly the oldest age cohort, matter a good deal to the Conservative Party’s electoral prospects. The impact of older voters has only grown in importance for Conservative electoral prospects in contrast to both Labour and the Liberal Democrats, which are less dependent on older voters. The Conservatives do, however, share with UKIP the same appeal to older voters (Ford and Goodwin, 2014a). A number of factors magnify the importance of older voters in Britain and in other countries. A primary factor is the significance of differential turnout between

The Conservative Party and a changing electorate97 90

80

72

70

78

55–64

65 and older

64

60 50

77

54 43

40 30 20 10 0

18–24

25–34

35–44

45–54

Figure 4.2  Voting turnout by age, 2015 Source: Created by the authors using data from Ipsos MORI, 2015.

generations of voters. As Figure 4.2 illustrates, British citizens in the youngest age cohort are the least likely to vote and the oldest age cohort has the highest turnout. Based on opinion-poll data from the 2015 election, 78% of people in the 65 and older age group said they were voting while 43% in the 18 to 24 year old group said they were voting. This pattern of electoral participation is long established. In general elections since 1970, the youngest age cohort has been consistently 20% below the national turnout average in general elections. Young British voters have turnout rates in national elections that are as much as 18% lower than the average turnout reported in other European Member States (European Commission, 2013: 13). The low turnout of younger voters contributes to the contrast between older and younger British voters. According to data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, Britain has the distinction of having the greatest gap in turnout between the youngest and oldest age groups at nearly 40%. Another factor contributing to the importance of older voters is their increase in numbers and as a percentage of the population. People in the United Kingdom are living longer than they did in the past. Older people are also an increasingly larger share of the British population. Indeed, the oldest age cohort, people over the age of 65, has never in the past been as large a share of the British population as it is today (Cracknell, 2010). Moreover, it appears to be the case that these Britons over the age of 65 are better off than similar older Britons were in the past. In many cases older people have more in the way of resources than do many Britons found in the youngest age cohorts. This is particularly apparent if one takes into account access to, and

David Cameron and Conservative renewal

98

use of, health care and other social programmes that if not directed to older Britons are, nonetheless, disproportionately used by them. Older Britons are more likely to own their residences and other property. Of course, there is a good deal of variation in economic well-being within every age cohort and it is important to observe that there are older people with very limited resources as well (Bytheway, 2011). One of the more striking patterns in electoral support in the past 15 years or so is the growing importance of age as a factor in electoral voter choice (Benyon, 2010). Davidson notes that ‘most seats in the House of Commons will soon elect MPs based on turnout where grey voters – those aged 55 and over – are the majority’ (2012: 83). Older voters are important for all parties but they have a greater presence among the Conservative electorate than among the voters of the Labour Party or the Liberal Democratic Party. Figure 4.3 shows a comparison of intended vote choice for the Conservatives or Labour by age. Support for Labour is highest among the youngest voters and lowest among the oldest voters. Conversely, intent to vote for the Conservatives increases with age, from 27% among the 18- to 24-year-old group to 47% in the 65-and-over group. The prominence of older voters in the Conservative Party and the need to appeal to younger voters have been key factors in Cameron’s commitment to stake out 50

47

45

43

40 36 35 30

35

35

33

37

36 33

31

27

25

23

20 15 10 5 0

18-24

25-34

35-44 Conservave

45-54

55-64

Labour

Figure 4.3  Intended voting by age, 2015 Source: Created by the authors using data from Ipsos MORI, 2015.

65 and older

The Conservative Party and a changing electorate99 positions on issues that appear relevant to younger voters. Yet this aspect of the Conservative modernisation project has not met with unqualified success. This question may be phrased in terms of why Conservatives have been successful in recent elections in attracting older votes, or perhaps more pertinently for the Cameron modernisation objective, why has the Party been so lacklustre in attracting and holding younger voters? It has not always been the case that Conservatives have been so closely associated with older voters. In the last 15 years or so the confluence of two effects, ­generational and ageing respectively, has proved critical in making the Conservatives the party with a large older-age voting bloc (Tilley and Evans, 2014). Voters who began voting during a period of Conservative dominance were more likely to support the Party over the course of their lives than voters who came of age in a period when the Party was not dominant. In the present era it appears that no single party dominates the political scene. Today the major parties appear to be closer together on a number of issues then they were during the Thatcher era. Voters today may find it easier to switch parties without fear that of making a major ideological shift and instead focus on performance in government as the criterion for electoral choice (Clarke et al., 2009). Perhaps an important consequence of centrist party politics is the longer-term implication for younger-age cohorts in their voting commitments. If the parties are not clearly distinguishable from one another, the result could be a decline in the identification of period effects for younger voters. In addition to generational effects, Tilley and Evans (2014) stress the importance of the ageing effect in electoral choice. They see a shifting of partisan attachment over the course of a lifetime – that is, a steady flow of older people moving to the Conservative Party. The Conservative Party’s appeal apparently grows with age. It is surely welcome knowledge for Conservative leaders to know that in the longer run the Party gains a steady stream of new voters. What may be less welcome is whether the steady intake of older Conservative voters and activists creates a welcoming climate for the recruitment of younger voters. In the present period, a generation who came of age in the era of Thatcher is now among the older voters. These voters today are now firmly in their fifties and sixties and a number of them remain committed to the Conservative Party or at least their recollection of the Conservative Party during the Thatcher era. Many of them will be politically active for some decades to come. These older Conservatives, who recall the Thatcher period positively, are likely to have had their expectations for politics today shaped by that era. It may be that for these older Conservative identifiers, the Conservative Party is recalled as a risk-acceptant party which is willing to stick with policies even if they prove unpopular. Such voters may in the future judge Cameron’s inclusive centrism as disappointing since it contrasts sharply with ideological edge the Party developed during the Thatcher years. It should be noted that there is some controversy about the relative importance of generational and ageing effects. Wagner, Konzelmann and Rattinger (2012)

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conducted a cohort analysis using German data and found that ageing had no significant effect upon voter choice. In contrast, Schatz (2002) used data from several eastern European nations and finds that cohort and ageing effects were interactive. Dramatic period events affect different ages differently, which created lingering cohort effects. Cohort effects are, essentially, lingering long-term age effects in response to pivotal events. The consequences of ageing and cohort effect over time indeed may affect intergenerational turnout rates and vote choice. There are countries where younger people vote in similar proportions to older people. But in Britain it is apparent that the sharp contrast between younger and older voters exercising the suffrage and the importance of older voters for the Conservative Party has given older Conservative voters a strong voice in shaping the direction of the Conservative Party. Conclusion If the Cameron-led modernisation programme’s electoral goal was to broaden the Party’s appeal, to reach out to ethnic minority voters, younger voters, women and voters throughout the United Kingdom then the record of accomplishment is modest. If, on the other hand, the modernisation project is understood as restoring the Party’s reputation as the party of managerial competence then it may have  worked. The Conservatives argued in 2010 and in 2015 that through fiscal prudence they could return the economy to economic growth. The 2015 campaign from the Conservative perspective was best fought on the question of the Party’s performance in power, specifically management of the economy. A twofold argument advanced by the Cameron leadership from the start of the campaign was that the United Kingdom was better off economically than it was when the Conservatives formed the Coalition government with the Liberal Democrats. The Conservatives stressed that a return to a Labour government would threaten the Conservative achievement of an improved economy. The question of which party could better manage the economy was framed as a choice between the Conservatives or Labour. The other parties offered little by way of alternative economic direction. In the run-up to the 2015 election, however, it was unclear whether the Conservatives could successfully claim credit for improvements in the economy or whether the relationship between perception of economic performance and vote choice had changed in a fundamental way (Borges et al., 2013; Whiteley et al., 2015). Yet, in the end, both the Conservatives and Labour modestly improved their share of the vote in 2015. But what mattered was the distribution of seats. The 2015 election is likely to be noted for the interactive impact of the five political parties on voters: the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats, UKIP and the SNP. The role of the smaller parties was more critical to the outcome than in 2010, notably in Scotland and in England. The impressive success of the SNP nearly eliminated Labour and the Liberal Democrats from a Scottish presence at Westminster.

The Conservative Party and a changing electorate101 The near collapse of the Liberal Democrats in England gave many more seats to the Conservatives than to Labour. UKIP have constrained the electoral appeal of both the Conservatives and of Labour. But a review of the seats won and lost by the political parties competing in the election indicates that regional patterns of electoral choice mattered a great deal. In England, both the Conservatives and Labour increased their respective shares of the vote and seats in the House of Commons (see Table 4.1). In Scotland, Labour suffered a massive loss of 40 seats and the SNP emerged as a presence at Westminster with 56 seats. In retrospect Cameron’s decision to form the Coalition government with the Liberal Democrats turned out to have been politically astute. The Coalition was not always well regarded by many Conservative MPs and activists who saw it as lacking a clear direction for the realisation of a Conservative agenda (Bale and Webb, 2014). But apparently among the electorate this frustration with the Coalition was focused on the junior partner, the Liberal Democrats, and not the senior partner, the Conservatives. Indeed, the Liberal Democrats found themselves in the unenviable position of having responsibility without power. Thus the first significant opportunity for the Liberal Democrats to exercise power, albeit shared power, led to electoral collapse with the loss of 27 seats to the Conservatives and 12 to Labour. The Liberal Democrats also lost ten seats to the SNP, leaving the Liberal Democrats with only eight seats in at Westminster. The Conservatives won eight seats from Labour but Labour picked up ten seats from the Conservatives. Overall the Conservatives benefitted from Labour’s collapse in Scotland and the Liberal Democrats’ implosion in England. It is an era of centrist politics at least for the major political parties. These parties have, at least until the election Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in 2015, largely agreed on the main contours of the British economy and what should be the main themes of political discourse. In era of consensus politics among the established parties, discontented voters have as we have seen opted for minor parties as a way of expressing dissatisfaction. In the past, voters dismayed with a Labour or Conservative government could vote for the loyal opposition, or vote Liberal Democratic or not vote. The politics of disenchantment today is expressed in the willingness to consider a shift to minor parties and such voting has had an impact on electoral outcomes. The Scottish Nationalists have changed constitutional politics in the United Kingdom. The presence of UKIP and its achievement of gaining the third largest share of the vote in 2015 challenge both Conservatives and Labour by UKIP’s success in introducing and sustaining attention to the question of European Union membership, immigration and transnational European migration. UKIP’s rise demonstrates the vulnerability of the established parties and voter discontent (Ford and Goodwin, 2014a). In time, the Greens may carve out their own niche in drawing attention to what they consider to be underserved issues. It may be that in the coming years the perceived distance between the

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­ on­servatives and Labour will widen, emphasising the choice between the two C large parties, thereby reducing the electoral appeal of the smaller parties. If the Corbyn leadership succeeds in moving Labour to the left, patterns in party choice may shift both in Scotland and in England, although it is not clear that the shift would be in the same direction in the two nations. If Conservative modernisation aimed to restore the Party to power by adjusting to a varied and changing electoral landscape, then from 2005 to 2015 modernisation under Cameron was able to make useful adjustments. His modernisation approach from an electoral perspective has been a programme of pragmatic inclusiveness, an invitation to draw a greater range of Britons into a Conservative-managed neoliberal state while remaining attentive to issues such as European Union membership and immigration that threatened to take supporters away from the Party. In a multiparty era characterised by weakened party attachment and issue fragmentation, this approach to modernisation may have proved productive. References Alford, R. (1963) Party and Society, Chicago: Rand McNally. Annesley, C. and Gains, F. (2014) ‘Can Cameron Capture Women’s Votes? The Gendered Impediments to a Conservative Majority in 2015’, Parliamentary Affairs 67: 767–82. Bale, T. and Webb, P. (2014) ‘Not as bad as we feared or even worse than we imagined? Assessing and Explaining Conservative Party Members’ Views on the Coalition’, Political Studies, early publication online, DOI: 10.1111/1467-9248.12164. BBC (2015) Election 2015 results, www.bbc.com/news/ election/2015/results. Benyon, J. (2010) ‘The Longevity Revolution’, Political Insight, 15 March, DOI: 10.111/j. 2041-9066.2010.00010.x. Borges, W. et al. (2013) ‘The Emerging Political Economy of Austerity in Britain’, Electoral Studies 32: 396–403. Butler, D. and Stokes, D. (1974) Political Change in Britain, 2nd ed., New York: St Martin’s Press. Bytheway, B. (2011) Unmasking Age: The Significance of Age for Social Research, Bristol, UK: Policy Press. Campbell, A. et al. (1960) The American Voter, New York: John Wiley. Campbell, R. (2012) ‘What Do We Really Know about Women Voters? Gender, Elections and Public Opinion’, Political Studies 83: 703–10. Childs, S. and Webb, P. (2011) Sex, Gender and the Conservative Party, London: Routledge. Clarke, H.D. et al. (2009) Performance Politics and the British Voter, New York: Cambridge University Press. Cracknell, R. (2010) The Ageing Population: The UK’s Ageing Population Has Considerable Consequence for Public Services, London: House of Commons Library Research. Crewe, I., Fox, A. and Day, N. (1995) The British Electorate 1963–1992: A Compendium of Data from the British Election Studies, New York: Cambridge University Press. Crewe, I. and Thomson, K. (1999) ‘Party Loyalties: Dealignment or Realignment?’ in Evans, G. and Norris, P. (eds), Critical Elections, London: Sage, 64–86. Curtice, J. and Steed, M. (1982) ‘Electoral Choice and the Production of Governments:

The Conservative Party and a changing electorate103 The Changing Operation of the Electoral System in the UK since 1955’, British Journal of Political Science 12: 249–98. Davidson, S. (2012) Going Grey: The Mediation of Politics in an Ageing Society, Farnham: Ashgate. Denver, D. and Garnett, M. (2014) British General Elections since 1964, New York: Oxford University Press. European Commission (2013) European Youth: Participation in Democratic Life. Flash Eurobarometer Report 375, May, http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/flash_ arch_390_375_en.htm#375. Fieldhouse, E. (1995) ‘Thatcherism and the Changing Geography of Political Attitudes, 1964–1987’, Political Geography 14: 3–30. Fisher, S. D. (2000) ‘Class Contextual Effect on the Conservative Vote in 1983’, British Journal of Political Science 30: 347–62. Ford, R. and Goodwin, M. (2014a) Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain, New York: Routledge. Ford, R. and Goodwin, M. (2014b) ‘Understanding UKIP: Identity, Social Change and the Left Behind’, Political Quarterly 85: 277–84. Franklin, M. (1985) The Decline of Class Voting in Britain, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Heath, A. et al. (1991) Understanding Political Change, Oxford: Pergamon Press. Heath, A. et al. (2013) The Political Integration of Ethnic Minorities in Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heath, A., Jowell, R. and Curtice, J. (1985) How Britain Votes, Oxford: Pergamon Press. House of Commons (2015) General election online, seats changing hands, http://geo. digiminster.com/election/2015-05-07/Statistics/SeatsChangingHands. Inglehart, R. and Norris, P. (2000) ‘The Developmental Theory of the Gender Gap: Women’s and Men’s Voting Behavior in Global Perspective’, International Political Science Review 21: 441–63. Ipsos MORI (2015) How Britain Voted in 2015, 22 May, http://ipsos-mori.com. Johnston, R.J. and Pattie, C.J. (2006) Putting Voters in Their Place, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnston, R.J., Pattie, C.J. and Allsopp, J.G. (1988) A Nation Dividing? London: Longman. Kavanagh, D. (1995) Election Campaigning, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Lynch, P. and Garnett, M. (2003) ‘Conclusion: The Conservatives in Crisis’, in Garnett, M. and Lynch, P. (eds), The Conservatives in Crisis, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 248–67. Norris, P. (1999) ‘Gender: A Gender-Generation Gap?’ in Evans, G. and Norris, P. (eds), Critical Elections, London: Sage, 148–63. Norris, P. et al. (1999) On Message: Communicating the Campaign, London: Sage. Office of National Statistics (2012) Ethnicity and national identity in England and Wales 2011, 11 December, www.ons.gov.uk. Robertson, D. (1984) Class and the British Electorate. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Saggar, S. (2000) Race and Representation, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Saggar, S. and Heath, A. (1999) ‘Race: Towards a Multicultural Electorate?’ in Evans, G. and. Norris, P. (eds), Critical Elections, London: Sage, 102–23.

