RepresentationPREVIEW
UK politics is party politics. When we vote, we vote for a political party – very few of us even know the name of the candidate we vote for. When governments are formed, they are formed by parties, and they govern very largely as parties: that is, through a process of party discipline. Parties dominate the lives of almost all of our politicians. Quite simply, they speak, vote and act (in most circumstances) as their parties tell them to. Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore (1878) is no less true today than when it was first written: ‘I always voted at my party’s call, And I never thought of thinking for myself at all’. Parties are also responsible for developing the ideas and policies that dominate the political landscape in the UK. The battle of ideas is fought between rival political parties.
And yet, party politics in the UK appears to be in a sorry state. Somehow parties seem to be failing in one of their basic functions: getting people involved in political life. Turnout levels at elections have fallen; there has been a decline in party membership (at least until 2015); and fewer voters claim to ‘identify’ with a particular party. In a media-obsessed age, leaders sometimes appear to be more important than their parties. Parties look to leaders to get them elected, rather than the other way round. The level of party competition has also changed. Instead of two mighty parties confronting one another, in many parts of the UK, three, four or even more parties jostle for power. What is more, until the advent of Corbyn, the major two parties had come increasingly to resemble one another. Is the party-political battle any longer a battle of ideas?
CONTENTS
• Parties and the party system
- Functions of parties
- Who has power within parties?
- The changing party system
• Party ideas and policies
- Left and right
- Post-war social democracy
- Thatcherism
- Post-Thatcherite consensus
• Ideas and policies in the ‘age of austerity’
- Conservative ideas and policies
- Labour ideas and policies
- Liberal Democrat ideas and policies
- Ideas and policies of ‘other’ parties
Politics, it seems, cannot exist without political parties. The only political systems that have no parties are ones, such as military dictatorships, that suppress them by force. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that parties have always been with us. Parties, in the modern sense, only emerged during the 19th century, and were a product of the development of representative government and the extension of the franchise. Until then, there existed only ‘factions’, which operated within the House of Commons, but which lacked the internal discipline of modern political parties as well as wider membership and organisation outside of Parliament. In the early 19th century, the main factions in Parliament were the Whigs and Tories. These in due course developed, respectively, into the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party. The Labour Party was different, however. It developed not from a parliamentary faction but was created by pressures from beyond Parliament. It was established in 1900 by the trade union movement, in the hope of gaining working-class representation in the House of Commons.
Faction: A group of like-minded politicians, usually formed around a key leader or in support of a set of preferred policies.
FUNCTIONS OF PARTIES
Why are parties so important to politics? Parties carry out a wide range of functions within the political system. However, in many cases, these have come under pressure in recent years, even allowing some commentators to speak of a ‘crisis’ in party politics.
Parties have the following functions:
Representation
Policy formulation
Recruitment of leaders
Organisation of government
Participation and mobilisation of electorate.
Representation
Representation (see p. 63) is often seen as the primary function of parties in liberal democracies. Parties link government to the people by responding to and articulating public opinion. They do this by developing policies that appeal to the mass of the electorate. The major UK parties are therefore ‘catch-all parties’. The winning party in an election can thus claim a popular mandate to carry out its policies (see ‘The doctrine of the mandate’, p. 215). In this way, parties translate public opinion into government policy.
Catch-all party: A party that develops policies that will appeal to the widest range of voters, by contrast with a programmatic party.
Mandate: An instruction or command that gives authority to a person or body to act in a particular way; a mandate therefore confers legitimacy on a political actor.
A political party is a group of people that is organised for the purpose of winning government power. In a democratic system, parties do this by putting candidates up for election, in the hope of gaining representation and ultimately forming (or participating in) government. Parties are often confused with pressure groups (see p. 149) or social movements.
Political parties have three main features:
• Parties aim to exercise government power by winning political office (small parties may nevertheless use elections more to gain a political platform than to win power)
• Parties typically adopt a broad issue focus, addressing each of the major areas of government policy (small parties, however, may have a narrower, or even a single, issue focus, thus resembling pressure groups)
• Members of political parties are usually united by shared political preferences and a general ideological identity, although these are often loose and broadly defined.
However, the effectiveness of parties in ensuring representation has also been questioned:
• The electorate is not always well-informed and rational in choosing between parties. Factors such as a party’s image and the personality of its leader may be as important as its policies (see Chapter 4).
• Because of the ‘first-past-the-post’ electoral system (see p. 65), parties may only need the support of 35–40 per cent of the electorate to win a general election.
Differences between ...
Programmatic Parties and
Catch-all Parties
PROGRAMMATIC PARTIES |
CATCH-ALL PARTIES |
Ideological |
Pragmatic |
Long-term goals |
Short-term popularity |
Fixed values |
Flexible values |
Shape public opinion |
Follow public opinion |
Traditional policies |
Policy renewal |
Class-based support |
Classless support |
Strong activist base |
Weak activist base |
Policy formulation
Political parties are one of the key means through which societies set collective goals and formulate public policy. In the process of seeking power, parties develop programmes of government (through party forums, annual conferences and, most importantly, in election manifestos ). Not only does this mean that parties often initiate policy (come up with policy proposals), but they also formulate coherent sets of policy options that give the electorate a choice of realistic and achievable goals.
Manifesto: A pamphlet that outlines (in more or less detail) the policies or programme a party intends to introduce if elected to power.
However, the effectiveness of parties in formulating policies has also been questioned:
• As the major parties have, in recent years, distanced themselves from their traditional ideologies, they have become less interested in formulating larger goals for society, and generally less interested in ideas.
• In a related development, parties have become more eager to follow public opinion (for example, by responding to opinion polls and the views of focus groups) than in trying to shape it by adopting clear ideological stances.
Recruitment of leaders
All senior political careers start with the decision to join a political party. As a party member, a budding politician can gain experience of canvassing, debating issues and helping to run a constituency party. Most importantly, party membership opens the door to political office. Nomination as a parliamentary candidate can ultimately lead to Number 10 (where the prime minister lives: 10 Downing Street). Parties therefore both recruit and train the political leaders of the future.
However, the effectiveness of parties in recruiting and training leaders has also been questioned:
• As governments are appointed from the ranks of the majority party in the House of Commons, they rely on a relatively small pool of talent.
• Electioneering and other party activities may be poor training for running a large government department.
Party government is a system through which single parties are able to form governments and carry through policy programmes.
Party government has a number of features:
• The major parties have clear ideological convictions and develop rival programmes of government, giving the electorate a meaningful choice between potential governments
• The governing party is able to claim a popular mandate and enjoys sufficient internal unity and ideological cohesion to be able to translate its manifesto commitments into government policy
• The government is accountable to the electorate through its mandate and by the existence of a credible opposition party, which acts as a balancing force.
Organisation of government
The operation of government relies on parties in many ways. Parties:
• Help to form governments, meaning that the UK effectively has a system of ‘party government’
• Give governments a degree of stability and coherence, especially as the members of the government are usually drawn from a single party and are therefore united by common sympathies and attachments
• Facilitate cooperation between the two major branches of government: Parliament and the executive
• Provide a source of opposition and criticism, helping to scrutinise government policy and provide a ‘government in waiting’.
However, the effectiveness of parties in organising government has also been questioned.
• The decline in party unity since the 1970s has tended to weaken the majority party’s control of the Commons. (This tendency is discussed more fully in Chapter 8.)
Participation and mobilisation
Political parties foster participation in two ways. Parties:
• Provide opportunities for citizens to join political parties and therefore help to shape party policy and, if they are lucky, government policy
• Help to educate and mobilise the electorate through a range of activities – canvassing, public meetings, advertising and poster campaigns, party broadcasts, and so on.
Such activities are designed to elicit support for a particular party, and for its policy and ideological agendas. This is the sense in which parties are, at heart, electoral machines, operating through the building up of loyalty and identification amongst the electorate.
However, the effectiveness of parties in ensuring participation and mobilisation has also been questioned:
• Voters’ loyalty towards, and identification with, parties has declined. Whereas 44 per cent of voters claimed to have a ‘very strong’ attachment to a party in 1964, this had fallen to a mere 10 per cent by 2005 through the process of partisan dealignment (see p. 94).
• Turnout in general elections has fallen sharply since 1997, with only 59 per cent voting in 2001, the lowest turnout since 1918, and 66 per cent voting in 2015, still about 9 per cent below the historical trend.
• The membership of the three traditional major parties in the UK has fallen – from over 3 million in the 1960s to around 384,000 in 2015, although Labour and Liberal Democrat membership have risen notably since 2015 (see pp. 45–47 for more details).
WHO HAS POWER WITHIN PARTIES?
As parties are important channels of communications between government and the people, the location of power within them is of great significance. Are parties really governing machines, centralised bodies that are controlled by a small group of parliamentary leaders? Or are they genuinely ‘bottom-up’ organisations that are responsive to pressure from members and extra-parliamentary bodies? What is significant here is not so much the formal structure of a political party but how, and by whom, its policies and political strategies are determined.
The main actors within a political party are:
Party leaders
Parliamentary parties
Members and constituency parties
Party backers.
Party leaders
In theory, Conservative leaders have greater authority than Labour leaders. Whereas few formal obstacles stand in the way of Conservative leaders, Labour leaders are supposed to be bound by decisions made by their annual conferences and, between conferences, by the views of the National Executive Committee (NEC). However, as McKenzie (1964) argued, for most practical purposes power is distributed in the same way in the two parties: parliamentary leaders dominate the rest of the party. This applies especially when the leader is the prime minister. Indeed, since the 1980s, party leaders have grown in importance in a number of respects. In an age of political celebrity, their public profiles dominate those of senior colleagues and even of their parties. Moreover, in line with the trend towards ‘presidentialism’ (examined in Chapter 9), leaders are increasingly expected to determine their parties’ ideological direction and to deliver electoral success.
