David Cameron and Conservative renewal: The limits of modernisation?

By Manchester University Press

Offering a new overview of the Conservative modernisation project, this book assesses the efforts of David Cameron and his colleagues to rebuild the British Conservative Party in the period since 2005.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Nov 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781526108258

Book preview

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 policy-making 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.

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 re-establish 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 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 ‘One-Nation’ tradition of conservatism (Seawright, 2010; Carr, 2014). Sometimes the 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 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 policy-making 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 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 atten tion 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 (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 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 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