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Sanders, D. et al. (2014) ‘The Calculus of Ethnic Minority Voting in Britain’, Political Studies 62: 230–51. Sarlvik, B. and Crewe, I. (1983) Decade of Dealignment, New York: Cambridge University Press. Schatz, S. (2002) ‘Age Cohort Effects in the Breakdown of Single-Party Rule’, Journal of Ageing Studies 16: 199–219. Tilley, J. and Evans, G. (2014) ‘Ageing and Generational Effects on Vote Choice: Combining Cross-Sectional and Panel Data to Estimate APC Effects’, Electoral Studies 33: 19–27. Wagner, C., Konzelmann, L. and Rattinger, H. (2012) ‘Is Germany Going Bananas? Life Cycle and Cohort Effects on Party Performance in Germany from 1953 to 2049’, German Politics 21: 274–95. Webb, P. and Childs, S. (2012) ‘Gender Politics and Conservatism: The View from the British Conservative Party Grassroots’, Government and Opposition 47: 21–48. Whiteley, P. et al. (2015) ‘The Economic and Electoral Consequences of Austerity Politics in Britain’, Parliamentary Affairs 68: 4–24.

5

The parliamentary party Philip Cowley, Mark Stuart and Tiffany Trenner-Lyle

Introduction A political party’s parliamentarians are one of the leadership’s key resources and constraints. They are the face of the party and the focus of attention for the national media. The costs of a divided parliamentary party were made painfully clear the last time the Conservatives had been in power during John Major’s premiership when the Conservative Party, once commonly portrayed as united instead became widely seen as deeply divided (Cowley, 1999). In legislative terms, the parliamentary party is, or should be, the bulk vote that will deliver the government’s programme. If it splits, then promised (or hoped for) legislation may not be delivered. Loose cannons, therefore, are dangerous, whether they are in the House of Commons lobbies or the Millbank Television Centre, broadcasting their opinions to the nation. And third, parliamentarians form the talent pool from which members of any incoming government must be recruited. Ministers come from, and remain in, Parliament. Those handful of exceptions – such as peerages being created for the purpose of bringing individuals into government – merely go to prove the centrality of the institution in the formation of governments at Westminster. For much of the 2010 parliament, the PCP was more constraint than resource. Key to the parliamentary arithmetic throughout the parliament was the fact that even if every backbench Liberal Democrat MP rebelled on an issue, there were not enough of them to defeat the government; but there were enough backbench Conservative MPs to do so. This meant that Coalition measures could be blocked if enough Conservative backbenchers were willing to join forces with Labour, but they could not be blocked if Lib Dem backbenchers were similarly annoyed. This chapter discusses the composition of the parliamentary party, along with its behaviour in the divisions lobbies. We discuss whipped votes, where the Party’s MPs rebelled in record-breaking numbers and prevented key parts of the government’s Coalition Agreement making it onto the statute book. We then discuss the key divisions within the Party on free votes. The chapter ends with a discussion of the ideological factions within the parliamentary party. David Cameron may have been a moderniser, as were some of his MPs – but he, and they, were very much in a minority.

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The most striking thing about the PCP that gathered after the 2010 election was how different it was. The combination of a large number of retirements in advance of the election, driven in large part by the expenses scandal, and the Conservatives’ successes at the polls, meant that almost half (48%, some 148 MPs) of the parliamentary party were newly elected (Criddle, 2010: 306–7). All occasions when a party enters government from opposition see a large number of new MPs elected; but the Conservatives in 2010 were doing so from a lower base than any other party entering government since 1945. In terms of experience of government, they were not quite as inexperienced as had been the mass of Labour MPs elected in 1997 (when just 10% had experience of a Labour government), but it was not far off; just over a quarter of Conservative MPs had experience of sitting on the Treasury benches. In David Cameron’s first speech as party leader in 2005 he had pledged to change the Party: ‘We will change the way we look. Nine out of 10 Conservative MPs, like me, are white men. We need to change the scandalous under representation of women in the Conservative party and we’ll do that.’ Some of the new MPs were indeed visibly different from their predecessors. As a result of the changes to the Conservatives’ selection procedures used between 2005 and 2010 (Childs and Webb, 2011), there were more Conservative women MPs (49, up from 17 in 2005) as well as more from ethnic minorities (11, up from just two). Both were historic high figures for the Party. The majority of the parliamentary party, though, remained white and male, something which was especially true at the higher levels of the government. Ironically, despite repeated claims of social exclusiveness that would dog the Party throughout the parliament, the number of privately educated Conservative MPs after 2010 hit an all-time low – with the new intake splitting roughly evenly between those educated at state and private schools – but the privately educated were still heavily over-represented (and, again, especially on the frontbench). The near total absence of working-class MPs on the Conservative side of the House continued. The rare exceptions – such as Cameron’s first Chief Whip, Patrick McLoughlin, a former miner – merely proved the broader point. In 2010, the Conservatives gained over 30% of the C2 and DE vote (Kavanagh and Cowley, 2010: 341). Almost no efforts had been made to ensure that this segment of the population – and of the Conservatives’ own supporters – received representation on the Conservative benches. At each of the last three elections there have been claims about how the new intake of Conservative MPs would be more socially liberal, and help to shift the balance of power in the Party. The reality has always been more mixed, as it was to prove in 2010. This large intake of new MPs should, however, have been good news for the party whips, as new MPs are traditionally less difficult to manage, at least initially. Again, the reality proved more mixed.

The parliamentary party107 Managing the backbenches The Coalition Agreement specified that the Conservative Chief Whip would serve as the government’s Chief Whip; the government’s Deputy Chief Whip would be the Liberal Democrat Chief Whip. Although the two parties would consult, they were responsible for the internal organisation and discipline of their own MPs. Throughout the Parliament there were criticisms made of the whips – especially the Conservative whips and/or the Number 10 machine – for mishandling relations with backbenchers. They were accused of being heavy-handed or aloof, of not listening or of only promoting MPs who had been to school with the prime minister or were allies of the Chancellor.1 Some of these criticisms were valid, but they often failed to appreciate the broader structural difficulties that the party managers were working under. The Conservatives got through four Chief Whips during the Parliament; each time a new Chief Whip took office there was discussion of how he (it was always a he) would shake up the Whips’ Office and solve the party management problems the Party was facing; each time, it made little difference. In part, the difficulties the Party faced were merely the latest manifestation of a long-term development seen over the last 40 or so years: the rising independence of MPs, a trend first identified in the 1970s and which has been increasing, in fits and starts, since then (Cowley, 2005). But in addition, there were multiple factors which made things worse for the Conservatives after 2010. First, that the Party was in government in Coalition with the Lib Dems was a crucial aspect of party management during this period. The government’s MPs occupied a broader ideological range than any other government in the post-war era (even the broad churches that are British political parties are not quite as broad as the range between the left of the Liberal Democrats and the right of the Conservatives). Whatever it did, therefore, it was bound to alienate one wing or the other. Indeed, one of the other paradoxes of the 2010 Coalition was that members of the public did not tend to think the Lib Dems achieved very much as a result of being in government, whereas many Conservative MPs frequently blamed them for preventing the government being more right wing. Both cannot be true. Second, many of the rhetorical weapons that would normally be deployed by the party whips (especially during the early stages of a parliament) were absent as a result of Coalition. It was, for example, no use the party managers telling would-be rebels that they needed to support legislation because it was in the Party’s manifesto – a traditional whipping tactic – because in many cases the Coalition were doing things that were not in a party’s manifesto, and sometimes indeed things that were the opposite of manifesto pledges. In some cases it was the would-be rebels who were able to claim the legitimacy of the manifesto. Nor was it any good, for example, telling Conservative MPs that they needed to support the prime minister who won them the election – given that he had not. Indeed, some Conservative MPs blamed

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the prime minister for not winning the election, and did not see that they owed him much loyalty as a result. Then, third, there were the problems of managing such a large number of new MPs. It is hard enough for prime ministers to fill all the positions in government under normal circumstances. Doing so with such an unbalanced parliamentary party, and trying to reconcile the demands of the newly elected for advancement with fair treatment for the longer-serving, especially those who have worked hard for the party in opposition, was near to impossible. One senior figure in the Parliamentary Labour Party, when discussing the problem of dealing with a large intake of new MPs in 1997, simply shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘What the fuck do you do?’ Conservative whips after 2010 found themselves thinking similar thoughts. Things were made even worse by the involvement of the Lib Dems: it is not difficult to imagine the disgruntlement felt by Conservative MPs who served their party loyally during opposition and had expected a position in government, only then to discover that not only were they not going to get any such post, but they were going to lose out to a Lib Dem instead. And fourth, whereas Lib Dem MPs had been part of a process to ratify the Coalition – thereby binding them to it, even when they disagreed with individual policies – Conservative MPs had been largely passive observers to the drawing up of the agreement, which was then presented to them as a fait accompli; they therefore felt more willing to ignore it when it suited them. Fifth, matters were made worse by a pledge Cameron had given in 2009 that by the end of his first term a third of his ministers would be female. When he made it, people pointed out how difficult this would be to achieve, given the usual lag between initial election as an MP and ministerial office (Cowley, 2009), and so it proved. Throughout the 2010 Parliament Cameron was routinely criticised by (some) male MPs for over-promoting women MPs and routinely criticised by (some) commentators for not having enough women on his frontbench and in Cabinet. He received little thanks or praise for his efforts to deal with the latter, whilst the former perception just stored up more resentment on the backbenches. Combined, the result was a record high level of dissent. There were some 1,239 divisions (votes) in the House of Commons from 2010 to 2015. Of these, there were rebellions by Coalition MPs in 438, covering a wide range of issues and bills. The first rebellion, which came within a month of Parliament meeting, was on the government’s control of time in the Commons; the last was on the draft Infrastructure Planning (Radioactive Waste Geological Disposal Facilities) Order. En route, the whips faced rebellions on everything from the Academies Bill to the Postal Services Bill, from welfare reform to localism, from HS2 to Syria, from voting systems to the Finance Bill, as well as student finance and Europe (the last occurring repeatedly). As a percentage of divisions, these 438 rebellions constitute a rebellion by Coalition MPs in 35% of divisions, a figure without precedent in the post-war era.

The parliamentary party109 In the first four parliaments after the end of the Second World War, the rate of rebellion by government MPs never rose above one backbench revolt every ten divisions (indeed, the majority of sessions between 1945 and 1959 saw a rate of below one in twenty). That remained largely true in the next three parliaments, although there were five sessions in which the percentage of divisions to see government MPs defy the whip rose marginally above 10%. Backbench rebellion then increased noticeably during the premiership of Edward Heath, with a government rebellion in almost one in five of the divisions between 1970 and 1974, and increased yet further during the Labour governments of 1974 to 1979 (to 21% overall, but reaching 30% and 36% in the final two sessions of the parliament). Backbench dissent fell back somewhat during the Thatcher and Major years – although never to pre-1970 levels – and then slowly began to pick up again during the post-1997 Labour governments, rising from a rebellion in 8% of divisions (1997–2001) to 21% (2001–05) to a postwar peak of 28% (2005–10). A rate of 35% was therefore extremely atypical. These data are for the Coalition as a whole, including the Liberal Democrats.2 But even the data for Conservative MPs alone demonstrate the scale of the problems that David Cameron and his party whips faced with their MPs: Conservative MPs broke ranks in 25% of votes. Even this separate figure is higher than the rate of rebellion by government MPs in all but one post-war parliament. This high level of dissent ran for the entire parliament. Contrary to usual practice, there was almost no honeymoon for the new prime minister. First sessions, especially first sessions after changes in government, usually see relatively little dissent. It is in the first session that the government’s authority is usually greatest. The discipline of the election campaign is still strong; and the fact that the government is implementing its manifesto is usually enough to prevent many MPs, even those who may disagree with the policies, from dissenting. There are also usually many new MPs, normally much less willing to defy the whips. The first session, then, is usually the calm before the storm. This was absolutely not true of 2010. The rate of rebellion in the first session (44%) was higher than in the second (27%), third (31%) or fourth (27%) session; indeed between September 2010 and February 2011, the rate of dissent consistently exceeded 50%, with rebellion becoming the norm, cohesion the exception. The previous record for a first session was 28%, for Labour MPs in the 2005–06 session, as the party entered its third, and most troublesome, parliament under Tony Blair. Prior to 2005, the most rebellious first session was that of 1992–93 (in which Conservative MPs rebelled in some 23% of divisions). The figure for Conservative MPs alone during the 2010–12 session was 28%. In other words, even when measured separately Conservative MPs rebelled more often than did John Major’s backbenchers as he struggled to pass the Maastricht bill. The contrast becomes even clearer when you compare the behaviour in the first session of the 2010 parliament to the first sessions of parliaments following a change in government. Between 1945 and 1997, the six sessions immediately after a change in

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g­ overnment saw rates of rebellion between zero (1964) and 6% (1979). The total rate of rebellion in the first session at 44% was therefore more than seven times what had been the post-war peak for a first session after a change of government; and even the figure for the Conservatives alone (28%) was more than four times the post-war peak. One of the few bits of good news for the whips was that things could have been even worse. The two wings of the Coalition rarely coalesced in opposition to the government. The bulk of Conservative rebellions came from the right. The bulk of Lib Dem rebellions came from the left. And the two wobbly wings of the Coalition mostly did not rebel at the same time. Around half of rebellions saw Conservative MPs rebel alone; around a third saw Lib Dem MPs rebel alone, and around one in five saw a rebellion by both Lib Dem and Conservative MPs. This was because the two groups generally rebelled on very different issues. Lib Dem rebellions tended to be on social policy (broadly defined), whereas Conservative rebellions were much more likely to be constitutional policy (broadly defined), such as the bills relating to the introduction of AV and fixed-term parliaments. Of this last category, a big chunk (around one in five of all Conservative rebellions) were on Europe, an issue the leadership had explicitly been keen to avoid in opposition (in his first conference speech as leader Cameron had said that the Party should avoid ‘banging on about Europe’), but which were more than double the average size of all Conservative rebellions. The key rebellions In common with other parliaments of recent years, most of the backbench rebellions that occurred were small and of little or no policy significance. Many comprised lone backbenchers, rebelling on causes that mattered to them, but which were not of a scale to concern the party whips. But periodically they were large (several were of record size), on major policy matters, and had serious consequences. Moreover, the combined policy impact of the rebellions was probably greater than in any parliament in the post-war era. This section identifies the five most significant Conservative rebellions of the period. The largest rebellion of the first session came in October 2011, when the government comfortably saw off a backbench business motion calling for a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, winning by 483 to 111.3 A total of 81 Conservative MPs defied a three-line whip to vote for the motion, with another 14–19 abstaining.4 This was a larger rebellion than almost all of the Conservative rebellions in government from 1945 until early 1997, topped only by a handful of revolts over gun control during the Major years. It also constituted the largest rebellion on the issue of Europe of the post-war era, an issue which had caused problems for many previous prime ministers. Although the government won – Labour voting with the government – it was a sign of troubles to come; many of the subsequent larger rebellions were also to involve Europe.