However, they are by no means all-powerful. The fact that leaders act as a kind of ‘brand image’ for their parties is a source of vulnerability as well as strength. There is an increasing tendency for ‘failed’ leaders to be removed or encouraged to stand down. The Conservatives, for instance, had no fewer than four leaders in the nine years after John Major resigned – William Hague (1997–2001), Iain Duncan Smith (2001–03), Michael Howard (2003–05) and David Cameron (since 2005). The Liberal Democrats had three leaders in the decade after 2005 – Charles Kennedy (until 2006), Menzies Campbell (2006–07) and Nick Clegg (2007–15). (See Chapter 4 for a discussion of the factors that affect parties’ electoral success.)
Parliamentary parties
The popular image of parliamentary parties is that, being subject to a system of party discipline, they are mere ‘lobby fodder’: troops ready to be pushed through the division lobbies on the instructions of their leaders. Nevertheless, trends dating back to the 1970s suggest that MPs have generally become less deferential and more independently minded. This has been reflected in a decline of party unity, which can lead to splits and divisions that, in turn, weaken the authority of the leader. Margaret Thatcher’s removal in 1990 demonstrates the ultimate power that parliamentary parties have over their leaders, and Major’s position was seriously undermined by a series of backbench revolts, mainly over Europe. The 1922 Committee (the committee of Conservative backbenchers) and the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) may therefore play a significant role in upholding or challenging the parliamentary leadership. As far as the PLP is concerned, it has the additional power of electing the members of Labour’s shadow cabinet when the party is in opposition.
Members and constituency parties
The influence of constituency parties and party members is difficult to evaluate. On the one hand, a pattern of falling membership in recent decades and an associated decline in the ranks of party activists suggests that constituency parties have become less important. Furthermore, the growing tendency for the major parties to develop policy through policy committees, forums and task forces has generally strengthened the control that parliamentary leaders exercise over policy development, while creating an impression of consultation and wider debate. In the Labour Party, such strategies have effectively robbed the party conference of its traditional policy-making role.
Conservative leaders are elected as follows:
• In the case of a vacancy, candidates can be nominated by any two Conservative MPs. Where there is no vacancy, a leadership contest can be initiated by the parliamentary party passing a vote of no confidence in the present leader. This is called if 15 per cent of Conservative MPs write to the chairman of the 1922 Committee.
• If more than two candidates stand, MPs hold a series of ballots to reduce the number to two. On each round, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. If two candidates stand, the election immediately proceeds to a ballot of all party members. If only one candidate stands (as happened in 2003), he or she is elected uncontested.
• All paid-up party members are then eligible to vote for one of the two remaining candidates. The candidate who tops the poll is declared the leader.
Labour leaders are elected as follows:
• In the case of a vacancy, nominations must be supported by 15 per cent of the PLP. Where there is no vacancy, nominations must be supported by 20 per cent of the PLP.
• Voting takes place in a single section, comprising party members, affiliated supporters and registered supporters.
• Votes are cast by each individual and counted on the basis of one person one vote.
• Voting is by preferential ballot, using the alternative vote system, or AV (see p. 68).
• If no candidate receives more than half the vote, the least popular candidate drops out, with his or her votes being redistributed until one candidate achieves 50 per cent.
Liberal Democrat leaders are elected as follows:
• Candidates for the leadership of the Liberal Democrats must be supported by 10 per cent of the parliamentary party plus 200 party members drawn from at least 20 constituencies. There is no limit to the number of candidates and MPs can nominate more than one candidate.
• The election is decided by all individual members of the Liberal Democrats in a postal ballot.
• Voting is conducted on the basis of AV.
On the other hand, constituency parties and ordinary members have retained, or even enlarged, their power in other respects. Conservative constituency associations, for instance, have maintained a high degree of autonomy in the selection of parliamentary candidates, even though the process has become more centrally controlled in the Labour Party (not least through the imposition of all-women shortlists in half of all ‘winnable’ seats before the 1997 and 2005 elections). Nevertheless, the clearest demonstration of internal party democracy is in the role that individual party members now play in the election of party leaders (see p. 114). The significance of this can be judged by the role that an influx of new members into the Labour Party from 2015 onwards played in bringing about the ‘Corbyn revolution’. This, in turn, sparked a civil war in the party between its MPs and its leader and members (see p. 138).
Party backers
Some argue that the real power within political parties lies not with people who have formal positions of influence (leaders, MPs, constituency activists, and so on), but with the people who fund the party, those who provide campaign and political finance. Critics have long alleged that Labour has, in effect, been controlled by the trade unions that provide the bulk of the party’s funds (Labour’s dependence on the unions has declined in recent years, but they still provide about 77 per cent of all donations to the party). The Conservatives are similarly open to the allegation that their major business backers (such as brewers, tobacco companies and construction companies) exert undue influence over the process of policy development.
Recurrent charges of ‘sleaze’ and corruption, levelled at both Conservative and Labour governments (for example, ‘cash for questions’ and ‘cash for honours’), have also kept alive the idea that rich individuals can buy influence within parties. Such scandals have led to new rules on party funding, administered by the Electoral Commission (see p. 37), which, amongst other things, place limits on campaign spending and require the public disclosure of donations over £5,000. The presence of a number of major Conservative donors in Cameron’s resignation honours list in 2016 nevertheless suggests that problems persist. Some, as a result, argue that concerns that persist related to party finance can only properly be addressed by the introduction of state funding, as occurs widely in continental Europe (see ‘State funding of political parties’, p. 116).
THE CHANGING PARTY SYSTEM
Political parties are important not only because of the range of functions they carry out, but also because the relationships between and amongst them are crucial in structuring the way the political system works in practice. These relationships are called a party system. The traditional view of UK politics is that it is dominated by a two-party system (see p. 117). Just as the 19th century was characterised by a Conservative–Liberal two-party system, so the 20th century was characterised by a Conservative–Labour two-party system. In fact, this image has often been misleading. The Conservatives, for example, were the dominant party for much of the 20th century, with neither the Liberals nor Labour being able effectively to challenge them in the interwar period in particular. Nevertheless, an archetypal two-party system did exist between 1945 and 1970. During this period, Conservative and Labour parties consistently won over 90 per cent of the vote and also dominated the House of Commons with over 90 per cent of MPs. Power alternated four times, with the average electoral gap between the parties being only 4 per cent. However, even during this period, two-partyism was called into question during the 13 years of continuous Conservative rule during 1951–64.
UK political parties receive relatively limited public funding for various purposes, including supporting long-term policy development and assisting opposition parties in carrying out their business. However, pressure to introduce a proper system of state funding has increased as funding and financial scandals have become more common. The issue, nevertheless, remains controversial.
Benefits of state funding:
• It would reduce parties’ dependence on vested interests and allow them to be more responsive to the views of party members and voters. This would make parties more democratically responsive.
• It would create a more level playing field for the parties, removing the unfair advantages that some parties derive from the simple fact that they have wealthy backers.
• It would improve the performance of parties generally, allowing them to carry out their roles more effectively; and to waste less time and energy on fund raising.
Drawbacks of state funding:
• In providing parties with a reliable source of income, it may weaken their links to the larger society. These are brought about by the need to seek financial support as well as electoral support.
• It may create a bias in favour of existing parties if (as is usual) the level of state funding reflects past party performance.
• It may reduce the independence of parties, making them, in effect, part of the state machine and less likely to advance policies that run counter to the interests of important state bodies.
Two-party politics was once portrayed as the surest way of reconciling representative government with effective government. Its key advantage is that it makes possible a system of party government, supposedly characterised by stability, choice and accountability. The two major parties are able to offer the electorate a straightforward choice between rival programmes and alternative governments. Voters can support a party knowing that, if it wins the election, it will have the capacity to carry out its manifesto promises without having to negotiate or compromise with coalition partners. The two-party system was also praised for delivering strong but accountable government, based on competition between the governing and opposition parties. Two-partyism, moreover, created a bias in favour of moderation. As the two contenders for power battled for the support of ‘floating’ voters, they were drawn to the centre ground. This helps to explain why a social-democratic consensus prevailed in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s (as discussed later in the chapter).
A two-party system is a system that is dominated by two ‘major’ parties that have a roughly equal prospect of winning government power. In its classical form, a two-party system can be identified by three features:
• Although a number of ‘minor’ parties may exist, only two parties enjoy sufficient electoral and parliamentary strength to have a realistic chance of winning government power
• The larger of the two parties is able to rule alone (usually on the basis of a parliamentary majority); the other party provides the opposition
• Power alternates regularly between these parties; both are ‘electable’, the opposition serving as a ‘government in the wings’.
However, the two-party system started to break down from 1974 onwards, with revived support for the ‘third’ party (the Liberals, then the Liberal-SDP Alliance (1983–87) and finally the Liberal Democrats). This shift was signalled by the outcome of the February 1974 election, which resulted in a ‘hung’ Parliament and the formation of a minority Labour government. During 1974–97, the UK had a kind of two-and-a-half-party system. This occurred as a result of significant shifts in voting behaviour associated with class dealignment (see p. 92) and partisan dealignment. The impact of these electoral shifts was nevertheless masked by the majoritarian tendencies of the ‘first-past-the-post’ electoral system (see p. 65). Indeed, the main political manifestation of these shifts was the long period of Conservative rule during 1979–97. Conservative dominance during this time was largely a consequence of the divided nature of the non-Conservative vote. The Labour Party, in particular, appeared to be in long-term decline, not only losing the support of working-class voters, but also being damaged by the shrinkage of the ‘traditional’ working class.
Since 1997, two-partyism in the UK has given way to multiple or overlapping party systems, which operate in different ways at different levels. Many of these, moreover, are multiparty systems (see p. 118). Two-partyism continued (thanks to the Westminster electoral system) to operate within the House of Commons. But, even there, it is distorted by the fact that Labour was in power continuously between 1997 and 2010. Two-partyism nevertheless suffered a major blow when the 2010 general election led to a ‘hung’ Parliament and the formation of a coalition government (see p. 75). This reflected a long-term decline in combined support for the Conservative and Labour parties, down to 65 per cent in 2010. Whereas in February 1974, there were just 38 MPs from parties other than Labour and the Conservatives, in 2010 there were 85. Although the combined number of Conservative and Labour MPs in 2015 rose marginally (by 2), this was the first election in which parties other than Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats (in their various incarnations) together won over a quarter of the vote. Elsewhere, the picture is more complex and diverse. This has happened for a number of reasons:
• Devolution has made nationalist parties more prominent, turning them from being ‘minor’ Westminster parties into ‘major’ parties in Scotland and Wales, and, in the case of the SNP at least, giving them the potential to influence the formative of government at Westminster.
• The use of proportional electoral systems for newly created bodies since 1997 has improved ‘third’ and minor party representation, also underlining the extent to which two-partyism was maintained by ‘first-past-the-post’ elections.
• New issues have emerged that cut across traditional party-political battle lines, such as Europe, the environment and war. This has given impetus to parties such as the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), the Green Party and, in 2005 in particular, Respect.
Evidence of multipartyism is now widespread. The 2014 European Parliament election saw UKIP emerge as the largest party and MEPs being elected from ten different parties. The Scottish Parliament was controlled until 2007 by a Labour– Liberal Democrat coalition, but a minority SNP administration was then formed, with a majority SNP government being elected in 2011. The Welsh Assembly has had four different types of government: a majority Labour administration, a minority Labour administration, a Labour–Liberal Democrat coalition and a grand coalition between Labour and Plaid Cymru. In Northern Ireland, where quite different parties compete for power, a power sharing executive controlled by the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Féin has been in power since 2007 on the basis of a Northern Ireland Assembly in which no party has overall control.
Key concept ... MULTIPARTY SYSTEM
A multiparty system is a party system in which more than two parties compete for power.
Multiparty systems can be identified by three factors:
• No single party enjoys sufficient electoral or parliamentary strength to have a realistic prospect of winning government power alone. This means that the distinction between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ parties often becomes irrelevant.
• Governments tend to be either coalitions (see p. 75) or minority administrations. This can either create a bias in favour of compromise and consensus-building or it can lead to fractured and unstable government.
• Government power can shift both following elections and between elections as coalition partnerships break down or are renegotiated.
PARTY IDEAS AND POLICIES
LEFT AND RIGHT
Political ideas and beliefs are often categorised on the basis that they are either ‘left-wing’ or ‘right-wing’. These terms date back to the French Revolution and the seating arrangements adopted by the different groups at the first meeting of the Estates General (roughly equivalent to Parliament) in 1789. Supporters of the king and the traditional social order sat on the right of the assembly, and the opponents sat on the left. Although the terms left and right do not have exact meanings, they tend to summarise different attitudes to the economy and the role of the state. Left-wingers generally support social welfare and economic intervention, and in extreme cases (communists or the ‘far left’) they believe that all property should be owned collectively by the state. Right-wingers, by contrast, wish to ‘roll back the state’ and support a free-market or unregulated capitalism. This can be illustrated by the traditional, linear left/right political spectrum.
Left: Political ideas that are based on generally optimistic views about human nature and favour social change; left-wingers tend to support liberty, equality and state intervention.
Right: Political ideas that tend to be pessimistic about human nature and oppose change; right-wingers typically favour order, authority and oppose state intervention.
Capitalism: An economic system in which wealth is owned privately and economic life is organised according to the market.
In the UK, the left/right divide has traditionally been portrayed as a battle between two contrasting ideologies, socialism (see p. 122) and conservatism (see p. 124), with liberalism (see p. 120) somehow standing between them. In turn, these ideologies have been represented by political parties that have dominated UK politics since the early 20th century, the Labour and Conservative parties. Socialism has traditionally been viewed as the ideology of the Labour Party, and conservatism has traditionally been seen as the ideology of the Conservative Party. These two parties therefore had, to a greater or lesser extent, a ‘programmatic’ character. They developed policies on the basis of a vision of how they believed society should be organised. This vision was always defined in very general terms, allowing both major parties to be ‘broad churches’ and, when in power, to respond more to practical pressures than to ideological beliefs. Nevertheless, both parties had a sense of what they ‘stood for’. This was underpinned by the class basis of their support. As discussed in Chapter 3, working-class voters tended to vote Labour and middle-class voters tended to vote Conservative.
Ideology: An ‘ism’, a more or less coherent set of ideas, values and theories that help to explain the world and guide political action.
• Individualism: Individualism is the core principle of liberal ideology. It reflects a belief in the supreme importance of the human individual as opposed to any social group or collective body. Human beings are seen, first and foremost, as individuals. This implies both that they are of equal moral worth and that they possess separate and unique identities. The liberal goal is therefore to construct a society within which individuals can flourish and develop, each pursuing ‘the good’ as he or she defines it, to the best of his or her abilities. This has contributed to the view that liberalism is morally neutral, in the sense that it lays down a set of rules that allow individuals to make their own moral decisions.
• Freedom: Individual freedom or liberty (the two terms are interchangeable), is the core value of liberalism; it is given priority over, say, equality, justice or authority. This arises naturally from a belief in the individual and the desire to ensure that each person is able to act as he or she pleases or chooses. Nevertheless, liberals advocate ‘freedom under the law’, as they recognise that one person’s liberty may be a threat to the liberty of others; liberty may become licence. They therefore endorse the ideal that individuals should enjoy the maximum possible liberty consistent with a like liberty for all.
• Reason: Liberals believe that the world has a rational structure, and that this can be uncovered through the exercise of human reason and by critical enquiry. This inclines them to place their faith in the ability of individuals to make wise judgements on their own behalf, being, in most cases, the best judges of their own interests. It also encourages liberals to believe in progress and the capacity of human beings to resolve their differences through debate and argument, rather than bloodshed and war.
• Equality: Individualism implies a belief in foundational equality: that is, the belief that individuals are ‘born equal’, at least in terms of moral worth. This is reflected in a liberal commitment to equal rights and entitlements, notably in the form of legal equality (‘equality before the law’) and political equality (‘one person, one vote; one vote, one value’). However, as individuals do not possess the same levels of talent or willingness to work, liberals do not endorse social equality or an equality of outcome. Rather, they favour equality of opportunity (a ‘level playing field’) that gives all individuals an equal chance to realise their unequal potential. Liberals therefore support the principle of meritocracy, with merit reflecting, crudely, talent plus hard work.
• Toleration: Liberals believe that toleration (that is, forbearance: the willingness of people to allow others to think, speak and act in ways of which they disapprove) is both a guarantee of individual liberty and a means of social enrichment. They believe that pluralism, in the form of moral, cultural and political diversity, is positively healthy: it promotes debate and intellectual progress by ensuring that all beliefs are tested in a free market of ideas. Liberals, moreover, tend to believe that there is a balance or natural harmony between rival views and interests, and thus usually discount the idea of irreconcilable conflict.
• Consent: In the liberal view, authority and social relationships should always be based on consent or willing agreement. Government must therefore be based on the ‘consent of the governed’. This is a doctrine that encourages liberals to favour representation and democracy, notably in the form of liberal democracy. Similarly, social bodies and associations are formed through contracts willingly entered into by individuals intent on pursuing their own self-interest. In this sense, authority arises ‘from below’ and is always grounded in legitimacy.
• Constitutionalism: Although liberals see government as a vital guarantee of order and stability in society, they are constantly aware of the danger that government may become a tyranny against the individual (‘power tends to corrupt’ (Lord Acton)). They therefore believe in limited government. This goal can be attained through the fragmentation of government power, by the creation of checks and balances amongst the various institutions of government, and by the establishment of a codified or ‘written’ constitution embodying a bill of rights that defines the relationship between the state and the individual.
Progress: Moving forwards; the belief that history is characterised by human advancement based on the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom.
Meritocracy: Rule by the talented; the principle that rewards and positions should be distributed on the basis of ability.
However, the relevance of this traditional left/right battle between socialism and conservatism has declined in recent years in a number of ways:
Figure 5.1 The left/right political spectrum
• During the 1980s, the Conservative Party went through a period of major ideological upheaval. The party’s traditionally non-ideological approach to politics was upset by an upsurge in ‘conviction politics ’ in the form of Thatcherism (see p. 126). Some within the party argued that this had led to an abandonment of traditional conservatism in favour of free-market or classical liberalism.
• The Labour Party has also changed, as a process of ‘modernisation’ accelerated during the 1990s, leading to the birth of so-called New Labour. Many have asserted that New Labour, in effect, ditched the party’s core values and broke any remaining link between the Labour Party and socialism. However, since 2010, New Labour thinking has been marginalised within the party.
• Ideology itself may have become less important. Until the advent of Corbyn and Brexit, Labour and the Conservatives had no longer appeared to be programmatic parties but ‘post-ideological’ catch-all parties. They were willing to adopt policies on the basis of ‘what works’ or ‘what is popular’, rather than on the basis of a long-term strategy or an ideological vision.
• Many modern political issues cut across the traditional left/right (pro-state versus anti-state) political spectrum. Examples include the environment, women’s rights, homosexuality, abortion, cloning, immigration, multiculturalism, terrorism, and so on. Some therefore believe that an authoritarian/libertarian (strong state versus personal freedom) axis needs to be added to the left/right (state intervention versus the free market) spectrum:
Conviction politics: A style of politics in which the policies of parties are shaped by the ideological convictions of their leaders.
Party ideology in the post-1945 period has gone through a number of phases:
Post-war social democracy
Thatcherism
Post-Thatcherite consensus
Ideas and policies in the ‘age of austerity’.
• Community: The core of socialism is the vision of human beings as social creatures linked by the existence of a common humanity. As the poet John Donne put it, ‘no man is an Island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main’. This refers to the importance of community, and it highlights the degree to which individual identity is fashioned by social interaction and membership of social groups and collective bodies. Socialists are inclined to emphasise nurture over nature, and to explain individual behaviour mainly in terms of social factors, rather than innate qualities.
• Fraternity: As human beings share a common humanity, they are bound together by a sense of comradeship or fraternity (literally meaning ‘brotherhood’, but broadened in this context to embrace all humans). This encourages socialists to prefer cooperation to competition, and to favour collectivism over individualism. In this view, cooperation enables people to harness their collective energies and strengthens the bonds of community, while competition pits individuals against each other, breeding resentment, conflict and hostility.