The parliamentary party111 For all the rebellions in the first session of the Parliament, they generated no defeats.5 The Parliament’s early rebellions might, conceivably, have been dismissed therefore as mostly sound and fury. The rebellions in the later sessions, however, were to prove more consequential, generating both outright defeats along with retreats more substantial than those in the preceding session. The largest rebellion of the Parliament came in July 2012 over the Second Reading of the House of Lords Reform Bill. Some 91 Conservative MPs voted against the Bill’s Second Reading. This was the largest rebellion on the issue of Lords reform in the post-war era, almost double the 47 Labour MPs who voted against Richard Crossman’s white paper on the subject in 1968. It was also the largest rebellion by government MPs on the Second Reading of any Bill in the post-war period, easily outstripping the 72 Conservative MPs who voted against the Shops Bill in 1986 or the 72 Labour MPs who voted against the Higher Education Bill in 2004.6 With the support of the Labour frontbench, the Bill’s Second Reading was secured relatively easily, by 462 votes to 124, a majority of 388. But Labour’s support did not extend to the bill’s programme motion, where the whips faced a similarsized rebellion; knowing that they would go down to defeat, the government pulled the programme motion rather than see it voted down. Trying to legislate on Lords reform without control of the timetable would have been next-to-impossible – as Harold Wilson had discovered in the 1960s – and so shortly afterwards the Bill was abandoned. The government’s retreat on the programme motion means that this was, technically, not a government defeat, but no one was in any doubt what would have happened had the vote gone ahead, and the effect was the same: the government withdrew their Bill in the face of backbench opposition. The medium-term consequences of that vote, however, were just as significant. Together with the announcement that the bill would be withdrawn came the announcement that the Liberal Democrats were, as a consequence, withdrawing support for the government’s proposed constituency boundary changes. As a result, in January 2013, a vote to overturn a Lords amendment to the Electoral Registration and Administration Bill failed by 334 to 292. Four Conservative MPs voted against their party line, but the reason the vote failed was because the Liberal Democrats were whipped to vote against.7 The first government defeat as a result of backbench dissent occurred in October 2012, when 53 Conservative MPs voted against their whip on an amendment moved by Mark Reckless calling for a reduction in the EU budget. Although smaller than the first session rebellion identified above, this was still a larger revolt than any Conservative rebellion over Europe before 2010, including any of the Maastricht rebellions; and, whereas the European referendum rebellion in 2011 had seen Labour join forces with the government to defeat the rebels, on this occasion Labour opposed the government, and the combination of official and backbench opposition was sufficient to defeat the government (by 307 votes to 294). It meant that David Cameron joined the list of prime ministers defeated in the House of

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Commons as a result of their own MPs rebelling, a line which dates back unbroken to Edward Heath. The third session began with yet another rebellion over a referendum on EU membership – this time on an amendment to the motion on the Queen’s Speech. Faced with the possibility of a very large rebellion, the Conservatives promised support for a private members’ bill on the subject (although, as a result of Lib Dem opposition, such support did not extend to any government time). Despite this, the rebels pushed ahead with their amendment, and faced with what would have been an enormous rebellion, the Conservatives allowed a partial free vote on the issue: ministers would abstain, backbenchers could do what they liked. More than 110 Conservative MPs went on to vote for an amendment ‘regretting’ the absence of a referendum bill from the Queen’s Speech. The amendment was defeated, as a result of Labour and Lib Dem votes, by 130 to 277 (it was another vote – like that over boundary changes – where the Coalition parties ended up in different lobbies). Technically, this was not a ‘rebellion’, because it was a (partial) free vote. But it had been made a free vote because the government knew they faced an enormous rebellion. The size of the vote was another reminder of the scale of Conservative divisions over Europe, but the most striking feature was that this was on the Queen’s Speech. Rebellions on motions on the Queen’s Speech are extremely rare. Even more rare – we cannot find a precedent – are occasions where  the government (or at least the largest party of the government) abstain over the Queen’s Speech. The prime minister declared himself ‘relaxed’ about the outcome, which is a curious position for a prime minister to take over a vote on the government’s legislative programme, if an accurate acceptance of the political realities he faced. The largest Coalition rebellion of the 2013–14 session occurred in August 2013 over possible military action in Syria. Having recalled Parliament to debate the situation in Syria, the government whips discovered such unhappiness amongst a large number of its MPs over the possibility of military action that the government was forced to retreat, promising that no action would take place without a further vote – which left it in the curious position of having recalled Parliament to have a vote that would not achieve anything even had it been passed. But despite this retreat, 39 Coalition MPs – 30 Conservatives, nine Liberal Democrats – voted against a government motion condemning the use of chemical weapons in Syria and planning for a further vote on the use of military force in the country. Others abstained. The government was defeated by 283 to 270, a majority against the government of 13. The government then abandoned all plans to intervene militarily in Syria. As the prime minister put it, immediately after the vote, ‘I strongly believe in the need for a tough response to the use of chemical weapons, but I also believe in respecting the will of this House of Commons. It is very clear tonight that, while the House has not passed a motion, the British Parliament, reflecting the views of the British people, does not want to see British military action. I get that, and the Government will act

The parliamentary party113 accordingly’ (HC Debs, 29 August 2013, cc. 1555–6). The crucial factor distinguishing this vote from previous votes on military engagement – such as Iraq – was the behaviour of the Official Opposition, who opposed the government on such votes for the first time since Suez. But Labour opposition was a necessary but not sufficient condition for defeat; defeat also required the rebellion by a sufficient number of government MPs. No British government has lost a comparable vote over matters of defence or military involvement since at least the mid-nineteenth century. The fact that the only comparable votes involved Lord Palmerston, Lord Aberdeen and even Lord North is a sign of just how significant the vote was, an indicator of the Commons’ developing independence. Taken together, these were not minor or insignificant matters. During the parliament, opposition from Conservative MPs derailed one part of the Coalition Agreement (consequently derailing another part), blocked the UK taking military action and significantly steered government policy on the EU in a more Eurosceptic direction. Free votes As noted above, the government repeatedly allowed MPs free votes on topics which would not normally be considered suitable for free votes. It also did so on several more conventional matters. Indeed, the very last vote of the Parliament – on a motion that the re-election of the Speaker at the beginning of a Parliament should be conducted by secret ballot – was a free vote, and one which caused much embarrassment to the government.8 By far the most tricky issue was the passage of the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Bill – the Bill to introduce civil marriage for same-sex couples. Whilst the Conservative Party’s relationship with the issue of gay rights is more complicated than it first seems (McManus, 2011), the stance of the majority of Conservative MPs in recent decades has been predominantly hostile towards moves to liberalise the law. That remained true between 2010 and 2015. The key votes on the Bill were free votes for all the three main parties (albeit after some argument in the case of Labour and the Liberal Democrats), but they only produced significant divisions on the Conservative side. The Bill’s second reading, for example, saw the Party split down the middle (127 Conservative MPs voting for, 137 voting against), with the prime minister siding with a minority of his party. With large majorities of Labour and Lib Dem MPs supporting gay marriage, the vote on the principle of the bill was passed by 400 to 175. Deep splits on free votes are not that unusual – indeed, one of the reasons some issues are made free votes in the first place is that they have historically divided the parties – and it was not unique to find party leaders voting with a minority of their MPs. As prime minister, Tony Blair had found himself in a similar situation (indeed, numerically even worse) over fox hunting.9

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The Conservative MPs who voted for same-sex marriage were disproportionately female, younger and from the new 2010 intake. Of those to vote at Second Reading, Conservative women split in percentage terms 61:39 in favour of same-sex marriage; men were split 46:54 against. Those Conservative MPs born before 1970 split 45:55 against, but those born in 1970 or after split 58:42 in favour. And those from the new 2010 intake split exactly 50:50, whereas those from earlier intakes were 46:54 against. To that extent, therefore, the new parliamentary party was a more socially liberal one than before. The problem for David Cameron was that two of these groups of disproportionate support are relatively small whilst amongst the numerically large 2010 intake, support was stronger than amongst the old lags but it was still only evenly split. It was more socially liberal perhaps, but not very socially liberal. What made the passage of the bill more unusual was the venom that accompanied these splits among Conservative MPs, given that the issue was being decided by a free vote and no one was being whipped to take up a position they opposed. Free votes normally take the poison out of arguments like this; in this case they did not. Partly this sprang from a feeling amongst some Conservative MPs that the issue was, as one senior member of the 1922 Committee put it, being done ‘to generate division, and to demonise bits of the party. It was to denigrate the dinosaurs who took a different view.’ In addition, many Conservative MPs reported receiving considerable pressure from their activists over the issue, and some reported being leant on to support the prime minister’s position (not all free votes are all entirely free, and this one was no different). The prime minister was later variously quoted as saying that had he known the difficulties the issue would cause, he would not have taken it on, a claim he disputes – although he does accept that he underestimated the extent of unhappiness the issue would cause amongst his party.10 The issue of gay marriage therefore showed the clear limitations on any future Conservative prime minister in embarking on any further socially liberal reforms. It was achieved, but only at considerable cost. People That most MPs who defied the Coalition on whipped votes in the 2010–15 parliament were Conservatives should not be a surprise, given that there were (roughly) six times more Conservative than Lib Dem MPs. But Conservative MPs also rebelled more often than Lib Dems, and most of the more rebellious MPs were Conservatives. Some 163 Conservative MPs voted against the whip at some point. Most of the more rebellious MPs could indeed have been predicted before the 2010 election; most had ‘form’ and were well known in the Whips’ Office even before the Conservatives entered government. What was more striking, from the position of the government whips, was the behaviour of their newer MPs. Of the 163 Conservative rebels, 94 (or almost six in ten) came from the new intake.

The parliamentary party115 Of the new intake, some 64% rebelled at least once, and of those who had been on the backbenches throughout the parliament, the figure rises to over 90%. Based on a combination of division lists, including the free votes discussed above, and others, along with analysis of debates, and examination of the known membership of parliamentary groups, we constructed a typology of the Conservative parliamentary party during the 2010 parliament. We identify eight groupings, described briefly below. Modernisers (14%). These MPs were fully signed up to the Cameron programme for government and supported the Coalition in most of its actions. They were socially liberal and believed in free markets. Although Eurosceptic, theirs was a soft Euroscepticism, and they remained mostly loyal to the party whip on votes on Europe. If they were in party groupings they were in groups such as Bright Blue, or 301 or 2020. Traditional right (12%). The opposite of the modernisers. These were hard Eurosceptics, who favoured exit from the EU. They rebelled repeatedly on Europe and supported a referendum as soon as possible. They were the most socially conservative group of Conservative MPs, opposed both to same-sex marriage and to a raft of other social measures. Some favoured the restoration of the death penalty. Many will have been in Cornerstone, whose motto was ‘Flag, Faith, Family’. Some saw their role as defenders of the constitution. Few voted for David Cameron as leader, almost none prospered under his leadership. They saw modernisation as unnecessary and were many of Cameron’s most strident critics. Thatcherites (22%). The largest single grouping, these MPs were economically liberal, prioritising Thatcherite economic principles, in groups such as No Turning Back or Conservative Way Forward. Many could also be found in the Free Enterprise Group. They were socially conservative but less stridently so than members of the traditional right, and Eurosceptic, but of a softer variety than the traditional right. They were more likely to be concerned with reforming Britain’s membership of the EU than withdrawal. Many will have been supportive of Cameron’s leadership initially, but more questioning of it as the parliament progressed, and were less hostile to the process of modernisation. Radicals (19%). The radicals were as concerned with economic policy as the Thatcherites – and formed the core of the Free Enterprise Group – but coupled this with more socially liberal views. They were a bridge between the Thatcherites and the modernisers, although they expressed more concern over Europe than the modernisers, as shown by their membership of the Fresh Start Group or occasional rebellions over Europe. Libertarians (5%). A small group: social liberals, but who coupled that with diehard economic liberalism and hard Euroscepticism. Not all will have supported same-sex marriage, but their opposition was on the basis of perceived threats to religious freedom rather than opposition to the measure itself. It was from this group that the two defectors to UKIP, Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless, originated.11

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Populists (3%). The smallest category of all: socially conservative, but more statist or interventionist than most other Conservative MPs. Often in trade unions and quite vocal, they were not especially hostile to the Cameron project per se, but tended to pursue their own issues and causes. They had a habit of going over the heads of, and occasionally against, the party machine, but usually on their own, somewhat idiosyncratic, causes. Pro-Europeans (11%). Europhilia was practically non-existent with the parliamentary party, but this group were at least broadly happy with Britain’s current relationship with the EU. They were members of groups such as European Mainstream and did not participate in the multitude of rebellions on Europe. They also tended to hold reformist beliefs towards the electoral system and/or the House of Lords. They often intersected with the One Nation grouping, such as the Tory Reform Group. Most were socially liberal, although around a third of this group were more socially conservative. This group used to be the core of the Wets (and what Philip Norton in 1990 called the Damps), although most have dried out somewhat over the years. They comprised the oldest and longest-serving MPs of any group; they were – literally – dying out. The remainder, some 13%, we class as Party faithful, a term used by Norton (1990). This group encompassed those who have shown insufficiently consistent views to achieve membership of any of the above groups. As with Norton’s grouping, this does not mean that these MPs lacked views on individual issues – sometimes views they held firmly – but they did not hold them in conjunction with views on other issues. Moreover, they chose not to align themselves openly with any of the Party’s groupings; if they had a loyalty it was to the Party, and not to the leader. It is often difficult to compare typologies across time, as the method of calculation is rarely the same, but we suspect that this exercise indicates that the Party does appear to have become more factional in recent years.12 When Norton constructed his typology in 1990, some 58% of the Party were classified as party faithful. We now class just 13% in that way. In itself, this helps explain some of the difficulties the party leadership faced during this period. But perhaps the most important finding is that David Cameron’s own grouping, the modernisers, made up just 14% of the parliamentary party. This is a small band with which to try to change the attitudes of the Party. Even when combined with the radicals, many of whom were not hostile to the Cameron project initially, the total still only reaches a third of the parliamentary party. On core economic matters, there was relatively little dispute anymore, but on both Europe and social liberalism, the divisions ran deep. Conclusion ‘Prediction is very difficult’, said Niels Bohr, ‘especially if it’s about the future’ – but much of what happened to the Conservative parliamentary party after 2010 was predictable (Cowley, 2009). It was pretty clear before the 2010 election that the

The parliamentary party117 Party would look different afterwards; it was clear that there were a significant number of recidivist rebels who would be unlikely to change their habits; and it was clear that certain issues – Europe, Lords reform, abortion, gay rights – had the potential to cause division and would need handling carefully. What was less predictable was the scale of the divisions that being in government and Coalition would unleash, and the extent to which the parliamentary party would be able to operate as a break on the Party’s leadership. Nor, perhaps, was its effect. By 2011, a YouGov poll found that 64% saw the Conservatives as divided; by 2013, that figure had risen to over 70%. And in October 2014, a ComRes poll for ITV News found that the one phrase most associated with the Conservatives – out of a list of eight – was divided. The public had noticed. The election of 2015 resulted in a Conservative majority government, but with a nominal majority of just 12, the smallest majority of any government since October 1974.13 There were a total of 110 occasions during 2010–15 when seven or more Conservative MPs voted against the party line, enough in theory to defeat the new government. Of the top 30 Conservative backbench rebels during the Coalition, all but three – all of whom retired – were re-elected. They are unlikely to become supine just because the government has a small majority. Indeed, as the example of John Major from the mid-1990s shows, a small majority can lend huge power to some otherwise insignificant backbenchers. Just as the likes of Tony Marlow and Sir Teddy Taylor held considerable sway in Commons votes under Major, so Philip Hollobone and David Nuttall are likely to exercise a disproportionate influence while the government has such a small majority. And yet the good news for the government whips is that in practice the new government will have a larger majority than 12. Add in the fact that Sinn Fein do not take their seats, and the nominal majority rises to 16. But more important, in terms of day-to-day business, is that the opposition parties will not coalesce against them on every vote. The (massive) new SNP bloc and the (reduced) Labour Party will not always vote together; and the attendance of Northern Irish MPs is always low (and those who do vote may well vote with the Conservatives as much as with Labour). Moreover, for backbench rebellions to threaten the government they have to be on issues where the rebels are willing to vote with the opposition. By definition, that is not true of most rebellions by MPs on the right of the Conservative Party (or, similarly, when in government, for MPs on the left of the Labour Party). All of this gives the whips slightly more wriggle room than the government’s ­nominal majority indicates. The EU referendum was enough to prevent Cameron’s critics from doing anything too destabilising in the first year of the Parliament. It was however that referendum which led to his downfall. Whatever short term honeymoon Theresa May might enjoy with her backbenchers, once that fades she will face the same structural constraints that caused such problems for Cameron. The new prime minister stated that ‘Brexit means Brexit’. But Brexit means different things to different people and