• Social equality: Equality is the central value of socialism. Socialism is sometimes portrayed as a form of egalitarianism, the belief in the primacy of equality over other values. In particular, socialists emphasise the importance of social equality, an equality of outcome as opposed to equality of opportunity. They believe that a measure of social equality is the essential guarantee of social stability and cohesion, encouraging individuals to identify with their fellow human beings. It also provides the basis for the exercise of legal and political rights. However, socialists disagree about the extent to which social equality can and should be brought about. While Marxists have believed in absolute social equality, brought about by the collectivisation of production wealth, social democrats have favoured merely narrowing material inequalities, often being more concerned with equalising opportunities than outcomes.
• Need: Sympathy for equality also reflects the socialist belief that material benefits should be distributed on the basis of need, rather than simply on the basis of merit or work. The classic formulation of this principle is found in Marx’s communist principle of distribution: ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’. This reflects the belief that the satisfaction of basic needs (hunger, thirst, shelter, health, personal security and so on) is a prerequisite for a worthwhile human existence and participation in social life. Clearly, however, distribution according to need requires people to be motivated by moral incentives, rather than just material ones.
• Social class: Socialism has often been associated with a form of class politics. First, socialists have tended to analyse society in terms of the distribution of income or wealth, and they have thus seen social class as a significant (usually the most significant) social cleavage. Second, socialism has traditionally been associated with the interests of an oppressed and exploited working class (however defined), and it has traditionally regarded the working class as an agent of social change, even social revolution. Nevertheless, class divisions are remediable: the socialist goal is either the eradication of economic and social inequalities, or their substantial reduction.
• Common ownership: The relationship between socialism and common ownership has been deeply controversial. Some see it as the end of socialism itself, and others see it instead simply as a means of generating broader equality. The socialist case for common ownership (in the form of either Soviet-style state collectivisation, or selective nationalisation (a ‘mixed economy’)) is that it is a means of harnessing material resources to the common good, with private property being seen to promote selfishness, acquisitiveness and social division. Modern socialism, however, has moved away from this narrow concern with the politics of ownership.
Figure 5.2 The two-dimensional political spectrum
The ideological identity of the Labour Party, and the nature of British socialism, were deeply influenced by the reforms enacted by the Attlee governments, 1945–51. These reforms gave rise to a particular brand of socialism, best referred to as social democracy. Social democracy is a ‘revisionist’, even ‘watered down’, form of socialism. Instead of trying to abolish capitalism, as socialists in the Marxist or communist tradition had wanted to do, social democrats sought instead to reform or ‘humanise’ it. Such a position was based on a kind of compromise – the social-democratic compromise – which recognised both the strengths and drawbacks of a capitalist or market economy. On the one hand, capitalism was accepted as the only reliable means of generating wealth (because of the profit motive, competition and incentives), but it was seen as a very poor means of distributing wealth (because the wealthy would get wealthier and the poor would get poorer). Therefore, socialism, in the form of social democracy, was reborn as an attempt to create greater equality within a capitalist society, by redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor. This is reflected in the overriding principle of social democracy: social justice.
Social justice: A morally justifiable distribution of wealth, usually implying a desire to reduce material inequalities (rather than absolute equality).
Social democracy came to be associated with three key policies:
• A mixed economy. A programme of nationalisation created a ‘mixed’ economy, an economy made up of both publicly and privately owned industries and enterprises. The Attlee government nationalised industries including coal, steel, ship building, the railways, gas and electricity.
• Economic management. A managed economy is an economy that is regulated by the government. The idea that the economy should be managed was advanced by the economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946). Keynesianism reflects the belief that governments achieve full employment and stimulate growth by ‘reflating’ the economy through higher levels of public spending.
• Comprehensive social welfare. Under Attlee, the welfare state was expanded on the basis of the Beveridge Report (1942), written by the economist and social reformer, William Beveridge (1879–1963). The Beveridge Report set out to attack the so-called ‘five giants’:
• Want (poverty)
• Disease (illness)
• Ignorance (lack of education)
• Squalor (poor housing)
• Idleness (unemployment).
Nationalisation: The extension of state control over the economy through the transfer of industries from private ownership to public ownership.
• Tradition: The central theme of conservative thought, ‘the desire to conserve’, is closely linked to the perceived virtues of tradition, respect for established customs, and institutions that have endured through time. In this view, tradition reflects the accumulated wisdom of the past, and institutions and practices that have been ‘tested by time’, and it should be preserved for the benefit of the living and for generations yet to come. Tradition also has the virtue of promoting a sense of social and historical belonging.
• Pragmatism: Conservatives have traditionally emphasised the limitations of human rationality, which arise from the infinite complexity of the world in which we live. Abstract principles and systems of thought are therefore distrusted, and instead faith is placed in experience, history and, above all, pragmatism: the belief that action should be shaped by practical circumstances and practical goals, that is, by ‘what works’. Conservatives have thus preferred to describe their own beliefs as an ‘attitude of mind’ or an ‘approach to life’, rather than as an ideology, although they reject the idea that this amounts to unprincipled opportunism.
• Human imperfection: The conservative view of human nature is broadly pessimistic. In this view, human beings are limited, dependent, and security-seeking creatures, drawn to the familiar and the tried and tested, and needing to live in stable and orderly communities. In addition, individuals are morally corrupt: they are tainted by selfishness, greed and the thirst for power. The roots of crime and disorder therefore reside within the human individual rather than in society. The maintenance of order therefore requires a strong state, the enforcement of strict laws, and stiff penalties.
• Organicism: Instead of seeing society as an artefact that is a product of human ingenuity, conservatives have traditionally viewed society as an organic whole, or living entity. Society is thus structured by natural necessity, with its various institutions, or the ‘fabric of society’ (families, local communities, the nation and so on), contributing to the health and stability of society. The whole is more than a collection of its individual parts. Shared (often ‘traditional’) values and a common culture are also seen as being vital to the maintenance of the community and social cohesion.
• Hierarchy: In the conservative view, gradations of social position and status are natural and inevitable in an organic society. These reflect the differing roles and responsibilities of, for example, employers and workers, teachers and pupils, and parents and children. Nevertheless, in this view, hierarchy and inequality do not give rise to conflict, because society is bound together by mutual obligations and reciprocal duties. Indeed, as a person’s ‘station in life’ is determined largely by luck and the accident of birth, the prosperous and privileged acquire a particular responsibility of care for the less fortunate.
• Authority: Conservatives hold that, to some degree, authority is always exercised ‘from above’, providing leadership guidance and support for those who lack the knowledge, experience or education to act wisely in their own interests (an example being the authority of parents over children). Although the idea of a natural aristocracy was once influential, authority and leadership are now more commonly seen as resulting from experience and training. The virtue of authority is that it is a source of social cohesion, giving people a clear sense of who they are and what is expected of them. Freedom must therefore coexist with responsibility; it therefore consists largely of a willing acceptance of obligations and duties.
• Property: Conservatives see property ownership as being vital because it gives people security and a measure of independence from government, and it encourages them to respect the law and the property of others. Property is also an exteriorisation of people’s personalities, in that they ‘see’ themselves in what they own: their houses, their cars, and so on. However, property ownership involves duties as well as rights. In this view, we are, in a sense, merely custodians of property that has either been inherited from past generations (‘the family silver’), or may be of value to future ones.
Natural aristocracy: The idea that talent and leadership are innate or inbred qualities that cannot be acquired through effort or self-advancement.
Social democracy is an ideological stance that supports a broad balance between a capitalist or market economy on the one hand and state intervention on the other. Although some see social democracy as a betrayal of socialism (because it accepts the continuing need for capitalism), others view it as the only practicable form of socialism. The key goal of social democracy is reformed or ‘humanised’ capitalism, based on the economic efficiency that only capitalism can deliver and an enduring socialist belief in equality and social justice.
The expanded welfare state, based on a comprehensive system of social security and a National Health Service (NHS), sought to protect citizens ‘from the cradle to the grave’. It brought about a major redistribution of wealth, as it was funded by a system of progressive taxation.
Progressive taxation: A system of taxation in which the rich pay proportionally more in tax than the poor, usually based on graduated direct taxes.
However, these social democratic ideas and policies were soon accepted across the political spectrum in the UK. By 1950, the Conservatives had come to accept the key reforms introduced by the Attlee Labour governments. This created a period of consensus politics that lasted through the 1950s and 1960s. This ideological shift was brought about by the prominence of One Nation thinking within the party, making the Conservatives more sympathetic to social reform, having a pragmatic approach to economic policy. The central idea in Conservative politics during this period was the notion of the ‘middle way’, championed in the writings of Harold Macmillan who later became prime minister, 1957–63. The ‘middle way’ rejected the two ideological extremes, free-market liberalism and socialist state planning, attempting to draw a balance between rampant individualism and overbearing collectivism.
Consensus politics: An overlap of ideological positions between two or more political parties; an agreement about fundamental policy goals that permits disagreement on matters of detail or emphasis.
Individualism: A belief in the primacy of the human individual, implying that people are self-interested and largely self-reliant.
Collectivism: A belief in people working together and supporting one another, often (but not necessarily) linked to state intervention.
Key concept ... ONE NATION CONSERVATISM
One Nation conservatism is a pragmatic and paternalistic form of conservatism that was prominent during the 1950s and 1960s. One Nation ideas can be traced back to the early writings of Benjamin Disraeli, who was prime minister in 1867 and again in 1874–80. Disraeli warned against the danger of Britain being divided into ‘two nations: the Rich and the Poor’. His call for social reform to narrow (but not remove) social inequalities was based on the principles of paternalism. The rich therefore have an obligation to attend to the needs of the poor.
Paternalism: Acting in the interests of others who are unable to make informed moral decisions, supposedly as fathers do in relation to children.