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her more Eurosceptic Brexit MPs will be alert to any signs that May’s version of Brexit is different from theirs. Notes  1 Particularly crass was an early attempt to change the voting rights of backbenchers on the 1922 Committee; the prime minister was forced to retreat (Norton, 2013: 39–40).  2 It might be objected that comparing the data for one party in government (1945–2010) with two parties (after 2010) is not a like-for-like comparison. Nor, though, is comparing data for just a part of the government (for example, the Conservatives after 2010) with all of the government (between 1945 and 2010). Either way, the comparison is not like-for-like. Thankfully, in this case it does not matter very much. However you slice the data, the conclusion is much the same.  3 A particular problem for the party whips was the establishment of the Backbench Business Committee after 2010. The whips began the Parliament approaching backbench business as if it was ‘normal’ business: as resolutions in the House of Commons they should not endorse something contrary to the position of the government. But the nature of the issues the committee showed itself willing to discuss soon put this to the test. In February 2011, facing almost certain defeat over a Backbench Business Committee motion on voting for prisoners, the government decided to absent itself from the vote, ministers abstaining en masse, and allowing a free vote for backbenchers and PPSs. Some 165 Conservative MPs voted for the motion, which was passed 234 to  22. This is a tactic governments have used in the past, if only rarely, but as the Parliament went on, it became one increasingly employed with backbench business. Having initially treated votes on backbench business as if they had to win, the government soon resorted to shrugging their shoulders, and admitting defeat.  4 We discuss this rebellion in more detail in Cowley and Stuart (2012).  5 The only Commons defeat in the first session came in December 2011 on the motion that the House had considered the economy – as a result of an old-fashioned Labour ambush, with Labour MPs hiding until enough Conservative MPs had gone home. Defeats caused by such tactical manoeuvres are embarrassing for any government (and especially the whips) but they do not represent a systematic problem with their party.  6 Still just shy in absolute terms of the largest Conservative rebellion in government on any subject in the post-war era (John Major suffered larger rebellions over gun control, one of which saw 95 Conservative MPs voting against their whip), measured as a proportion of the parliamentary party the 91 Lords rebels represented a larger proportion of Cameron’s parliamentary party than did the 95 gun control rebels of Major’s, and so it was also the largest Conservative rebellion in government of the post-war era on any subject measured in relative terms.  7 The vote on boundary changes was interesting as an example of how Coalition has changed some of our assumptions about what is, or is not, allowed when it comes to voting in the Commons: it saw government MPs whipped, in different directions, and with the Lib Dems voting in direct contravention of the Coalition Agreement. It was not the first time the two Coalition parties had had different whipping arrangements

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 8

 9

10

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on measures in the Commons – the Coalition Agreement specifically allowed for the Liberal Democrats to abstain on specific issues – but this was the first time they were whipped in opposite directions, and (moreover) in contravention of the Coalition Agreement. The vote, on 26 March 2015, was dropped into the agenda at very short notice by the outgoing Leader of the House, William Hague, in an attempt to ambush both the Speaker and opposition MPs. The hope was that insufficient Labour MPs – who were more supportive of the Speaker – would be around to block the measure. In the event, Labour whips managed to recall sufficient of their MPs to defeat the motion, helped by a significant number of Conservatives MPs who, on a free vote, decided either to vote against the Leader of the House’s motion or abstain. It was widely felt not to have been William Hague’s finest hour. Nor was it the first time David Cameron had found himself in a minority of his parliamentary party over gay rights. In March 2007, for example, Conservative MPs divided in percentage terms 25:75 against the draft Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations. David Cameron was one of just 29 Conservative MPs to back the measure. See for example the Andrew Pierce article in the Daily Mail (‘I never expected gay marriage to cause such an uproar, admits Cameron in private meeting at party conference’, 8 October 2013), but also its later correction (see ‘Daily Mail apologises for wrongly stating that David Cameron “regretted” equal marriage’, Pink News, 8 October 2013). But also see the claim in D’Ancona: ‘If I’d known what it was going to be like, I wouldn’t have done it’ (2013: 350). Whilst other MPs were approached by, and considered joining UKIP, these two were the only ones who defected – and the only two where the Conservative Whips Office estimated their chances of defection at 50% or more. For a similar attempt at a typology of the parliamentary party, see Heppell, 2013. Our figures and his are not massively dissimilar, but we differ both on some individuals and the size of some groupings. The failure of the government to enact the proposed boundary changes (as discussed above) was frequently cited as one of the things said to be preventing the Conservatives from winning a majority in 2015; in retrospect, it is clear that its impact was rather to prevent the Conservatives from winning a more comfortable majority.

References Childs, S. and Webb P. (2011) Sex, Gender and the Conservative Party. From Iron Lady to Kitten Heels, London: Palgrave. Cowley, P. (1999) ‘The Parliamentary Party’, in Dorey, P. (ed.), The Major Premiership, London: Macmillan, 1–25. Cowley, P. (2005) The Rebels: How Blair Mislaid His Majority, London: Politicos. Cowley, P. (2009) ‘The Parliamentary Party’, Political Quarterly 80(2): 214–21. Cowley, P. and Stuart, M. (2010) ‘Where Has All the Trouble Gone? British Intra-Party Parliamentary Divisions during the Lisbon Ratification’, British Politics 5(2): 133–48. Cowley, P. and Stuart, M. (2012) ‘The Cambusters: The Conservative European Referendum Rebellion of October 2011’, Political Quarterly 83(2): 402–6.

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Criddle, B. (2010) ‘More Diverse, Yet More Uniform: MPs and Candidates’, in Cowley, P. and Kavanagh, D. (eds), The British General Election of 2010, London: Palgrave. D’Ancona, M. (2013) In It Together: The Inside Story of the Coalition Government, London: Viking. Heppell, T. (2013) ‘Cameron and Liberal Conservatism: Attitudes within the Parliamentary Conservative Party and Conservative Ministers’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 15(3): 340–61. Kavanagh, D. and Cowley, P. (2010) The British General Election of 2010, London: Palgrave. McManus, M. (2011) Tory Pride and Prejudice: The Conservative Party and Homosexual Law Reform, London: Biteback. Norton, P. (1990) ‘“The Lady’s Not for Turning but What about the Rest?” Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party, 1979–1989’, Parliamentary Affairs 43(1): 41–58. Norton, P. (2013) The Voice of the Backbenches, London: Conservative History Group.

6

Continuing fault lines and new threats: European integration and the rise of UKIP Philip Lynch and Richard Whitaker In his first Conservative Party annual conference speech as leader, David Cameron argued that instead of ‘talking about the things that most people cared about, we talked about what we cared about most … banging on about Europe’ (Cameron, 2006). Conservative modernisers recognised that European integration was not an issue of great concern to voters and that the perception that the Conservatives were both obsessed by and divided on the issue had damaged the Party. In Opposition, Cameron lowered the salience of the issue and policy towards the EU did not undergo the significant rethinking seen in other areas. However, European integration then became one of the most important and difficult issues for Cameron in office after the 2010 general election. The Eurozone sovereign debt crisis prompted other Member States to pursue further integration, which the UK neither participated in nor blocked, hastening the development of differentiated integration. Eurosceptics favouring fundamental renegotiation or withdrawal from the EU were emboldened. Record numbers of Conservative MPs rebelled on EU issues while UKIP saw a surge in support and helped shape the agenda by linking together the issues of European integration and immigration. Cameron responded by pledging to seek a ‘new settlement’ with the EU and then hold an in–out referendum by 2017 should the Conservatives win the 2015 general election. Following the Conservatives’ election victory, the EU issue is now likely to dominate the early years of Cameron’s second term as prime minister and define his legacy. This chapter examines the difficulties that European integration has posed for the Conservatives under Cameron. It explores how two familiar problems, albeit in a new form, reappeared and posed problems for Cameron’s modernisation project. In the EU, the desire of other Member States to pursue further integration limited UK influence, while domestically Conservative divisions returned with a vengeance, this time between soft Eurosceptics supporting membership of a reformed EU and hard Eurosceptics seeking fundamental renegotiation or withdrawal (Szczerbiak and Taggart, 2008). Attention then turns to an important new dimension to Conservative difficulties on the EU issue, namely the rise of UKIP, as we assess the challenge it poses and the Conservative response. We conclude by considering how the EU issue might play out after the 2015 general election.

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Cameron’s modernisation sought to reposition the Conservatives in the centre ground of British politics and rebrand the Party so that it appeared more in tune with modern society (Bale, 2010). Early in his leadership, Cameron shifted his party’s focus away from its traditional issues (e.g. taxation, the EU and immigration) towards those that it had either neglected (e.g. the environment) or which were ‘owned’ by Labour (e.g. health). He also reconfigured Conservative ideology, promoting compassionate conservatism and social liberalism while rejecting Thatcherite individualism and New Labour’s micro-management (McAnulla, 2010). Although these changes in personnel, organisation and policy marked the most significant change in Conservative politics since their 1997 election defeat, Cameron’s modernisation was neither especially radical nor effective (Kerr and Hayton, 2015). It failed to deliver a parliamentary majority at the 2010 election as support did not increase sufficiently among target voters and, although modernisation had helped shed some negative perceptions, the Conservatives were still not regarded particularly positively. Two broader trends limited the effectiveness of modernisation. The first was growing anti-party sentiment, fuelled by the 2009 MPs’ expenses scandal, which made it more difficult to re-establish trust. The second was the fragmentation of the party system which created centrifugal pressures, albeit not as powerful as those pulling the Conservatives closer to the political centre, as UKIP gained support on the right and exploited dissatisfaction with mainstream parties. The most effective modernisation projects of recent times – those of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair – went further than short-term reactions to the ebb and flow of party competition. Instead, they responded to the identity crises that bedevilled their parties by undertaking a fundamental reappraisal of party tradition, ideology, policy and strategy in response to changes to the state, economy, society and in the European and international arenas (Kenny and Smith, 1997). Cameron aped Blair’s rebranding and triangulation, but the Conservatives did not put in the hard yards that the Blairities had when rethinking Labour’s rationale in a new era shaped by the erosion of the Westminster Model, the shift from government to governance, Thatcherism, the shrinking of the working class, European integration and globalisation. Although Cameron’s modernisation recognised that British society and politics had changed, his focus was primarily on what Andrew Gamble (1994) calls the ‘politics of support’ (i.e. winning elections and ensuring party unity) rather than the ‘politics of power’ (i.e. developing a governing project that can cope with domestic and international constraints). However, the issue of European integration illustrates the limitations of Cameron’s modernisation. Cameron approached the EU issue primarily in terms of party competition and party management, lowering its salience in order to change

European integration and the rise of UKIP123 public perceptions of the Conservatives and to minimise intra-party divisions. Euro­ scepticism was a crucial part of the Conservative Party’s DNA by the time Cameron became leader, and the arch modernisers were themselves Eurosceptic. A modernisation project that sought to purge Euroscepticism would have been unpalatable, even for a party as skilled historically at pragmatic adaptation. Cameron’s 2005 leadership election pledge to remove Conservative MEPs from the European People’s Party-European Democrats group in the European Parliament helped keep onside Eurosceptic MPs who were otherwise suspicious of modernisation. In comparison to other policy areas, Cameron made few substantive changes to Conservative EU policy while in Opposition. Demands for the repatriation of fisheries and international aid were dropped, and Cameron sought to tie his position on European integration to wider themes in his modernisation project by arguing that the EU should focus on tackling global warming and global poverty (Cameron, 2007). But Cameron maintained Michael Howard’s pledge of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, and the decision to abandon this once the treaty had been ratified by all Member States frustrated harder Eurosceptics who would instead press for a referendum on EU membership itself. The core policy themes developed under William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Howard – opposition to further integration, a limited repatriation of EU policy, referendums on future treaties and the completion of the single market – remained largely intact. By sidelining rather than deepening party thinking on the EU issue, Cameron provided the space for harder Eurosceptics to gain ground and set the agenda – and he would later play catch-up (Lynch, 2015). Having largely ignored the EU and immigration issues in Opposition, Cameron was forced to return to them in government as external developments, firstly the sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone and later the rise in migration from other Member States, plus the re-emergence of Conservative dissent in Parliament and the rise of UKIP in the domestic arena, forced them to the fore. European integration – problems old and new The problems that European integration posed for Cameron in government were perhaps more challenging than those faced by Margaret Thatcher and John Major. Not only did Cameron have to deal with intra-party divisions, as Thatcher and Major had done, but he also had to manage relations with the Liberal Democrats in Coalition and deal with the surge in support for UKIP. Tensions over EU issues were inevitable in a Coalition between the soft Euro­ sceptic Conservatives and pro-European Liberal Democrats. At the 2010 general election, the Conservatives promised to introduce a ‘referendum lock’ requiring transfers of competences to the EU to be put to a referendum, a Sovereignty Bill reaffirming parliamentary sovereignty, and seek safeguards or policy repatriation on the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, criminal justice and social and employment

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legislation (Conservative Party, 2010: 113–14). The manifesto pledges on repatriating powers were dropped in Coalition negotiations, but the Coalition Agreement specified that there should be no further transfers of competences to the EU (HM Government, 2010: 19). Thereafter the Liberal Democrats sought to prevent Cameron from straying beyond the Coalition Agreement but had limited influence (Goes, 2014). Cameron’s fiscal compact veto and his renegotiation-referendum plans for a post-2015 Conservative government strained relations between the Coalition partners, with Nick Clegg accusing the prime minister of damaging UK influence. The Liberal Democrats would not allow a government bill on an in–out referendum and helped ensure that Private Member’s Bills on this introduced by Conservative MPs were unsuccessful. Eurozone crisis Cameron hoped to adopt a pragmatic approach within the EU, seeking reform without provoking conflict in Brussels or in his own party. It helped that, for the first time in 30 years, EU treaty change was not on the horizon, but the Conservatives would have to work within the Lisbon Treaty framework which they had opposed. However, hopes of a low-key period in UK–EU relations were dashed as soon as Cameron entered office by the escalation of the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis. The UK government accepted that Eurozone states should pursue further economic integration in order to rescue the euro, but it would not participate in these measures and sought safeguards for the UK (e.g. on financial services) and on the single market. Such safeguards were not always forthcoming, notably at the December 2011 European Council where Cameron vetoed an EU fiscal compact treaty – although he soon accepted that 25 Member States would sign the intergovernmental Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance which permitted European Court of Justice (ECJ) involvement in non-compliance decisions. The government also feared that changes to qualified majority voting would see Eurozone states caucus on single-market measures. It did, however, secure a new system of doublemajority voting in the European Banking Authority, which requires support from a majority of both Eurozone and non-Eurozone states. The government enjoyed some success in promoting and defending UK interests. Alliance-building with Germany helped bring about the first real-term cut in the EU budget, the Common Fisheries Policy was reformed, the European Commission launched new initiatives on competitiveness and deregulation, and negotiations on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership got underway. However, the UK was less influential in the EU at the end of the Coalition’s term in office than it had been at the outset. This was apparent not only in the UK’s minority position on the fiscal compact treaty, but also in Cameron’s failed campaign to block the nomination of Jean Claude Juncker as President of the European Commission, when only Hungary joined the UK in voting against his appointment.

European integration and the rise of UKIP125 Conservative divisions The Conservatives have experienced internal divisions on the issue of European integration for over half a century (Crowson, 2009). Parliamentary votes on joining the European Economic Community (EEC) and ratifying the Maastricht Treaty saw substantial rebellions. Dissent dissipated in Opposition after the 1997 general election as soft Euroscepticism became the predominant position in the Party. But divisions reappeared in government in the 2010–15 Parliament as 103 Conservative MPs rebelled on EU issues and 49 votes on EU issues saw a rebellion. Critics of Cameron’s modernisation were prominent rebels, but dissent was not confined to the ‘usual suspects’ as 60 MPs from the 2010 intake rebelled on EU issues. October 2011 saw the largest ever Conservative rebellion on European integration when 81 Conservative MPs defied a three-line whip to support a backbench motion on an EU referendum (Cowley and Stuart, 2012). A year later, the government was defeated on a motion on the EU budget when 53 Conservatives voted with Labour to support a real-terms cut. Cameron’s January 2013 pledge to hold an in–out referendum by 2017 satisfied most but did not extinguish dissent. Within months, he granted Conservative backbenchers a free vote on an amendment to the Queen’s Speech, regretting the absence of a referendum bill. One hundred and sixteen Conservative MPs supported it. The fault line in the Conservative Party is no longer between Europhiles and Eurosceptics, but between Eurosceptics who favour membership of a reformed EU and those who support withdrawal or fundamental renegotiation of UK membership. Eurosceptics disagree over the extent of renegotiation (Lynch and Whitaker, 2013a). Maximal revisionists demand a fundamental renegotiation of the UK’s relationship with the EU, whereas minimal revisionists support a limited repatriation of EU competences and an end to any UK commitment to ‘ever closer union’. Renegotiation is insufficient for outright rejectionists who want withdrawal at the earliest opportunity. In Coalition, Cameron pursued a minimalist Eurosceptic position that looks to exploit existing opportunities to resist further integration (e.g. the national veto, opt-outs and challenges in the ECJ). His Bloomberg speech setting out the aim of a renegotiation of aspects of UK membership and an in–out referendum promised a shift to the minimal revisionist position. However, the centre of gravity in the Conservative Party has already moved towards the maximal revisionist position. The Fresh Start Project, supported by some 100 MPs, proposes major changes which go beyond Cameron’s position (Fresh Start Project, 2013). In addition, 95 Conservative MPs urged Cameron to accept the European Scrutiny Committee’s proposals for a parliamentary veto over current and future EU law (Daily Telegraph, 2014). The Conservatives for Britain group, formed after the 2015 general election, brought together Conservative MPs who would campaign to leave the EU unless renegotiation delivered fundamental changes.

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Why did dissent return with a vengeance? First, Conservative dissent on European integration has been more pronounced in government than in Opposition. Individual governments cannot control the EU agenda, have to take decisions on divisive issues and often make compromises in EU negotiations. The challenges are more pronounced for soft Eurosceptic governments which find it difficult to construct alliances and can expect key moments in the EU calendar (e.g. budget negotiations and the choice of Commission President) to provoke domestic difficulties. Second, Coalition tested party cohesion still further: party policy was diluted and fewer ministerial posts were available to Conservative MPs. Third, changes in parliament have given backbenchers greater opportunity to challenge the government. The new Backbench Business Committee put forward the 2011 EU referendum motion, while the European Scrutiny Committee adopted a more proactive approach under its Eurosceptic chairman Bill Cash. Finally, Cameron’s ineffective party management failed to quell dissent. In Opposition, he had promised a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty but changed position once the treaty had been ratified by all Member States. Having whetted the Conservative appetite for a referendum on the EU, the appetites of Eurosceptic MPs would not be sated easily and they now doubted Cameron’s willingness to deliver on his promises. The motivations of Conservative MPs are also significant. The emergence of UKIP as a threat to their incumbency and the prevalence of Eurosceptic views in constituency associations provided incentives for Conservative MPs to flaunt their Eurosceptic credentials. Eurosceptic MPs also noted how rebellion helped bring about policy change: dissent on an EU referendum and on the EU budget made it more difficult for Cameron to accept the fiscal compact and increased EU spending. Fifteen months after opposing a backbench motion on an EU referendum, Cameron proposed an in–out referendum under the next Conservative government. Eurosceptics then sought further concessions, pressurising Cameron to support ­legislation enabling an EU referendum to be held after 2015. The rise of UKIP UKIP is the most significant challenger to the established parties for a generation. For much of the time since its formation in 1993, UKIP was a minor irritant rather than major threat to the mainstream parties. It performed well in European elections (polling 16.5% of the vote in 2009), where it benefitted from proportional representation and the focus on its core issue, but much less well in domestic elections (polling 3.1% in the 2010 general election). However, UKIP enjoyed a significant upsurge in support from mid-2012. It consistently scored over 10% in opinion polls and gained over 100 council seats in each of the 2013, 2014 and 2015 local elections, taking control of its first council (Thanet) in 2015. UKIP topped the poll (with 26.6% of the vote) at the 2014 European elections. It also achieved a series of strong results in Westminster by-elections, culminating in the 2014 victories for

European integration and the rise of UKIP127 Douglas Carswell in Clacton and Mark Reckless in Rochester and Strood following their defections from the Conservatives. But, as we will examine later, although UKIP came third in terms of share of the vote at the 2015 general election, only Carswell was elected. The rise of UKIP was, in part, the result of favourable external factors. The Conservatives’ move to the centre and entry into Coalition with the Liberal Democrats alienated some of its socially conservative voters. Policy problems in government – including the 2012 budget ‘omnishambles’ and failure to hit the target of reducing immigration below 100,000 – may also have pushed former Conservative voters towards UKIP. Furthermore, UKIP benefitted from the unpopularity of Labour and Ed Miliband, the transformation of the Liberal Democrats from party of protest to party of government, and the collapse of the British National Party. Voter dissatisfaction with the major parties and the Westminster system also provided fertile ground for UKIP’s anti-establishment message. Developments within UKIP ensured that it was better placed to benefit from this more favourable environment. Farage’s return to the leadership in late 2010 after Lord Pearson’s hapless spell gave UKIP an effective communicator of its message. With the salience of the EU issue relatively low, the Party expanded its narrative. Higher than anticipated migration from Eastern Europe since the 2004 enlargement of the EU provided an opportunity for UKIP to link opposition to EU membership with an immigration issue that was becoming more salient and was particularly important to UKIP voters. Whereas Pearson had focused on Islamic extremism, Farage concentrated on EU migration at a time when the entry restrictions on citizens of Romania and Bulgaria were due to be lifted in 2014. UKIP also saw an increase in members, to over 40,000 in early 2015, and donations, with the party receiving almost £1.7 million during the 2015 election campaign (Electoral Commission, 2015), which was more than it received during the whole of 2010. Policymaking and candidate selection procedures were professionalised. The 2015 general election manifesto was more coherent than its 2010 effort, and was accompanied by an independent audit of its spending commitments. Some candidates strayed off-message, but the likes of Paul Nuttall, Suzanne Evans, Patrick O’Flynn and Tim Aker gave the party a stronger leadership team. Recognition of the importance of building grass-roots support and campaigning on local issues helped deliver local election success. The UKIP threat to the Conservatives The rise of UKIP not only appeared to threaten the Conservatives’ prospects of winning the 2015 general election, but exposed and added to the longer-term challenges facing the party. For much of the twentieth century, the Conservatives were a national, patriotic party with a cross-class appeal who pursued effective statecraft in office and did not face major challengers on the right. These foundations of

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Conservative dominance were already crumbling but UKIP’s emergence hastened the process. The Conservatives had previously benefitted from party fragmentation to their left while remaining largely unchallenged from the non-extremist right. When new right-of-centre parties did emerge as direct challengers – e.g. Rothermere’s Anti-Waste League or Beaverbrook’s Empire Free Trade Crusade in the interwar years – they were either vanquished or absorbed before they inflicted lasting damage. But the rise of UKIP has opened up a significant schism on the right. Key debates on the right have previously taken place within the Conservative Party, with the most successful challenge from the right to the political orthodoxy coming from Thatcherites. Now, the right is fragmented with UKIP leading a popular insurgency and attracting one of the Conservative right’s radical voices, Douglas Carswell, into its ranks. UKIP positioned itself in the political space vacated by the Conservatives’ move towards the centre ground. It offers traditional conservative positions on immigration, defence and education plus economically liberal policies on taxation. Furthermore, UKIP targeted Conservative vulnerabilities on a range of issues, including gay marriage, grammar schools and HS2, where Cameron’s position jars with those of some Conservative voters. Populist messages also feature prominently in UKIP’s narrative, while the low levels of trust that many UKIP voters have in the major parties makes it difficult for the Conservatives to win them over with policy-based appeals. Issues concerning identity politics (e.g. patriotism, the Union and Empire) were a Conservative strength for much of the twentieth century, but European integration, immigration and England’s place in the post-devolution UK have proved difficult in recent years (Hayton, 2012). UKIP’s focus on identity politics exacerbates these problems. It has framed debates on the EU and immigration, making it more difficult for the Conservatives to lower the salience of these issues or claim policy success. Growing support for UKIP also intensified divisions within the Conservative Party as Eurosceptic MPs pressed the leadership to adopt tougher positions on the EU and immigration. The defections of Carswell and Reckless, and their subsequent by-election victories, signalled that UKIP might provide an alternative home for disillusioned Conservative MPs. Many Conservative Party members were also willing to countenance voting for UKIP (Webb and Bale, 2014). The electoral limitations of Cameron’s modernisation were also exposed by the UKIP surge. The Conservatives lost significantly more of their 2010 general election support to UKIP than either Labour or the Liberal Democrats. The post-election wave of the British Election Study’s (BES) 2014–17 Internet panel (Fieldhouse et al., 2015) showed 12% of 2010 Conservative supporters saying they had voted UKIP in the 2015 election compared with 5% of Labour 2010 voters and 9% of Liberal Democrats. The BES Continuous Monitoring Survey (CMS)

European integration and the rise of UKIP129 for June 2010 to April 2013 showed that 42% of UKIP supporters recalled voting for the Conservatives in 2010. The post-election wave of the 2014–17 BES showed a slightly lower proportion (38%) compared with 14% from 2010 Labour voters and 19% from those supporting the Liberal Democrats at the previous election. This proportion of the UKIP vote coming from previous Conservative supporters is higher than that derived from former Labour voters under Blair or Brown (Ford and Goodwin, 2014: 166). The rise of UKIP further diminishes the Conservatives’ cross-class, national appeal, casting it further adrift of Labour in northern England. UKIP made bigger gains in the period from 2009–13 among pensioners, those with limited education and working-class voters than it did among many other social groups (Ford and Goodwin, 2014: 172). Of those saying they would vote UKIP in the CMS data from 2004–13, 42% were working class, 57% were over 55 years of age and 55% had completed their education at age 16 or younger (Ford and Goodwin, 2014: 153). The economic interests and social characteristics of these working-class UKIP voters may be similar to ‘Old Labour’ voters, but their political attitudes place them on the right. Some are ex-Conservatives, others are the archetypal blue-collar voters that the Conservatives used to attract but who now appear beyond the reach of Cameron’s party. Thatcherism had combined an economic appeal to aspirant working-class votes with patriotic, social conservative values to win over the ‘Tebbit Tories’. UKIP is now attracting significant support from this demographic. Evans and Mellon show that many voters shifting to UKIP are those who would have been among Thatcher’s core supporters in the 1980s, namely large employers and the self-employed (Evans and Mellon, 2016). Dealing with UKIP Mainstream parties tend to adopt one of three broad strategies in response to the emergence of a niche party – that is, a party which has a distinctive focus on a limited set of non-economic issues that lie beyond the traditional class cleavage and are largely ignored by mainstream parties (Meguid, 2005). First, a mainstream party may seek to defuse the issue associated with the niche party and discredit the party. The mainstream party ignores the niche party’s core issue if it finds it difficult or regards it as unimportant, hoping to lower the salience of the issue and reduce support for the niche party. However, this approach affords space for the niche party to set the agenda and is problematic if the niche party’s issue is particularly salient for a section of the mainstream party’s supporters or if a rival mainstream party decides to emphasise the issue. Alternatively, the mainstream party may acknowledge the importance of the niche party’s core issue and adopt much of its position. In this case, the mainstream party tries to seize issue ownership and lower support for its niche rival but in doing so, it risks losing support from centrist voters and losing credibility if its agenda is perceived as being set by a smaller rival.

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Finally, a ­mainstream party may reinforce its own distinctive position on the niche party’s core issue and retaliate by both promoting its own position and highlighting the weaknesses of the niche party’s position. The effectiveness of this strategy may, however, be limited if a significant section of the mainstream party’s support prefers the harder position of the niche party or if the niche party position is closer to public opinion. Political parties in practice trade off elements of each of these strategies. In responding to UKIP, the Conservatives have not adopted its position on withdrawal from the EU but the offer of an in–out referendum may be attractive to UKIP supporters as a route to Brexit. A mainstream party is also likely to switch strategies if its previous approach has not worked and support for the niche party rises. So, the surge in support for UKIP from 2012 forced the Conservatives to rethink their response. It is also important to recognise that UKIP was only one of a number of drivers of Conservative strategy and policy on the EU and immigration: intra-party divisions and inter-party competition with Labour were initially more important in the development of its soft Eurosceptic position and lowering of the salience of the EU issue. We now consider how the Conservatives moved away from their initial ‘defuse and discredit’ strategy to a ‘reinforce and retaliate’ position. Defuse and discredit Although Cameron urged his party to stop ‘banging on about Europe’, it was Duncan Smith who lowered the salience of the EU issue following the failure of Hague’s 2001 ‘save the pound’ campaign to deliver significant electoral reward. The Blair government had also defused the issue by ruling out EMU entry and matching the Conservative commitment to a referendum on the EU Constitutional Treaty (Oppermann, 2008). The EU issue did not feature prominently in either the Conservatives’ 2005 or 2010 election campaigns. Cameron initially maintained his predecessors’ strategy of downplaying the challenge that UKIP posed and seeking to discredit it. His description of UKIP members as ‘fruitcakes, loons and closet racists’ (Carlin, 2006) ultimately proved counterproductive, antagonising those who sympathised with UKIP’s policies and confirming to those disillusioned with Westminster that their concerns were not registering with the mainstream parties. Others offered a more measured critique, with veteran Eurosceptic Bill Cash warning that UKIP made a firmer government position on the EU less likely by splitting the Eurosceptic vote (Cash, 2013). Fearing that UKIP would damage the Conservatives’ electoral prospects, some Conservative MPs began to argue that some form of accommodation with UKIP was required in order to ‘unite the right’. Michael Fabricant proposed an electoral pact (Fabricant, 2012), Jacob Rees-Mogg suggested that UKIP MPs be given ministerial positions in a Conservative government (Rees-Mogg, 2013) and Nadine Dorries claimed that she might stand as a joint Conservative–UKIP candidate