THATCHERISM
The post-1945 social-democratic consensus broke down during the 1970s as the ‘long boom’ of the 1950s and 1960s came to an end and the UK suffered from renewed economic problems. Unemployment rose and prices also increased, creating the problem of ‘stagflation’ (a combination of economic stagnation and inflation). This brought about the ‘Thatcherite revolution’, initiated by the Thatcher governments of 1979–90, and consolidated by the Major governments of 1990–97. What became known as the New Right, and in the UK was more commonly called ‘Thatcherism’, amounted to a kind of counter-revolution against both the post-war drift towards state intervention and the spread of liberal or progressive social values. It constituted the most important shift in the ideological balance of UK politics since 1945.
Key concept … THATCHERISM
Thatcherism is an ideological agenda that was associated with the ideas and values of Margaret Thatcher and the policies of her government, 1979–90. Thatcherism does not so much constitute a coherent and systematic philosophy as an attempt to marry two distinct traditions. Although there is political and ideological tension between these two traditions, they can be combined in support of the goal of a strong but minimal state: in Andrew Gamble’s (1994) words, ‘the free economy and the strong state’.
The two elements within Thatcherism are:
• Neoliberalism (sometimes called ‘economic Thatcherism’). This is an updated version of classical liberalism. Its central pillars are the free market and the self-reliant individual.
• Neoconservatism (sometimes called ‘social Thatcherism’). This is a form of authoritarian conservatism that calls for a restoration of order, authority and discipline in society.
Free market: The principle or policy of unrestricted market competition, free from government interference.
The principal goal of Thatcherism in its neoliberal or economic guise is to ‘roll back the frontiers of the state’, in the belief that unregulated capitalism would lead to efficiency, growth and widespread prosperity. It wishes to remove the ‘dead hand’ of government from economic life. Its other enemy was the ‘nanny state’, the welfare system that undermines hard work and initiative by creating a culture of dependency. The ‘Thatcherite revolution’ thus set out to overturn the key features of post-war social democracy.
The central themes of ‘economic Thatcherism’ are:
• Privatisation. The ‘mixed’ economy was transformed by the privatisation of most of the industries that had been nationalised during the 20th century; examples included telecommunications, gas, electricity, water, steel, buses and railways. The state, therefore, lost direct control of major UK industries.
• Reduced union power. The ‘problem’ of trade union power was tackled by a series of laws that restricted the ability of unions to take industrial action. The miners were also taken on and defeated in a year-long strike, 1984–85. Such measures both created a more flexible labour market and led to the growth of a low-wage and low-skill economy in many sectors.
• Low taxes. Although Thatcherism failed in its broader goal of reducing the overall level of taxation, it brought about a significant shift in the tax burden from direct taxes (e.g. income tax and corporation tax) to indirect taxes (e.g. VAT). This substantially reduced the progressive nature of the UK tax system and, in the process, widened inequality.
• Deregulation. In line with free market principles, the Thatcher government removed a wide range of restrictions and controls on the economy. Controls on exchange rates were ended, allowing the pound to ‘float’; financial markets were deregulated; and subsidies and supports that had propped up ‘failing’ industries were scaled down or scrapped.
Privatisation: The selling off of nationalised industries and other state assets, transferring them from the public to the private sector.
At the heart of the neoliberal ‘world view’ was a rugged or ‘atomistic’ individualism, that was best expressed by Thatcher’s statement that ‘there is no such thing as society only individuals and their families’ (suggesting that individuals, like atoms, are separate and independent entities). In many ways, these ideas and policies drew less from traditional conservatism and more from a classical liberal belief in a minimal state.
Minimal state: A state that only maintains domestic order, enforces legal agreements and protects against external attack, leaving other matters in the hands of the individual.
ONE NATION CONSERVATISM • Paternalism • Tradition • Organic society • Social duty • Pragmatic intervention • ‘Middle way’ economics |
THATCHERISM • Self-interest • Radicalism • Rugged individualism • Personal advancement • Roll back the state • Free-market economics |
Nevertheless, neoliberalism is only part of the Thatcherite or New Right picture. The other element within Thatcherism, neoconservatism, is clearly rooted within the conservative tradition. Neoconservatism advocated the establishment of a strong state, based on the ideas of social conservatism.
Social conservatism: The belief that tradition, order and a common morality provide the basis for a stable and healthy society.
The central themes of ‘social Thatcherism’ are:
• ‘Tough’ law and order. Greater emphasis was placed on maintaining public order through a fear of punishment, reflected in the belief that ‘prison works’. Custodial sentences were more widely used, prison terms were lengthened and, in some cases, ‘tougher’ prison regimes were imposed.
• Traditional values. One of the enemies of social Thatcherism was the spread of liberal or permissive values, associated in particular with the 1960s. Instead, traditional, ‘Christian’ or ‘family’ values were defended.
• National patriotism. Thatcherites placed a particular stress on strengthening national identity, seen as one of the cornerstones of political strength and social stability. Over time, this came increasingly to be expressed in the form of Euroscepticism.
Permissiveness: The willingness to allow people to make their own moral choices or to ‘do their own thing’ because there are no authoritative values.
Euroscepticism: Opposition to the process of European integration, based on a defence of national sovereignty and national identity; Eurosceptics are not necessarily anti-European.
POST-THATCHERITE CONSENSUS
The challenge of Thatcherism had profound effects on the Labour Party. In the early 1980s, it drove Labour to the left, as the party tried to protect its social democratic heritage. This led to the adoption of more radical ‘socialist’ policies, such as unilateral nuclear disarmament, withdrawal from the European Community, further nationalisation and increased investment in the welfare state. Consensus politics gave way to adversary politics, as an anti-interventionist Conservative government confronted a clearly pro-interventionist Labour opposition. However, Labour’s shift to the left opened up serious ideological divisions within the party, leading to the formation of the breakaway Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1981. (The SDP later merged with the Liberal Party to create the Liberal Democrats.) Labour’s disastrous showing in the 1983 and 1987 general elections nevertheless led to the beginning of the ‘modernisation’ process.
Adversary politics: A form of politics that is characterised by deep ideological conflicts between major parties; the parties offer rival ideological visions.
Clause Four of Labour’s 1918 constitution contains a commitment to:
the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of public administration and control of each industry and service.
Clause Four of Labour’s 1995 constitution contains the following commitment:
[We] work for a dynamic economy, serving the public interest in which the enterprise of the market and the rigour of competition are joined with the forces of partnership and co-operation to produce the wealth the nation needs and the opportunity for all to work and prosper, with a thriving private sector and high quality public services.
Under Neil Kinnock, party leader 1987–92, Labour undertook a comprehensive policy review, which abandoned policies such as unilateral nuclear disarmament and the commitment to withdraw from the then EC. However, the modernisation process was substantially intensified after Tony Blair’s appointment as leader in 1994. A key moment in this process came with the adoption, in 1995, of a rewritten Clause Four of the party’s constitution, which effectively ditched Labour’s commitment to public ownership. To symbolise this ideological shift, Blair started to refer to the party as ‘New Labour’, thereby distancing it from its old image, ideas and policies.
What became known as ‘Blairism’, the ‘Blair project’ or the ‘third way ’ was a complex and, in many ways, contradictory phenomenon. Seen by some as ‘Thatcherism with a human face’, it sought to blend a market-orientated economic strategy with continued support for public services. Although it has been argued that there was a shift back to Old Labour priorities after Gordon Brown replaced Blair in June 2007, Blair and Brown were the joint architects of New Labour, and the New Labour project remained in place until 2010 (even though the term New Labour had become less and less fashionable).
Third way: The idea of an alternative to both ‘top-down’ Keynesian social democracy and the free-market policies of Thatcherism.
The chief themes of the New Labour project were as follows:
• Market economics. As the revised Clause Four indicated, Labour came to accept that the economy should be regulated by the market and not by the state. Blairism therefore built on Thatcherism and did not try to reverse it. This particularly applied in relation to the core elements of economic Thatcherism – privatisation, reduced union power, lower taxes and deregulation.
• Constitutional reform. A major distinction between Old Labour and New Labour was the latter’s enthusiasm for reforming the constitution. During Blair’s first government, 1997–2001, a bold series of constitutional reforms were introduced (see Chapter 7). However, many have argued that Labour’s conversion to constitutional liberalism was only partial. For example, plans to consider alternatives to the Westminster voting system were quickly dropped and enthusiasm for constitutional reform declined after 2001.
• ‘Third way’ welfare. Blair’s approach to welfare was different from both the Thatcherite emphasis on ‘standing on your own two feet’ and the social-democratic belief in ‘cradle to grave’ support. This was reflected in the wider use of ‘targeted’ benefits (as opposed to ‘universal’ benefits), an emphasis on the idea of ‘welfare-to-work ’ and attempts to reform the public services. Blair’s belief in welfare reform was based on what has been called ‘social entrepreneurialism’, the idea that the public services should be more market-orientated and consumer responsive.
• Strengthening responsibility. A key Blairite belief was the idea that rights should always be balanced against responsibilities. In this sense, Blairism was influenced by communitarianism. The desire to strengthen social duty and moral responsibilities was reflected in, for example, the so-called ‘respect agenda’, under which new public order laws were introduced (including ASBOs), the prison population rose steeply and a series of new anti-terrorism laws were passed.
Welfare-to-work: Welfare programmes that boost employability skills and provide incentives for people to work.
Communitarianism: The belief that people are happier and more secure if they live within communities that have clear values and a strong culture.
NEW LABOUR • Pragmatic • ‘Big tent’ politics • Market economy • Social inclusion • Targeted benefits • Welfare-to-work • Constitutional reform |
OLD LABOUR • Ideological • Working class • Managed economy • Social justice • Universal benefits • Cradle-to-grave welfare • Traditional constitution |
IDEAS AND POLICIES IN THE ‘AGE OF AUSTERITY’
CONSERVATIVE IDEAS AND POLICIES
Conservatives under Cameron
David Cameron was elected Conservative Party leader in December 2005. However, Cameron took over the leadership at a particularly difficult time. Having been the dominant force in UK politics throughout the twentieth century, the Conservatives had fallen on hard times. Party membership had fallen steadily. Business funding that the Conservatives could once have relied upon had seeped away to the Labour Party. Most importantly, the party had become electoral poison. Not only had the Conservatives lost the three previous general elections, it lost them badly. The Conservatives’ showing in the 1997, 2001 and 2005 elections were the worst for the party since 1832.
During the leadership campaign, Cameron had spoken of the need to change the party’s ‘look, feel and identity’, encouraging many to draw parallels with the thinking behind Blair’s ‘modernisation’ strategy in the Labour Party in the 1990s. In this light, Cameron expressed greater interest in green or environmental politics, and dubbed himself a ‘social liberal ’, suggesting greater commitment to health and education and a stronger concern about poverty. However, the onset of the ‘credit crunch ’ in 2007, which prefigured the more severe Crash of 2008, marked the point at which Cameron’s previous emphasis on ‘detoxifying the party’s image’ started to be modified. In the period between the crisis of September 2008 and the May 2010 general election, the Conservatives re-engaged more openly with economic Thatcherism. Thus, although all three major parties committed themselves in 2010 to reducing the budget deficit, the Conservatives alone proposed that substantial spending cuts should be imposed in the first year of the new Parliament and promised to remove the ‘structural’ deficit within the lifetime of the Parliament.
Social liberalism: A commitment to social welfare designed to promote equal opportunities and to help individuals to help themselves.
Credit crunch: A reduction in the general availability of loans (or credit), usually due to an unwillingness of banks to lend to one another.
Structural deficit: That part of a budget deficit that stems from a fundamental imbalance between the government’s tax revenues and its spending level.
In the aftermath of the formation of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition, a key part of which was the willingness of the Liberal Democrats to support the Conservative approach to deficit reduction, Cameron dubbed the new era the ‘age of austerity ’ (see p. 10). The adoption of austerity as a means of ‘re-balancing’ the economy opened up new political dividing lines, both between parties and sometimes within parties, that have shaped ideological developments in the UK ever since. The other major ideological development that occurred during the Coalition years was the strengthening of Euroscepticism within the Conservative Party. While this did not lead directly to the EU referendum (Eurosceptics remained a minority within the parliamentary party, albeit a growing one), it set the scene for Cameron to commit the party to holding such a referendum. The resurgence of Conservative Euroscepticism reflected not only deepening hostility towards the EU, in the context of the eurocrisis and the migrant crisis, but also burgeoning interest among the party in the idea of the ‘Anglosphere’, the notion of an alliance of English-speaking countries spread across the world, which could provide an alternative to the UK’s ‘European’ identity (Kenny, 2016). In many ways, the growth of Conservative Euroscepticism was part of a wider trend, in the form of the rise of right-wing populism (see p. 137) in the UK.
Austerity: Sternness or severity; as an economic strategy, ‘austerity’ refers to attempts to reduce a budget deficit through spending cuts and government contraction.
THE BIRTH OF AUSTERITY
In October 2010, in a defining moment for the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition, the Chancellor, George Osborne, announced the most radical programme of spending cuts in a generation. Some £81 billion of cuts were mapped out over the following four years. This reflected, on average, a 19 per cent cut in departmental budgets and a loss of almost three-quarters of a million public sector jobs. However, the Coalition’s goal of removing the ‘structural’ deficit by the end of the Parliament was not achieved. In the first quarter of 2015, the UK’s national debt amounted to £1.56 trillion, or 81.58 per cent of the total GDP. Still committed to austerity, the Conservative Party’s 2015 election manifesto committed the party to a further round of cuts (estimated by the Institute for Fiscal Studies at £30 billion), with a view to eliminating the deficit by 2018–19, the burden of cuts affecting, as they had done during 2010–15, the welfare state and the benefit system.
Contrasting views on the implications of austerity are based on rival accounts of the origins of the recession. Leading figures in the Conservative– Liberal Democrat coalition argued that what they referred to as ‘Labour’s debt crisis’ was essentially a consequence of the ‘reckless and irresponsible’ levels of public spending by Labour governments, particularly after 2001. If the recession and the budget deficit were a consequence of irresponsible spending levels, it was clear that the solution was to cut spending, and to do so in a swift and robust manner. This, indeed, was seen as the only way of avoiding the kind of financial crises that had brought the Greek, Irish and Portuguese economies close to collapse. Such thinking is nevertheless based on a deep faith in the natural vigour of a market economy, specifically the assumption that, as the public sector of the economy contracts, the private sector will grow.
However, those who opposed austerity tended to explain the UK’s budget deficit essentially in terms of the impact of a global recession that had been sparked by the Crash of 2008, and the resulting collapse in tax revenues. In that light, the budget deficit provided Cameron and Osborne with a political opportunity to shrink the state, in line with their continuing commitment to economic Thatcherism. Austerity could thus be viewed as an ideological choice rather than an economic necessity. Such a conclusion can be sustained by the fact that the Coalition’s cuts, and those planned to be introduced by Cameron after 2015, were more severe than those that had been implemented by many other European countries in a similar position. Critics, furthermore, argue that, in line with a Keynesian belief in economic management, austerity is counter-productive, in that it tends to weaken growth instead of strengthening growth.
Conservatives under May
Theresa May replaced Cameron as Conservative leader and prime minister in July 2016, the latter’s political career having been abruptly ended by the outcome of the EU referendum. Although the transition from Cameron to May took place in the absence of a general election and without a completed leadership election process, it precipitated two significant ideological shifts. The first of these was an attempt to distance the party from the neoliberal or free-market economic orthodoxy that had dominated Conservative politics since the days of Thatcher. Sometimes said to be inspired by Joseph Chamberlain, the radical social reformer and advocate of municipal government, who, in the 1880s, broke with the Liberals and effectively joined the Conservatives, May pledged that under her leadership the Conservative Party would serve the interests of ‘ordinary working people’, people who are ‘just managing’. To this end, she has sought to portray government as the solution, not as the problem. In the clearest attempt to date to give the shift theoretical substance, May set out her vision of the ‘shared society’, viewed as a society in which government plays a vital role in strengthening the ‘bonds and obligations’ that tie communities together. By emphasising that there is more to life than individualism and self-interest, this vision contrasts starkly with Thatcher’s assertion that ‘there is no such thing as society’, but it also differs from Cameron’s idea of the ‘big society ’, which was seen as an alternative to ‘big government’.
This change in thinking has also been reflected in a revised attitude to business and the free market. Instead of seeing private ownership and the market mechanism as the key to economic growth and social fairness, May has been critical of business, calling on it to spread prosperity more evenly and avoid scandals linked to the excessive pay of top executives and poor working conditions. These she has referred to as the ‘worst excesses of capitalism’, using language reminiscent of Ted Heath’s in the early 1970s. However, it is far from clear that this revised attitude to business goes much beyond rhetoric and affects public policy in meaningful ways. For instance, May quickly backtracked on plans announced during her leadership election campaign to require that workers be put on company boards, when these ran into resistance from big business. More fundamentally, it is questionable whether a mass of Conservative ministers and MPs, and, for that matter, May herself, have the appetite for the radical reform that the prime minister’s rhetoric sometimes implies. This is particularly the case as it appears to be modelled more closely on the structures of Christian Democratic Germany than on those of a liberal-market UK.
Big society: A controversial term that is associated with shifting service provision away from the state and towards charities and community groups.
The second ideological shift precipitated by the transition from Cameron to May was nevertheless more clear-cut. This was the transformation of the Conservative Party into a wholeheartedly Eurosceptical party. The emergence of a distinctive Eurosceptical strain within UK Conservatism can be traced back to Thatcher’s early battles with the EC over the UK’s budget rebate in the 1980s, with backbench Euroscepticism becoming increasingly prominent from the 1990s onwards (see p. 226). However, although the number of genuine Europhiles in the party progressively declined, the bulk of Conservative MPs continued to believe, if often with little enthusiasm, that the benefits of EU membership outweighed the risks of withdrawal (although by the time the 2016 EU referendum took place, Conservative MPs appeared to be split 50:50 on the issue). The referendum result nevertheless changed all this, as May realised, in basing her bid to succeed Cameron as party leader on the assumption that the referendum verdict was clear and, above all, unchallengeable. As far as the Conservative Party was concerned, Euroscepticism had thus become the only game in town. This left but one matter unresolved: the nature of the Brexit process on which the UK was embarked.
In March 2017, in advance of triggering Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, the May government published its Brexit plan in the form of a White Paper. Widely seen as a plan for a ‘hard’ Brexit (see p. 317), the White Paper set out twelve main goals. These included the UK’s withdrawal from the single market, the construction of new customs arrangements with the EU, the introduction of a system to control EU immigration, and bringing an end to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, although the need for a separate conflict-resolution mechanism for things like trade disputes was recognised.
A further attempt to map out ‘Mayism’ as a distinctive set of political ideas and policies was made in the Conservative manifesto for the June 2017 general election. Among the pledges this contained were the following:
• Brexit. The manifesto reiterated the commitments made in the Brexit plan, but added, in relation to negotiations with Brussels, that ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’.
• Immigration. Total annual net migration would be cut to below 100,000, and the levy for employing foreign workers would be increased.
• Social care. The wealth people can retain before having to pay for care would rise to £100,000; the £72,000 lifetime cap on care costs promised by Cameron would be scrapped; and the value of a person’s property would in future be included in the means test for care at home. However, amid rising criticism of what was dubbed the ‘dementia tax’ and falling poll ratings, May carried out a U-turn just four days after the manifesto’s publication, in which the commitment to cap social care costs was reinstated, albeit without a designated threshold.
• Pensions. The so-called ‘triple lock’ (under which the state pension rose annually by the higher of inflation, average earnings or 2.5 per cent) would be scrapped from 2020, and means-testing would be introduced for winter fuel payments.
• Health. Spending on the NHS would rise by at least £8 billion in real terms over five years.
• Education. An extra £4 billion a year would be pumped into the school’s budget and the ban on new selective schools would be abandoned, but the universal provision of free lunches for primary-school pupils would be dropped in favour of free breakfasts.