European integration and the rise of UKIP131 (Hardman, 2013). These suggestions were given short shrift by the leadership which recognised that any deal would bolster UKIP’s position and likely cost the Conservatives more support from centrist voters than it would win them from the right. UKIP contested all seats in England in 2015 but, in the end, there was no ­serious talk of national or local deals from either party. Reinforce and retaliate European integration can be both a positional issue and a valence issue in contemporary British politics. Parties might promote it as a positional issue given that only UKIP support withdrawal from the EU and, of the three main parties, only the Conservatives pledged to hold an in–out referendum if they won the 2015 general election. European integration can also be a valence issue because the three main parties all favour membership of the EU and encourage voters to judge their record in office and evaluate who they trust most on the issue. The Conservatives promoted the EU as a positional issue in their 2001 general election ‘save the pound’ campaign. Given the lower salience of the EU issue, intra-party divisions, Conservative voters’ preference for a tougher position than that offered by the Party and the rise of UKIP, the Conservatives have downplayed the EU issue and treated it as a valence issue since 2001. In the 2015 general election seven-way leadership debate, Cameron asked voters to look at his record on the EU – to which Farage replied, ‘We have’. The Conservatives pointed to the reduction in the EU budget, refusal to contribute to Eurozone bailouts, the fiscal compact treaty veto and the exercise of the opt out from some 95 police and criminal justice measures as evidence of their record on standing up for UK interests and resisting further integration (Conservative Party, 2015). They also offered a more positive message on UK influence in the EU, highlighting the exemption of micro-businesses from new regulations and agendasetting on competitiveness, deregulation and completion of the single market. The European Union Act 2011 introduced a ‘referendum lock’ requiring future treaties transferring powers from the UK to the EU to be put to a binding referendum. But it had little impact because none of the changes in the EU since then triggered a referendum. Retrospective evaluations of governing competence on the EU issue are, however, problematic for the Conservatives. In office, the Conservatives were unable or unwilling to deliver policies such as a referendum or policy repatriation, favoured by Eurosceptic voters. The government had also missed its target of reducing net annual migration ‘to the tens of thousands’ because limiting migration from other EU Member States proved very difficult (Partos and Bale, 2015). Furthermore, the Conservatives had also already lost ownership of the issue to UKIP. BES data reveals that at the 2005 general election UKIP overtook the Conservatives as the party viewed best able to handle the issue by those regarding Britain’s relations

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with the EU or the euro as most important (35% favoured UKIP and 30% the Conservatives). Of those identifying Europe or the euro as the most important issue at the 2010 general election, 61% believed UKIP was the party best able to deal with the issue compared to just 14% for the Conservatives (Lynch and Whitaker, 2013b). The Conservatives thus sought to promote prospective evaluations. In his January  2013 ‘Bloomberg speech’, Cameron announced that, should the Con­ servatives win the 2015 general election, he would negotiate ‘a new settlement’ in the EU and then hold an in–out referendum (Cameron, 2013). After the election, he set out four core objectives for the renegotiation (Cameron, 2015). The first, protecting the single market for the UK and other states outside the Eurozone, was one that Cameron had been striving for since entering office. The second, greater competitiveness, was a long-term UK objective and one on which there was support from the Juncker Commission and other Member States. Cameron’s third objective was a combination of demands on national sovereignty and flexibility, including a greater role for national parliaments and exemption for the UK from the goal of ‘ever-closer union’. On the latter, the June 2014 European Council had agreed that ‘the concept of ever closer union allows for different paths of integration for different countries, allowing those that want to deepen integration to move ahead, while respecting the wish of those who do not want to deepen any further’ (European Council, 2014). Cameron’s fourth objective, ‘tackling abuses of the right to free movement’ and restricting the right of migrants from the EU to claim benefits in the UK, would be the most difficult objective to achieve. While some states share UK concerns about EU migrants’ access to welfare benefits, few would countenance undermining the core principle of free movement. Cameron made clear in his speeches at Bloomberg (2013) and Chatham House (2015) that he would campaign for the UK to remain a member of a reformed EU in the in–out referendum. He highlighted the benefits of access to the single market and argued that EU membership gave the UK greater influence in international affairs. Citing the cases of Norway and Switzerland, Cameron also argued that alternatives to EU membership were unattractive as they would require the UK to implement EU directives without having any input in the ­legislative process. The 2015 general election The Conservatives entered the 2015 election campaign hoping to persuade those Eurosceptic voters who had defected to UKIP that a majority Conservative government committed to an in–out referendum provided the most realistic prospect of leaving the EU. Labour had a similar EU reform agenda to the Conservatives but Ed Miliband reiterated that he would not hold an in–out referendum in the next parliament, unless there was major treaty change. Although the EU was cited as the

European integration and the rise of UKIP133 most important issue by more people after the 2015 election than before it (3% in the BES post-election Internet panel wave compared with 1.3% in March 2015), it remained of low salience (Fieldhouse et al., 2015). The renegotiation-referendum pledge may have played a part in this slight increase in salience. Interestingly, in the BES post-election Internet panel wave, among those seeing the EU as the most important issue, a higher proportion of respondents favoured the Conservatives for dealing with this (37%) than did UKIP (28%) compared with the opposite situation in March 2015. This change may simply have been caused by Conservative voters shifting their concerns to the EU in the light of the referendum pledge being a real prospect after the election. If we look only at those people who answered the March 2015 and post-election waves of the survey, only around one fifth of those saying that the EU was the most important issue after the election had also placed it at the top of their list in the March 2015 wave. Hence we lack clear evidence of those favouring UKIP as best at dealing with the EU before the election, shifting their allegiance to the Conservatives. The BES post-election Internet panel wave shows UKIP as the most preferred party to deal with the far more salient issue of immigration, a dramatic change from 2010 when the Conservatives topped the list with UKIP a distant fourth, according to the BES. Nor did UKIP and Conservative voters regard Cameron’s policy as sufficiently Eurosceptic. In the BES post-election Internet panel, UKIP voters, and Conservative voters on average, place themselves in a more Eurosceptic position than they do the Conservatives. On a 0–10 scale where 0 is the most Eurosceptic value, Conservative voters place themselves at 2.3 and their party at 3.7 on average, while UKIP voters position themselves at 1.0 and the Conservatives at 5.0. During the election campaign, the Conservatives made direct and indirect appeals to those former supporters who intended to vote UKIP. Cameron stated that he understood ‘loud and clear’ the frustrations of those Conservative voters who had defected to UKIP, but urged them to ‘come home’ (Dominiczak, 2015). Attacks on Labour’s record on immigration and warnings that a vote for UKIP could let in a minority Labour government propped up by the Scottish National Party (SNP) were also intended to resonate with UKIP voters. Persuading UKIP supporters to vote Conservative was not straightforward: many did not trust Cameron, wanted tougher positions on immigration and the EU, and were less likely than other voters to feel that their personal economic situation was improving (Ford and Goodwin, 2014). As the election neared, the Conservatives were winning back significantly more voters from UKIP than they were losing to them. In the year between the European elections and the general election, UKIP lost almost half of its support – and half of these defectors went to the Conservatives (Goodwin and Milazzo, 2015: 250–1). Former Conservative voters among UKIP’s support were not more inclined to defect than former Labour voters, but there were more of them for UKIP to lose (ibid.: 272–3).

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Ultimately, UKIP did not inflict the level of damage on the Conservatives that some had feared. Only one UKIP MP was elected: Carswell retained his seat. Reckless was defeated and the Conservatives held off strong UKIP challenges in Thanet South, where Farage’s bid to enter the Commons ended in a damaging defeat, and Thurrock. But UKIP won 3.8 million votes (12.9% of the vote in Great Britain) and came second in 121 constituencies, 77 of which were won by the Conservatives. UKIP is a distant second rather than a close challenger in many of these constituencies but, even if it is not within striking distance of taking Conservative seats in southern England, it has overtaken the Conservatives and/or Liberal Democrats to become the closest challenger to Labour in parts of northern England. UKIP achieved fractionally higher vote shares on average in seats won by the Conservatives in 2015 (mean UKIP vote share of 14.4%) compared with those won by Labour (14.2%) (BES 2015 Constituency Results Data). Nevertheless, on average UKIP improved its vote share slightly more in seats won by Labour in 2015 (11.4 percentage point increase) compared with those where the Conservatives were victorious (10.5 percentage point increase). The party also performed better in safer seats than in marginal seats, where it suffered a higher rate of defection from former supporters (Goodwin and Milazzo, 2015: 281). Having failed to make a significant breakthrough at Westminster, UKIP faces a number of challenges. Populist parties rely heavily on the appeal of charismatic leaders, so Farage’s aborted resignation means that UKIP will maintain a high profile but it also exposed dissatisfaction over his leadership style. More effective ground campaigns will be required if UKIP is to translate distant second places into victories under first-past-the-post. There are also ideological and strategic tensions between ‘blue UKIP’ and ‘red UKIP’: the former hold low, tax, small-state, social conservative positions, while the latter have proposed higher taxes for large businesses and wealthy individuals. UKIP’s recent targeting of working-class voters and Labour strongholds in northern England is likely to endure, but this risks alienating middle-class ex-Conservative voters who moved to UKIP. The EU referendum is the next major challenge. UKIP has developed from being a party that prioritised its core policy objective, namely withdrawal from the EU, to one that is more confident in seeking to win votes and office. But a vote-seeking strategy that shores up core support through divisive messages potentially damages the prospects of achieving the policy objective. Some Eurosceptics, including Carswell (2015), fear that UKIP and Farage have toxified the Eurosceptic case, making it more difficult for the ‘leave’ campaign to win over moderate opinion in the in–out referendum. The 2014–17 BES Internet panel data (Fieldhouse et al., 2015) show the proportions of respondents strongly disliking Farage growing from 25% in February 2014 (wave one) to 32% in May 2016 (wave six), compared to only a two-point increase in those strongly liking him. If the ‘leave’ campaign is to be effective, Eurosceptics in UKIP and the Conservative Party must reach an accommodation about their respective roles.

European integration and the rise of UKIP135 Conclusion Kerr and Hayton (2015) identify ideological coherence, failings of Cameron’s leadership and party management problems as the crucial factors explaining why Conservative modernisation did not deliver on its early promise. In the case of EU policy, by lowering the salience of the EU issue, the modernisers unwittingly allowed their soft Eurosceptic case to stagnate and provided the space for harder Eurosceptics to push to the fore their case for fundamental renegotiation or Brexit. In other policy areas, key shifts in direction made in Opposition were reversed or not followed through in government, but in the case of policy on the EU the issue was largely ignored in Opposition and then had to be confronted head-on when the party returned to office. Any hopes that the low-key approach to the EU issue that had been adopted in Opposition could also be pursued in government were dashed as the Eurozone crisis raised difficult issues about the UK’s relationship with the EU. Cameron’s response was fitful, recognising that it required a new framework for relations between states within and outside the Eurozone, but antagonising other Member States with his fiscal compact veto. Party management considerations had underpinned Cameron’s EU policy from the outset, but Conservative divisions escalated in government while the rise of UKIP added an additional dimension to the difficult domestic environment. Cameron’s commitment to renegotiation and a referendum was, in large part, a response to the challenges of party management and party competition, but it has potentially momentous consequences for the UK, the EU and the Conservatives. The most optimistic scenario for Cameron would see renegotiation and a referendum providing the elusive formula that resolves the most divisive issue in the Conservative Party and the UK’s position in the EU. Here, a new settlement with the EU would provide a clearer footing for both the UK and for relations between Eurozone and non-Eurozone states, while a referendum vote to remain in a reformed EU would legitimise Cameron’s position and weaken hard Euroscepticism. But Cameron’s policy carries substantial risks. Some of the changes to the EU that he seeks, notably on free movement and treaty change, will be difficult to achieve but limited reform will not satisfy those MPs in the Conservatives for Britain group. The outcomes of EU referendums can also be unpredictable (Oppermann, 2013; Oliver, 2015). Referendum pledges initially dampen down intra-party dissent, before divisions intensify as the campaign approaches. Mobilising Conservative voters will be more difficult if they receive different cues from Cameron on the one hand and many Conservative MPs on the other. A vote to remain in the EU may not provide the finality that Cameron craves (Glencross, 2015). Eurosceptics will regard renegotiation not as a one-off event but as the beginning of a process to change the UK’s relationship with the EU. Nor will it resolve a key strategic dilemma, namely that UK influence is likely to wane further as other Member States pursue further integration: Conservatives will still face an

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uneasy choice between limited influence in a reformed EU or limited influence outside it (Lawson, 2013). A vote to leave the EU would also create significant problems for the Conservatives. The party’s historic claim to be both the party of the nation state and the party of capital would also be fractured. Should the SNP regard Brexit as sufficient cause for a second Scottish independence referendum, Cameron could be remembered as the prime minister who brought about withdrawal from one Union (the EU) and the end of another (the UK Union). References Bale, T. (2010) The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron, Cambridge: Polity. British Election Study (2015) Constituency Results with Census and Candidate Data, Version 2.0, www.britishelectionstudy.com/data-objects/linked-data, accessed 28 May 2015. Cameron, D. (2006) ‘Speech to the Conservative Party Conference’, Bournemouth, 1 October. Cameron, D. (2007) ‘The EU: A New Agenda for the 21st century’, speech to the Movement for European Reform, Brussels, 6 March. Cameron, D. (2013) ‘EU Speech at Bloomberg’, London, 23 January. Cameron, D. (2015) ‘Prime Minister’s Speech on Europe’, Chatham House, London, 10 November. Carlin, B. (2006) ‘Off-the-cuff Cameron accuses UKIP of being “fruitcakes and closet racists”’, Daily Telegraph, 5 April. Carswell, D. (2015) ‘Farage needs to take a break from UKIP’, The Times, 16 May. Cash, B. (2013) ‘Cutting off their nose to spite their face: The folly of UKIP’, Huffington Post, 8 August, www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/bill-cash/ukip-europe-referendum_b_4058388. html, accessed 28 May 2015. Conservative Party (2010) Invitation to Join the Government of Britain: The Conservative Manifesto 2010, London: Conservative Party. Conservative Party (2015) Conservative Party Manifesto 2015, London: Conservative Party. Cowley, P. and Stuart, M. (2012) ‘The Cambusters: The Conservative European Union Referendum Rebellion of October 2011’, Political Quarterly 83(2): 402–6. Crowson, N.J. (2009) The Conservative Party and European Integration since 1945: At the Heart of Europe? Abingdon: Routledge. Daily Telegraph (2014) ‘EU veto: The Tory MPs’ letter to David Cameron’, 11 January. Dominiczak, P. (2015) ‘David Cameron’s plans to “destroy” the Liberal Democrats’, Daily Telegraph, 7 April. Electoral Commission (2015) ‘Sixth and final pre-poll donations and loans report at the General Election published’, 19 May, www.electoralcommission.org.uk/i-am-a/ journalist/electoral-commission-media-centre/news-releases-donations/sixth-andfinal-pre-poll-donations-and-loans-report-at-the-general-election-published, accessed 28 May 2015. European Council (2014) ‘European Council Conclusions 26/27 June’, EUCO79/14, Brussels.