• Taxation. VAT would not be increased, while the income tax personal allowance would rise to £12,500 by 2020, but Cameron’s commitment not to increase rates of income tax or national insurance was dropped.
• Energy. A ‘safeguard tariff cap’ would be introduced to prevent sharp increases in gas and electricity bills.
LABOUR IDEAS AND POLICIES
Labour under Miliband
The development of Labour’s ideas and policies after Ed Miliband was elected leader in September 2010 has to be understood in the context of the Brown government’s response to the Crash of 2008. Not only did the Brown government recapitalise the UK’s banking system, a strategy that involved part-nationalisation, but it also relied on a policy of both monetary stimulus and fiscal stimulus. This last policy was dictated by Keynesian thinking, according to which the most appropriate response to a recession is for government to ‘inject’ demand into the economy through either increased spending or cuts in taxation. The resulting budget deficit can be tolerated because (in theory) it is self-correcting. The increased growth that it stimulates boosts tax revenue and reduces the need for public spending, thereby causing the deficit to shrink ‘naturally’. This, and the willingness, once again, to use nationalisation as a political tool, appear to suggest that New Labour was on the wane as Old Labour ideas and policies were returning. However, the gulf between Labour and the Conservatives in May 2010 was, though significant, more about the timing and scale of deficit reduction, rather than about whether or not the deficit needed to be addressed.
Monetary stimulus: A policy that seeks to stimulate economic growth by reducing interest rates in order to make borrowing easier.
Fiscal stimulus: A policy aimed at promoting economic growth by allowing government spending to exceed tax revenues.
Miliband’s victory in the leadership election was widely interpreted as a victory for the Brownite wing of the Labour Party over its Blairite wing. Miliband fostered this view by announcing that ‘New Labour is dead.’ The challenge that confronted Miliband as party leader was to establish an alternative to the Coalition’s budget reduction programme without allowing Labour to be attacked as ‘deficit deniers’. In this context, Miliband and his shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, were clear about the need to reduce borrowing levels, which they accepted were too high. Labour’s position was essentially that the Coalition had gone too far and too fast in reducing the deficit, broadly keeping faith with the stance the party had adopted in 2010.
In the early phase of the 2010–15 Parliament, Miliband’s central criticism of the Coalition focused on its failure to develop a strategy to promote economic growth. This hit hard as the recession proved to be deeper and more protracted than Coalition ministers had predicted, the implication being that severe spending cuts were part of the problem and not part of the solution. However, once the UK economy started to revive in 2014, Labour switched the focus of its attack to a concern about the ‘squeeze’ on living standards and the allegation that the economic recovery was benefiting the few and not the many. In the 2015 general election, Miliband and Labour committed themselves to cutting the deficit every year in order to balance the books as soon as possible, pledging also that there would be no additional borrowing for new spending. This nevertheless exposed them to the criticism that they did not take the deficit sufficiently seriously, while, at the same time, failing to reject austerity or to propose an alternative. Falling between two stools, Labour under Miliband appeared to support a kind of ‘austerity-lite’.
Labour under Corbyn
Jeremy Corbyn’s victory in the 2015 Labour leadership election was one of the most unexpected events in modern politics. After all, Corbyn was a veteran of Labour’s ‘hard’ left; he had never held ministerial or shadow ministerial office; and he had frequently been at odds with the Labour leadership. Indeed, he represented a wing of the party that had appeared to have been in virtual internal exile since the rise of New Labour. Corbyn’s success derived from a combination of Miliband’s switch to a ‘one member one vote’ leadership election process that placed the outcome squarely in the hands of party members (together with ‘affiliated supporters’ and ‘registered supporters’) and the influx into the party in the run-up to the 2015 general election, and, more crucially, in its aftermath, of large numbers of new and more radical members.
Corbyn appealed to these new members for at least three reasons. First, he was the only candidate to adopt a clearly anti-austerity stance (each of his rivals embraced some version of Miliband’s ‘fudge’ on the issue), allowing him to take advantage of a growing backlash against the politics of austerity. Second, he appeared to represent a new and more ‘authentic’ style of politics that was about principles and values, and not attempt to reduce politics to mere calculations about electoral success. Third, as a political ‘outsider’, he was not ‘tainted’ by his association with what had come to be seen in parts of the party as the morally compromised New Labour project and the ‘rudderless’ Miliband years. His vocal opposition to the 2003 Iraq War also helped him in this respect. However, the insurgency that transformed Corbyn from an inveterate backbench rebel into the Labour leader precipitated what, in effect, was a civil war between the party’s MPs and the combined forces of its leadership and grass-root members (see p. 138).
Corbyn’s election in 2015 brought about a decisive leftward shift in the Labour Party, encouraging many to draw comparisons with the policies Labour had embraced under Michael Foot’s leadership, 1980–83. The neosocialism embraced by Corbyn and his left-wing ally, shadow chancellor John McDonnell, is based on a form of left-wing populism. ‘Corbynism’ is part of a wider backlash against the advance of neoliberal globalisation, which is seen to have benefited corporate elites at the expense of ordinary working people. As such, it is linked to the transnational Occupy movement and parties such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain. As a left-wing form of populism, Corbynism nevertheless coexists with a ‘civic’ nationalism that accepts cultural diversity and is underpinned by belief in human rights (see p. 40).
Key concept … POPULISM
Portrayed variously as a political style, a political movement or an ideology, populism is based on the belief that the instincts and wishes of the people provide the principal legitimate guide to political action. Movements and parties described as populist thus typically claim to support the common people in the face of ‘corrupt’ political and economic elites. Populism is often viewed as a manifestation of anti-politics (see p. 46), reflecting, as it does, a distrust of intermediate, or ‘representative’, institutions. Contrasting types of populism are nevertheless often identified:
• Left-wing populism conceives of ‘the people’ in class terms; it tends to prioritise socio-economic concerns such as poverty, inequality and job insecurity, and is typically compatible with an inclusive view of national identity.
• Right-wing populism views ‘the people’ in narrower and often ethnically restricted terms; it is characterised by a focus on identity and tends to prioritise socio-cultural concerns such as immigration, crime and corruption.
CIVIL WAR IN THE LABOUR PARTY
In the aftermath of what critics saw as Jeremy Corbyn’s ineffective performance in support of the ‘Remain’ cause in the June 2016 EU referendum, tensions within the Labour Party that had been simmering since Corbyn’s election as party leader in September 2015, came to a head. Sparked by Corbyn’s sacking of Hilary Benn from the shadow cabinet for alleged disloyalty, some two-thirds of Labour’s shadow cabinet resigned, in an attempt to persuade Corbyn to step down as leader. When this failed, Labour MPs passed a vote of no-confidence in the leader by 172 votes to 40, (amounting to almost 80 per cent of the Parliamentary Labour Party), with 4 abstentions. But Corbyn still refused to go. Eventually, challengers to Corbyn precipitated a formal leadership election, which concluded in the September. However, Corbyn emerged from this election significantly strengthened, having received the backing of 62 per cent of party members, a higher percentage than had supported him in 2015.
Labour’s civil war was not just a struggle for power, it was also an ideological battle. It was an ideological battle both between ‘soft’ left Labour MPs and their ‘hard’ left leader, but, more deeply, between contrasting views about how the struggle for socialism should be conducted. Labour’s MPs overwhelmingly favour the principle of parliamentary socialism, under which socialism is advanced in and through Parliament, and therefore, in the UK context, by Labour MPs themselves. This implies that Labour MPs should enjoy a privileged position within the party, being the custodians of the interests of the working class. By virtue of being elected, Labour MPs not only possess popular authority but they can also claim to have a secure understanding of the needs and aspirations of working people. In this light, any Labour leader who loses the support of the Parliamentary Labour Party should surely consider his or her position, regardless of the support they may enjoy elsewhere in the party.
Corbyn and his supporters within the party nevertheless have significant misgivings about parliamentary socialism. For them, the struggle for socialism should be led by grass-root members and constituency activists, rather than by elected MPs. From this perspective, socialist parties such as the Labour Party should operate more as political movements, and less as parliamentary cliques. Although such movements should be based on constituency parties, they should extend beyond the party itself and include other progressive voices, such as, in the present context, Momentum, a left-wing campaigning group. This stance reflects a particular distrust of elected MPs, who not only live in a ‘Westminster bubble’, cut off from the people they claim to represent, but also prioritise winning and retaining power over remaining faithful to socialist principles. Parliamentarianism may therefore be the enemy of socialism.
A further attempt to spell out the nature of ‘Corbynism’ was made in the Labour manifesto for the June 2017 general election, which contained the party’s most radical tax and spending plans for 30 years. Among Labour’s specific pledges were the following:
• Taxation. Income tax would be levied at 45p on earnings of £80,000 and at 50p on earnings of £123,000, and cuts to corporation tax would be reversed.
• Education and early years. A NHS-style service for education would be established, with a commitment to increase spending on education and early years in total by more than £25 billion (the biggest single cost would come from the scrapping of university tuition fees).
• Health and social care. An extra £6 billion a year would be pumped into the NHS, and spending on social care would be boosted by £2.1 billion; hospital parking charges would be scrapped.
• Nationalisation. The railways, the Royal Mail, the water industry and, over time, the energy industries would be taken back into public ownership.
• Brexit and immigration. The outcome of the Brexit referendum was accepted, with the recognition that ‘freedom of movement’ must end; the party nevertheless looked to retain the ‘benefits’ of access to the European single market and the customs union.
• Employee rights. Zero-hours contracts and unpaid internships would be banned, and the minimum wage would rise to at least £10 an hour by 2020. All existing EU rights and protections would be retained.
• Pensions. The ‘triple lock’ on the state pension would be retained, and the pension age would be frozen at 66.