European integration and the rise of UKIP137 Evans, G. and Mellon, J. (2016) ‘Working Class Votes and Conservative Losses: Solving the UKIP Puzzle’, Parliamentary Affairs, 69(2): 464–79. Fabricant, M. (2012) The Pact? The Conservative Party, UKIP and the EU, https://the pactreport.wordpress.com, accessed 27 May 2015. Fieldhouse, E. et al. (2015) British Election Study Internet Panel Wave 6, www.britishelection study.com/data-objects/panel-study-data, accessed 4 December 2015. Ford, R. and Goodwin, M. (2014) Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain, Abingdon: Routledge. Fresh Start Project (2013) ‘Manifesto for change: a new vision for the UK in Europe’, January, http://eufreshstart.org/downloads/manifestoforchange.pdf, accessed 28 May 2015. Gamble, A. (1994) The Free Economy and the Strong State. The Politics of Thatcherism, 2nd ed., London: Palgrave Macmillan. Glencross, A. (2015) ‘Why a British Referendum on EU Membership Will Not Solve the Europe Question’, International Affairs 91(2): 303–17. Goes, E. (2014) ‘The Coalition and Europe: A Tale of Reckless Drivers, Steady Navigators and Imperfect Roadmaps’, Parliamentary Affairs 67(1): 45–63. Goodwin, M. and Milazzo, C. (2015) UKIP. Inside the Campaign to Redraw the Map of British Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hardman, I. (2013) ‘Nadine Dorries interview: why I want to run as a UKIP–Tory joint candidate’, The Spectator, 18 May. Hayton, R. (2012) Reconstructing Conservatism? The Conservative Party in Opposition, 1997– 2010, Manchester: Manchester University Press. HM Government (2010) The Coalition: Our Programme for Government, London: The Cabinet Office. Ipsos MORI (2015) ‘How Britain voted in 2015’, 22 May, www.ipsos-mori.com/research publications/researcharchive/3575/How-Britain-voted-in-2015.aspx?view=wide, accessed 28 May 2015. Kenny, M. and Smith, M. (1997) ‘(Mis)understanding Blair’, Political Quarterly 68(3): 220–30. Kerr, P. and Hayton, R. (2015) ‘Whatever Happened to Conservative Modernisation?’ British Politics 10(2): 114–30. Lawson, N. (2013) ‘I’ll be voting to quit the EU’, The Times, 7 May. Lynch, P. (2015) ‘Conservative Modernisation and European Integration: From Silence to Salience and Schism’, British Politics 10(2): 185–203. Lynch, P. and Whitaker, R. (2013a) ‘Where There Is Discord, Can They Bring Harmony? Managing Intra-Party Dissent on European Integration in the Conservative Party’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 15(3): 317–39. Lynch, P. and Whitaker, R. (2013b) ‘Rivalry on the Right: The Conservatives, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the EU Issue’, British Politics 8(2): 285–312. McAnulla, S. (2010) ‘Heirs to Blair’s Third Way? David Cameron’s Triangulating Conservatism’, British Politics 5(3): 286–314. Meguid, B. (2005) ‘Competition Between Unequals: The Role of Mainstream Party Strategy in Niche Party Success’, American Political Science Review 99(3): 347–59. Oliver, T. (2015) ‘To Be or Not to Be in Europe: Is That the Question? Britain’s European Question and an in/out Referendum’, International Affairs 91(1): 77–91.

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Oppermann, K. (2008) ‘The Blair Government and Europe: The Policy of Containing the Salience of European Integration’, British Politics 3(2): 156–82. Oppermann, K. (2013) ‘The Politics of Discretionary Government Commitments to European Integration Referendums’, Journal of European Public Policy 20(5): 684–701. Partos, R. and Bale, T. (2015) ‘Immigration and Asylum Policy under Cameron’s Conservatives’, British Politics 10(2): 169–84. Rees-Mogg, J. (2013) ‘Reunite the Right: give UKIP jobs in a Conservative ministry’, 7 May, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/10041349/Reunite-the-right-giveUkip-jobs-in-a-Conservative-ministry.html, accessed 28 May 2015. Szczerbiak, A. and Taggart, P. (2008) ‘Theorising Party-Based Euroscepticism: Problems of Definition, Measurement and Causality’, in Taggart, P. and Szczerbiak, A. (eds), Opposing Europe. The Comparative Party Politics of Euroscepticism. Volume 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 238–62. Webb, P. and Bale, T. (2014) ‘Why Do Tories Defect to UKIP? Conservative Party Members and the Temptations of the Populist Radical Right’, Political Studies 62(4): 961–70.

7

The evolving Conservative Party membership Tim Bale and Paul Webb

Much of the writing on the so-called modernisation of the Conservative Party since 2005 has focused on life at the top (Hayton, 2015). In as much as the grass roots are mentioned, they tend either to be objects – ‘done to’ rather than doing – or else obstacles – a shapeless or stereotyped mass who have occasionally made life awkward for the Conservative leadership, first, by resisting their efforts to change the party’s procedures and policies and, second, by supposedly clinging to attitudes which stand in marked contrast to the ‘compassionate’ or ‘liberal’ conservatism designed to ‘decontaminate the Tory brand’. Given the extent to which the Tories have, since at least the end of the nineteenth century, always put a premium on leadership, this top-down focus is perfectly understandable. On the other hand, given the extent to which, nowadays, ordinary party members – even if there are less of them than once there were – have so many more formal rights (and, indeed, so many more informal opportunities to publicly express their dissatisfaction) that it makes sense to look at modernisation from the bottom-up as well as the top-down perspective. In this chapter, we use primary research on Tory Party members, conducted through surveys, to round-out the often stereotypical impression that the media, and therefore much of the public, has of them.1 We then turn to the question of power in the Party and ask what members think of how decisions and selections are made. We also explore whether there is any relationship between members’ ideological and policy attitudes and their views on how the Party is or should be run. From this it becomes clear that the party membership has gained considerable ground over the years in terms of its role in selecting candidates and party leaders; and while the Party essentially maintains its long tradition of leadership autonomy in respect of policy formulation, it is also true that the grass roots are now able and willing to exercise the various opportunities for expression of dissent on questions of strategy, organisation and policy afforded by the development of new social media. A ‘modernising party’, according to Katherine Dommett (2015: 250), ‘diagnoses a disjuncture between [its] practices and/or ideas and contemporary society, and uses this diagnosis to revisit and revise [its] ideology, policies and/or structures’. All these features of a modernisation project must perforce involve and

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impact on party members. The extent to which they change is therefore one measure of the extent to which that project has succeeded or failed in changing the Party as a whole – platform, personnel, institutions and brand image. In other words, it would be foolish and/or misleading to assert that the Conservative Party has or has not modernised without examining how much that modernising project has taken the grass roots along with it and into, if you like, the twenty-first century. So have significant demographic and attitudinal shifts occurred in the decade after David Cameron took over or do the members of the party look and think pretty much like they did before he arrived on the scene? Who are the party members? The changing demographic and attitudinal profile The number of members that the Conservative Party claims has (as is true of the other main parties in the UK) dropped precipitately over the years. The post-war highpoint occurred during 1953, when some 2.8 million members were reported; the decline thereafter was more or less constant, although the Tories remained the party with the largest individual membership until New Labour at its mid-1990s zenith surpassed them. The party’s nadir to date came in September 2013 when it had only 134,000 members, although there was some recovery by the end of 2014 when it reported an official figure of 149,000. In addition to full members, the Party created a category of registered ‘Friends’ of the Party in 2013, reflecting a growing trend towards ‘multi-speed membership’ which many parties have embraced around the democratic world in recent years (Scarrow, 2014). All told, the Party estimated that it had around 224,000 supporters by the end of 2014 if one included full members, friends, activists and donors (Keen, 2015: 4–5). Who are the members? In 1994, Whiteley, Seyd and Richardson (1994: 42) described the typical Conservative Party member as someone who was ‘retired, comes from a middle class occupational background, is an owner-occupier, and possesses few educational qualifications’. Has the picture changed much since then? Table 8.1 reports details of the demographic profile of the membership over the past two decades, comparing Whiteley, Seyd and Richardson’s survey results with those of more recent Internet surveys conducted in 2009 and 2013. This reveals little significant change since the early 1990s: the average age of Tory members remains around 60 and their time in the party is about a quarter of a century. If anything, they have become more middle class and better educated than a generation ago – not surprising developments considering that such changes reflect the general change in British society during this time, with significantly fewer manual sector jobs and far more young people going on to university than a generation ago. The 2013 sample remains overwhelmingly white, although there would appear to have been a slight growth in ethnic diversity among the membership, which again reflects wider change in British society since the early 1990s.

The evolving Conservative Party membership141 Similarly, there has been a drop in the proportion of members identifying themselves as Anglican (though nearly two thirds remain at least nominal adherents of the Church of England); between a fifth and a quarter might be described as regularly observant. A good two thirds are now employed in the private sector, a moderate increase on the position in the 1990s, which mirrors the shrinking size of the public sector since that time. While four fifths own or are buying their own homes, this actually appears to constitute a drop in percentage terms since the early 1990s – an indication of the difficulties of fully realising Thatcher’s longedfor property-owning democracy given the volatilities of the housing sector in recent years; amongst other things, this instability has led to greater numbers of people opting for the private rental sector. A notable change in the samples is their increasingly male distribution over time: whether this is a quirk of the Internet samples used in 2009 and 2013 is hard to say. Three quarters of members read the Tory-supporting press (up from two thirds in 1992). A final interesting feature of Table 7.1 pertains to the activism of Conservative members. Paradoxically, the recent samples appear to be both more and less active than the 1992 sample; that is, greater proportions claim to be doing more than 20 hours work for the Party each month, and to be more active than they were five years previously; at the same time, however, a greater proportion also claims to be less active than previously. This apparent polarisation in patterns of Table 7.1  Tory membership’s basic demographic profile

Average age (years) Average length of party   membership (years) % active more than 20 hours   per month % more active than 5 years ago % less active than 5 years ago % social grade ABC1 % graduates % men % white % home-owners/mortgagees % working in private sector % Anglican % attending religious services once   a month % reading Mail/Express/Telegraph/Times

1992 (n = 2467)

2009 (n = 1690)

2013 (n = 852)

62 −

55 25

59 24

 2

 6

 8

 8 25 73 12 51 99 91 60 70 −

19 33 83 30 60 − − − − 21

− − 83 37 69 96 85 68 62 25

65

−

75

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activism is a corollary of the shrinking number who say that they do roughly the same amount of work as hitherto. It would seem that a ‘constant core’ of activists is  being squeezed by those whose behaviour has been changing one way or another. What of the attitudinal and ideological profile of Conservative members? Childs and Webb (2012: 124) described grass-roots Tories as ‘predominantly … centreright, socially authoritarian, materialist and Eurosceptic’. We can certainly flesh this story out with more detail here, although it is not possible to draw exact comparisons with Whiteley, Seyd and Richardson’s work on the previous generation of Tory members since the survey indicators and measurements they employed are rather different to those in the more recent research. Whiteley and his colleagues found that ‘most Conservatives think of themselves as being on the centre-right’ (1994: 141), although they drew attention to the perhaps surprising fact that two fifths of their respondents actually placed themselves to the left of centre on a 9-point subjective left–right ideological scale. Although the 2009 survey employed a 7-point scale, the broad picture does not seem dissimilar in so far as the mean location of party members on this scale, with 1 representing ‘very left wing’ and 7 ‘very right wing’, was 5.32 (valid n=1,601), which places the membership’s self-perceived ideological centre of gravity somewhere slightly right of centre. That said, some 80% of respondents in 2009 located themselves to the right of centre and only 5% to the left, which does represent a clear contrast with the position reported in the early 1990s (Childs and Webb, 2012: 124). Because the various surveys that we are drawing on asked a number of questions of Party members that were designed to measure their location in multiple dimensions of attitudinal space (not only standard left–right ideology, but also social liberalism/authoritarianism, and pro/anti-Europeanism) the ideological complexion of respondents can be examined with more sophistication. Again, we are hampered by the fact that the precise indicators are not identical across the surveys, so great caution should be exercised in drawing overconfident inferences, but the broad findings are interesting and indicative. Whiteley, Seyd and Richardson found very strong support (c.60% of members) for right-wing positions on questions of cutting income tax, regulating trade unions, the dangers of the welfare state, reducing state expenditure, pursuing redistribution and encouraging private education. That said, there was also evidence that substantial numbers of party members in 1992 harboured doubts about privatisation and a majority agreed with the need for the state to spend more to alleviate poverty, provide unemployment benefit to a ‘reasonable level’, and even to ‘give workers a say in the places where they work’ (Whiteley, Seyd and Richardson, 1994: 56–9). This suggests that the membership was never entirely Thatcherite, perhaps, even in the immediate aftermath of the Thatcher premiership. However, the membership was very clearly traditionalist on some matters of social policy and morality – especially immigration, the reintroduction of the death penalty and divorce.

The evolving Conservative Party membership143 In the 2009 and 2013 surveys, we are able to measure respondents’ left–right and libertarian–authoritarian locations through a number of indicators first developed by Heath, Evans and Martin (1993) that have by now become the basis of standard attitudinal scales.2 Tables 7.2 and 7.3 report the basic descriptive statistics for Table 7.2  Left–right attitudinal scale item statistics, 2009 and 2013*

Government should redistribute income   from the better-off to those who are less   well off Big business benefits owners at the   expense of workers There is one law for the rich and one for   the poor Ordinary people do not get their fair share   of the nation’s wealth Management will always try to get   the better of employees if it gets   the chance Valid N (listwise)

2009

2013

3.65 (1.25)

3.81 (1.12)

3.22 (1.28) 3.06 (1.41) 3.17 (1.26) 3.14 (1.34)

3.42 (1.22) 3.56 (1.29) 3.49 (1.11) 3.37 (1.25)

1,663

835

* 1 represents the most left-wing position on this scale, while 5 represents the most rightwing position. Figures in parenthesis = standard deviation. Table 7.3  Libertarianism–authoritarianism attitudinal scale item statistics, 2009 and 2013*

Young people today don’t have enough   respect for traditions People who break the law should be   given stiffer sentences For some crimes the death penalty is the   most appropriate sentence Schools should teach children to obey  authority The law should always be obeyed even if   a particular law is wrong Censorship of films and magazines is   necessary to uphold moral standards Valid N (listwise)

2009

2013

4.24 (0.89) 4.37 (0.88) 3.74 (1.48) 4.40 (0.83) 3.43 (1.08) 3.42 (1.29) 1,654

3.10 (0.93) 3.29 (0.86) 2.55 (1.56) 3.33 (0.81) 2.62 (0.91) 2.17 (1.32) 824

* 1 represents the most socially liberal position on this scale, while 5 represents the most authoritarian position. Figures in parenthesis = standard deviation.

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these individual Likert Scale questions.3 It is also possible to create additive scales from these responses; these scales confirm that party members consistently opt for slightly right-of-centre (mean = 3.25 for 2009 and 3.53 for 2013) responses to these questions, which is broadly consistent with the situation in 1992. However, the mean position in the samples varies with respect to the libertarian–authoritarian scale, in that the Party membership appears to have shifted to a somewhat more socially liberally stance between 2009 (mean = 3.93) and 2013 (mean =  2.15). Our suspicion is that this partly reflects a masculine bias in the 2013 sample: Childs and Webb found that Tory female members were significantly more socially conservative than their male counterparts on the whole in 2009 (2012: 126), and weighting the 2013 results to fit the 2009 gender profile of the sample would result in an adjusted mean of 2.47 on the libertarian–authoritarian scale. But this still suggests some shift in time towards a slightly more socially liberal profile for the Tory grass roots. It is of course possible that these scale items no longer capture the major issues that divide social liberals from social authoritarians in modern Britain. Certainly, there are other attitudes that reveal a more uncompromisingly authoritarian outlook: for instance, 59% of Tory members disapprove of the new law that the Coalition government brought in to introduce ‘gay marriage’, while 89% approved of efforts to reduce immigration from non-EU countries, and 63% regretted the government’s decision not to try to extend restriction on immigration from Romania and Bulgaria after January 2014. This brings us to the final attitudinal dimension that we will consider here, that of Europe. Whiteley, Seyd and Richardson found significant levels of support for the UK’s relationship with the EU in the early 1990s; although more than half of Tory members felt that further European integration should be resisted, as many as 31% supported the principle (1994: 57). Indeed, they concluded that ‘somewhere between one-fifth and one-third of the members are ardent Europeanists’ (58). If one thing has changed beyond doubt within the Party’s membership since then, however, it is its attitude towards Europe, which became manifestly more hostile. In this it mirrors a general shift of opinion in the changing PCP (Webb, 2008). The 2009 survey included a single measure – an 11-point scale on which respondents were asked to locate themselves with respect to EU integration, from 0 (representing the view that Britain should ‘unite fully with the EU’) to 10 (representing the view that the country should ‘protect its independence from the EU’). The mean score for the sample on this scale was 8.75 (n=1,661) – quite possibly even more radical than for Conservative MPs, whose mean score was 7.6 in 2005 (Webb, 2008: table 5). In 2013 members were asked, ‘If there was a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU tomorrow, how would you vote?’: some 71% said they would vote to leave. They were further asked how they would vote in the event of a renegotiation of terms regarding British membership and 38% still claimed they would vote for UK withdrawal from the EU, regardless. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that where once there was a division between Europhiles

The evolving Conservative Party membership145 and Eurosceptics in the Conservative Party, there now only seems to be a fault line between Eurosceptics and Europhobes. Members and leaders: the evolution of intra-party democracy What of the relationship between the membership and the leadership? Is the current membership less deferential than was true of the previous generation? What is the attitude of members towards decision-making procedures? Do they have higher expectations of intra-party democracy than previous cohorts, and if so, does this reflect the impact of a younger, more socially liberal and more cognitively mobilised generation? Unlike the Labour Party, the Conservative Party does not have a long-standing democratic tradition. R.T. McKenzie (1955) famously demonstrated that the real differences between Britain’s two major parties in the second half of the twentieth century were overstated in these terms – both afforded the parliamentary party leadership considerable autonomy in deciding party policy – but Labour always embraced the principle of intra-party democracy formally, and this had some impact on its procedures (most notably at its annual conference). The Conservatives never had any such pretensions, having evolved from a predemocratic organisation of parliamentary (and social) elites. In particular, the leader was said to be the font of authoritative pronouncements on policy and other major decisions. However, over the course of recent decades much has changed in the Party. Whiteley, Seyd and Richardson noted the birth of ginger groups within the Party from the late 1960s that agitated for greater internal democracy, starting with the publication Set the Party Free, which was produced by the Greater London Young Conservatives in 1969 and called for a ‘fundamental democratisation of the organisation’. This eventually helped to spawn the birth of The Charter Movement (named after the document A Charter to Set the Party Free) in 1981 and The Party Reform Steering Committee in 1992 (Whiteley, Seyd and Richardson, 1994: 31–3), both of which lobbied for greater democracy within the Conservative Party. Following the traumatic general election defeat of May 1997 the Party did undergo a major reorganisation and adopted a new constitution, a move prompted at least in part in the name of greater democracy. A number of factors precipitated this transformation. First, the shock of electoral defeat (especially when as heavy as that sustained by the Conservatives in 1997) can often (though not always) be enough to stimulate organisational change; the Tories did much the same thing after traumatic defeats earlier in their history, with what happened after 1945 offering the most obvious example, even if the novelty and the extent of the change that occurred were s­ eriously oversold, both at the time and later on (see Bale, 2012: chapter 2). Second, the new party leader, William Hague, needed to make his mark on the party, yet it was difficult for him to do this at the level of policy reform in the

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light of the continuing potential for bitter division which beset his party at that time; party organisation was, therefore, a somewhat less thorny nettle to grasp (though by no means an entirely uncontentious one), especially perhaps for someone who by profession was a management consultant (Bale, 2016: chapter 3). Third, the voice of internal critics such as the Charter Movement carried greater weight in the context of the stormy National Union annual conference staged in October 1997, at which a number of representatives from the local constituency associations recriminated bitterly with the parliamentary wing of the party. The pervading sense that the grass roots had been ‘betrayed’ by an irresponsible and unruly parliamentary elite which needed bringing to heel often translated into demands for greater democratisation. Fourth, Central Office had encountered considerable financial difficulties in the years between the 1992 and 1997 general elections, and yet had generally been frustrated in its attempts to alleviate these problems by gaining access to local constituency association funds. This was due to the legal autonomy from the centre of the party’s voluntary wing (Garner and Kelly, 1998: 95), an obstacle which provided Central Office with an incentive to initiate fundamental reform. Finally, there was quite simply a widespread feeling within  the Party that  it had fallen a long way behind the Labour Party in terms of organisation and management, and was patently in need of its own brand of modernisation. Consequently, the Party’s consultation exercise on reform spawned Fresh Future, a proposal setting out ‘the most radical changes to our party’s institutions since Benjamin Disraeli’, as William Hague declaimed in the document’s foreword. Interestingly, the document was suffused with the rhetoric of participation and democratisation, as Hague declared his bold intention to ‘build the single greatest mass volunteer party in the Western world’ (Conservative Party, 1998: 1). The Fresh Future proposals were overwhelmingly endorsed by the party membership (80% in favour) in a vote whose result was announced in March 1998. For the first time, a ‘single and unified’ party was created in the sense that its voluntary, professional and parliamentary pillars were drawn together into a single structure. Moreover, the party which had hitherto always operated much as the British state itself had, without any codified set of overarching rules, and with a pronounced penchant for evolving conventions, now embraced a new and binding codified constitution. This constitution can only be changed by a two-thirds majority of a ‘Constitutional Convention’ (comprising MPs, MEPs, Conservative Peers and members of the equally innovative National Conservative Convention (NCC)); such changes can be proposed by the Board of Management, the NCC, the 1922 Committee or a petition signed by 10,000 party members. The new Board of Management has become the ‘supreme decision-making body on all matters relating to party organization and management’ (Conservative Party, 1998: 6), and comprises members drawn from the three wings of the Party.4 The Board is obliged to meet at least six times a year, though generally meets on a monthly basis

The evolving Conservative Party membership147 in practice, and it has three permanent subcommittees, with respective responsibilities for candidate recruitment, conference preparation and management, and membership subscriptions. One of the most striking features of the new party constitution is the disappearance of the legal autonomy of the constituency associations. Doubtless they run much as ever on a day-to-day basis, but they are now formally subject to the authority of the central party in a number of ways, a radical departure from established tradition. For a start, new rules for the conduct of the associations are now included in the party constitution, and replace the National Union’s old ‘model rules’ by which most used to abide. The constitution also sets down such details as the minimum number of elected officers for each association, and stipulates that they should submit to the Board of Management an annual report on the association’s activities, membership and financial accounts. Complaints about breaches of rules are dealt with by new Area Executives (whose boundaries coincide with those of county and metropolitan local authorities) in the first instance, with the Board acting as a final arbiter of appeal. Most notably, perhaps, the Board has the right to specify a variety of ‘minimum criteria’ for local association performance in respect of such matters as membership levels, fundraising and campaigning: those failing to fulfil such criteria can be designated ‘Supported Associations’ into which the Area Executive can parachute nominees who will run local campaigns and supervise constituency operations. In short, the party centre (and its local representatives) now has unprecedented rights to gather information about local associations and intervene in the way they run. In addition, the Conservative Party’s system of conferences is maintained, with the annual party conference, the Spring Assembly and the National Conservative Convention being the most notable. Constituency associations send representatives to each of these, the NCC dealing mainly with organisational issues (its brief being to ‘recommend action to the Board to ensure the maintenance of an effective organization throughout the country’; Conservative Party, 1998: 14), while the former two bodies debate policy matters. While all associations may submit motions for debate at conference via the Conservative Policy Forum, the Party’s Committee on Conferences determines the agenda; the status of conference deliberations and decisions, moreover, remains consultative rather than binding. In national policy matters, therefore, it is unlikely that anything has changed much with the advent of the Fresh Future revolution: as Richard Kelly (1989) argued, it is quite possible that Conservative policy development may continue to reflect in subtle ways the influence of the grass roots through the Party’s conference system, but members still lack formal rights of control. However, there have been innovations in other major intra-party decisionmaking areas, especially parliamentary candidate selection and leadership election. With respect to parliamentary candidate selection, the local constituency ­associations have always exercised considerable autonomy. The old National

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David Cameron and Conservative renewal

Union’s traditional task of maintaining a national list of approved parliamentary candidates has now passed to a subcommittee of the National Board of Management, but it remains the job of constituency associations to shortlist applicants, and the members themselves usually make the decisive choice. However, we should note significant developments in recent years. First, it should be said that the Fresh Future reforms accorded members new rights in the procedures to select candidates for the European Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the Mayor of London. After shortlists have been produced by regional ‘screening committees’ (drawn from constituency and area chairs within the regions), members have the right to attend and vote at one of a number of final selection meetings held in their region: given the multi-member nature of the European and Welsh constituencies, moreover, the members’ task is to generate a rank-order of candidates (Conservative Party, 1998: 22–3). This constitutes an undeniable extension of democratic rights to party members. Second, after David Cameron became leader in 2005, the Party showed a new willingness to innovate in diverse ways when it comes to the method of parliamentary candidate selection. Much of this was driven by the desire to change the face of the PCP by bringing more female, ethnic minority and (although this last category was swiftly forgotten) disabled MPs to the House of Commons, thereby presenting to the country an image of the party that more accurately reflected modern British society than had been the case hitherto. Cameron felt that the traditional preferences of party activists for candidates who so often turned out to be local, middle-aged, middle-class white males had to be curtailed to some extent, and so he introduced a number of new rules and conditions surrounding the process of candidate selection prior to the 2010 election – a new degree of intervention in constituency affairs by the central party that drew significant resentment (Childs, Webb and Marthaler, 2009). One of the more notable innovations was that constituency associations were given the right to use open primaries of local residents in selecting candidates, an option that was taken up in a handful of cases. An even clearer democratisation of Conservative Party procedure is apparent in the method of selecting the party leader. Prior to the election of Edward Heath in 1965, Conservative Party leaders had always ‘emerged’ through an opaque process of negotiation and ‘soundings’ involving senior party figures. This system resembled a feudal process of king-making in which the party ‘barons’ (metaphorically and sometimes literally speaking) anointed their ‘monarch’. Sir Alec Douglas-Home became the last leader to assume the mantle of leadership in this fashion (in 1963), his successors until 2001 being elected by a system of exhaustive ballots of Conservative MPs. Although the precise rules for election varied over time, when William Hague was elected leader in July 1997, they stated that a successful candidate needed to win the support of an overall majority and to achieve a clear margin of at least 15% over any other rival. The new constitution replaced this with a system in which the parliamentary party only had the right to act as

The evolving Conservative Party membership149 the preliminary ­selectorate which, through a system of ballots, reduced to two the number of candidates; the final choice between these remaining candidates was then passed into the hands of the Party’s mass membership, who cast their votes in a one-member, one-vote postal ballot. All leaders since the election of Iain Duncan Smith in 2001 have been chosen this way (although Michael Howard’s candidacy in 2003 was unopposed). However, it is often forgotten that the influential website ConservativeHome was set up, at least at the beginning, to resist an attempt by Michael Howard to revert to the previous method of leadership election by MPs after the 2005 election – an attempt that, in the event, was only prevented because the majority for it was not quite sufficient to meet the threshold set to make such a change (see Bale, 2016: chapter 6). Fresh Future boldly opined that ‘the reformed Conservative Party will be an open and democratic organization … owned by its members’ (Conservative Party, 1998: 21), and the extension of membership rights in matters of candidate and leadership selection has given some credibility to such claims, illustrating once again perhaps the adaptive capacity of this most enduring of political organisations. Does this mean that the membership is now satisfied with the degree of internal democracy that the Party practises? The shift towards a vote of the membership in deciding the party leader is very likely to have pleased the grass roots overall. In 1992 51% of members felt that a one-member, one-vote system should be used in leadership elections, while only 35% opposed such an innovation (Whiteley, Seyd and Richardson, 1994: 171). The change that Hague ushered in can clearly be seen to have chimed with majority grass-roots opinion, therefore; this is confirmed by the high proportion of party members who agreed that the modern leadership election procedure is democratic (four fifths), fair (three quarters) and transparent (two thirds) in the 2009 sample (see Table 7.4). In 1992, a plurality of members (41%) disagreed with the suggestion that the central party should have more of a say in the selection of parliamentary candidates, however, and David Cameron’s attempts to shape the process after 2005 probably did little to assuage such concerns in the constituency associations. It is not surprising to find that fewer members regard the process of selecting candidates as positively as they do the procedure for electing leaders. A little more than half see it as democratic or fair, and barely two fifths find it transparent (Table 7.4). Very similar proportions think that the making of Conservative Party policy is democratic, fair or transparent, which is not surprising given the grip that the leadership has retained on this aspect of decision-making. This is not to say that the grass roots are in revolt about the way the Party goes about these things, but it does suggest that a significant minority (in the order of 15–20%) remain unconvinced that the making of policy and selection of candidates in particular are sufficiently democratic even now. In 2013, we offered members the choice between three options regarding leadership election: returning to a system whereby only MPs selected the leader, sticking with the current system where MPs pick two candidates to go forward to a ballot

David Cameron and Conservative renewal

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Table 7.4  Conservative Party members views on intra-party processes, 2009* Procedures for

Democratic

Fair

Transparent

Selecting party leader are:

81.6 (n=1,579) 59.8 (n=1,515) 58.2 (n=1,535) 66.5

74.7 (n=1,566) 53.1 (n=1,493) 58.3 (n=1,511) 62

65.6 (n=1,555) 43.9 (n=1,482) 40.1 (n=1,510) 49.9

Selecting parliamentary   candidates are: Making party policy are: Average

* All figures are percentages strongly agreeing + tending to agree.

of all members, or allowing members to vote for any MPs who put themselves forward. It turns out that half of all members (46%) are happy with the current system for electing the leader, although – perhaps surprisingly – a fifth (21%) would like to see the decision return to MPs only. Just over a quarter (28%) would like to see members with a completely free choice rather than having to pick one of two candidates preselected for them by MPs. This hardly represents an overwhelming desire for change and suggests that the parliamentary stage of Tory leadership contests will remain crucial for the foreseeable future. The relative satisfaction with the status quo on this matter, however, stands in marked contrast to members’ views about their role in policymaking and about the extent to which they feel that the leadership and Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) interfere with their right to select candidates. A sizeable plurality (44%) of members feels that the leadership/CCHQ has too much influence in candidate selection. And when it comes to policymaking, more than half of respondents (52%) feel that members should have more influence. The Tory grass roots have always been keen to preserve local autonomy, but it seems that nowadays they would also like a little more democracy, too. How much things would actually change if rank-and-file members were given a greater say on policy, we can only guess. But judging from what they thought of some of the Tory-led Coalition government’s policies, any such change would presumably see the Party shift rightwards, although perhaps more on social than on economic issues – possibly because, on the latter, a combination of austerity and their own innate Thatcherism has seen the current leadership shift sharply in that direction anyway. Is there any evidence that attitudes regarding intra-party decision-making are linked to the social or attitudinal profiles of members? Analysis of the 2009 sample suggests a number of these factors may be significant, as Table 7.5 shows. Being female rather than male; working class rather than middle class; educated to the age of 20 or more; inactive rather than active in the Party;5 and ideologically centrist

10.3 17.1*** 11.6 16.6*** 14.2 10.7** 9.7 21.7*** 53.6 3.04** 3.94

89.7 82.9 88.4 83.4 85.8 89.3 90.3 78.3 55.5 3.28

3.93

Not Democratic

3.99

74.7 76.5 74.6 77.8 78.1 70.3 78.7 67.1 56.2 3.22

Democratic

3.76***

25.3 23.5 25.4 22.2 21.9 29.7*** 21.3 32.9*** 52.4*** 3.33*

Not Democratic

Making Policy

Notes: * = p