LIBERAL DEMOCRAT IDEAS AND POLICIES
The Liberal Democratic Party (usually known as the Liberal Democrats) was formed in 1987 through the merger of the Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party (SDP), which had broken away from the Labour Party in 1981. Between 1983 and 1987, the Liberals and the SDP had worked closely together under the banner of the Alliance, but this constituted little more than an arrangement for fighting general elections. The Liberal Democrats have therefore drawn on a range of ideological traditions. Although they are the party most clearly associated with liberalism, their liberalism has encompassed both a classical liberal belief in a minimal state and the free market (reminiscent of economic Thatcherism) and a modern liberal belief in social and economic intervention that sometimes resembles social democracy. Similarly, the merger between the Liberals and the SDP marked an attempt to fuse an ideology orientated around the individual and freedom with one that traditionally favoured equality and social justice.
In electoral terms, the Liberal Democrats set out to ‘break the mould of British politics’, by which they meant to overthrow the Conservative–Labour two-party system by providing a centrist alternative to the agendas of the left and the right. However, in ideological terms, the Liberal Democrats were generally viewed as a centre-left party, in part as a consequence of attempts dating back to the early twentieth century to encourage the Labour and the Liberal parties to work together in a ‘progressive alliance’, and perhaps even merge. Such trends were strengthened in the run up to the 1997 general election, as Labour Party modernisation narrowed policy differences between the two parties, especially as New Labour showed an increasing interest in constitutional reform, and Blair prepared for a possible Labour–Liberal Democrat Coalition. Indeed, after 1997, as Labour in power continued to move to the centre-ground, some in the Liberal Democrats sought to outflank Labour on the left. This was reflected in the commitment to increase income tax by one penny in the pound in order to fund education better and to abolish tuition fees for university students, as well as in opposition to the Iraq War, which broke out in 2003.
In this light, the advent of a Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition was surprising. Nevertheless, shifts in the Liberal Democrats in the run-up to the 2010 general election arguably provided an ideological basis for the coalition. Associated with The Orange Book, published in 2004, which contained significant contributions from Nick Clegg, David Laws, Chris Huhne and Vince Cable, support within the Liberal Democrats grew for a more free-market economic strategy. This aimed to shift the Liberal Democrats from the centre-left to the centre-right. After Clegg was elected party leader in 2007, these tendencies became stronger. Nevertheless, apart from dropping the plan to increase income tax, they failed to have much influence on the party’s policy programme in the run-up to the 2010 election. During the election campaign, the Liberal Democrats, in common with Labour, advocated a broadly Keynesian approach to the budget deficit. The ‘hung’ Parliament and coalition negotiations with the Conservatives provided Clegg and senior Liberal Democrats with the opportunity for a radical reappraisal of their party’s economic strategy.
• The USA is the classic example of a two-party system. Its two major parties are the Republicans and the Democrats. These parties have dominated the presidency, usually hold all of the seats in Congress and also control politics at the state level.
• However, in view of the size and diversity of US society, both parties operate as loose coalitions. They are held together by little more than the need to fight presidential elections as national political machines. This results in considerable decentralisation. Congressional parties lack the tight party discipline found amongst parliamentary parties in the UK, and state and local party organisations enjoy considerable autonomy.
• Until it began to break apart in the 1960s, Democratic Party support was based on the ‘New Deal coalition’, composed of blue-collar workers and ethnic minorities in the north together with white Southerners. This gave the Democrats a basis for electoral success and inclined the party towards social reform (based on modern liberal thinking, not socialism). The political spectrum in the USA is narrower than in the UK, with no major socialist force ever having developed.
• The Republicans have traditionally been the party of big business, higher income groups and rural interests, encouraging the party to support limited government. Since the 1960s, it has attracted growing support from the white South. From the 1980s onwards, the Republicans have tended to practise a more ideological form of politics, in large part based on the influence of the New Christian Right (the ‘born-again’ Christian movement) and a greater emphasis on moral and cultural issues, such as abortion, gun control and gay marriage. Anti-statist, libertarian thinking within the party has been kept alive in recent years by the so-called Tea Party.
However, the experience of coalition government during 2010–15 proved to be deeply testing for the Liberal Democrats. By abandoning their economic strategy in order to support the Conservative approach to deficit reduction, the party gave the Conservatives political cover in this crucial and controversial area, while also failing to receive appropriate credit for policies that they had instigated (such as increases in the income tax threshold) or for having constrained the Conservatives in important areas. The Liberal Democrats were also defeated in their attempt to deliver meaningful constitutional reform, in relation to both the Westminster electoral system and the House of Lords. In many ways, the Liberal Democrat leadership’s decision in December 2010 to abandon the party’s opposition to university tuition fees summed up the predicament that so often confronts junior partners in a coalition government: they get insufficient reward for the coalition’s successes and disproportionate condemnation for its failures. This U-turn also sparked an electoral decline from which the Liberal Democrats never recovered, the party’s vote collapsing in 2015, when it held on to just eight seats.
Once it became clear that the Conservatives had won a Commons majority in 2015, and all prospects of a continuation of the Coalition had evaporated, Clegg stood down as Liberal Democrat leader. His successor, Tim Farron, had not, as the Liberal Democrat President, held office during the Coalition, and is widely considered to be closer to the party’s social liberal heritage than to its ‘Orange Book’ wing. However, he has been careful not to repudiate participation in the Coalition, as, to do so, would be to risk destroying the party’s credibility altogether. However, and ironically, the ‘Leave’ victory in the 2016 EU referendum opened up opportunities for a possible revival of the Liberal Democrats. Traditionally the most pro-European party in the UK, the Liberal Democrats have, under Farron, positioned themselves as the ‘party of the 48 per cent’, the percentage of the electorate that supported ‘Remain’ in the referendum. The centrepiece of the Liberal Democrat manifesto for the June 2017 general election was thus the pledge to hold a second referendum on the final Brexit deal. If this were defeated, the UK would remain a member of the EU.
IDEAS AND POLICIES OF ‘OTHER’ PARTIES
The 2015 general election emphatically demonstrated what has gradually become apparent since the 1970s, which is that it is no longer possible to confine a discussion of political ideas and policies in the UK to the ideological positions of the traditional major parties. In 2015 ‘other’ parties (for want of a better term) gained, collectively, one-third of the popular vote. These parties may not yet be ‘major’ parties, in the sense that they have a realistic possibility of winning, or sharing, government power, but they can no longer simply be dismissed as ‘minor’ or ‘fringe’ parties. The key such parties are:
The UK Independence Party
The Scottish National Party
The Green Party.
UK Independence Party
The UK Independence Party was founded in 1993 by the historian, Alan Sked, and other members of the Anti-federalist League, a cross-party organisation that had been formed to campaign against the Maastricht treaty. UKIP emerged as the leading right-wing Eurosceptical party in the UK following the dissolution of the Referendum Party in 1997. Despite internal power struggles and leadership changes, the party made steady electoral progress. Having gained three seats in the 1999 European Parliament election, UKIP came third with 12 MEPs in 2004 and second with 13 MEPs in 2009. Its major electoral breakthrough came with the 2014 European elections, the party becoming the largest UK party gaining a total of 24 MEPs, there has been disagreement about the nature of UKIP as a political movement. In Revolt on the Right (2014), Ford and Goodwin challenged the idea that UKIP supporters are either single-issue anti-EU voters or middle-aged, middle-class disaffected Conservatives. Instead, UKIP’s electoral base consists of angry, old, white men, the less-skilled, less-educated working-class voters who had been ‘written out of the political debate’. This analysis suggests that UKIP poses a significant threat to Labour, and not just to the Conservatives, as had often been assumed. This has become more apparent in UKIP’s electoral strategy since the election of Paul Nuttall as the UKIP leader in November 2016, with an accompanying focus on attracting support from the ‘patriotic working class’.
UKIP is the leading face of right-wing populism in the UK. As such, it is part of a larger trend in European politics that includes the French National Front, the Italian Northern League, Alternative for Germany and the Austrian Freedom Party. At the heart of UKIP’s ideology is the desire to strengthen national identity in the face of the twin threats of supranationalism and globalisation, represented, respectively, by EU membership and immigration. Indeed, these have been seen as linked issues, on the grounds that increased immigration into the UK, particularly since the early 2000s, has stemmed, in significant part, from the joint impact of the EU’s enlargement into Eastern Europe and the organisation’s commitment to the principle of ‘freedom of movement’. Nevertheless, the achievement of its overriding goal through the ‘Leave’ outcome of the 2016 EU referendum posed a possibly existential threat to UKIP, by both depriving it of its central purpose and forcing the Conservatives to join them in supporting Brexit. In these circumstances, UKIP attempted to remain ideologically meaningful by becoming the champion of so-called ‘hard’ Brexit. This involved emphasising the need for the UK to regain full control of its own borders and therefore control over immigration.
Scottish National Party
The Scottish National Party was created in 1934 through the amalgamation of the Scottish Party and the National Party of Scotland. The central goal of the SNP has always been secession from the UK, although the party was long divided between fundamentalists, who wanted to concentrate on the goal of Scottish independence, and the gradualists who paid attention instead to policies such as devolution or federalism. Until the 1960s, the SNP was essentially a moderate centrist party. However, its ideological orientation subsequently became more clearly social democratic, helping the SNP to make inroads into Labour’s support in urban, industrial Scotland. The party identified itself for the first time formally as a social democratic party during the February 1974 general election campaign. This coincided with the SNP’s electoral breakthrough, as it gained seven MPs in February 1974 and then 11 MPs in October 1974, on the basis of 30 per cent of the vote in Scotland. This increased presence at Westminster contributed to Labour holding a devolution referendum in 1979. Defeat in this referendum damaged the SNP for over a decade before support revived in the 1990s. In 2007, the SNP became the largest party in the Scottish Parliament and formed a minority government with Alex Salmond, the party leader, as first minister. In 2011, the party formed Scotland’s first majority government, paving the way for the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence (see p. 306). Although the ‘yes’ campaign was defeated by a full 10 percentage points, the SNP, under its new leader, Nicola Sturgeon, emerged dramatically strengthened, buoyed up by a significant decline in Labour’s Scottish vote.
After the 2015 general election, divisions started to emerge within the party over the prospects for Scottish independence. On the one hand, there were those who called for a second independence referendum to be held at the earliest possible opportunity, seeing the achievement of Scottish independence as the defining goal of the party. On the other hand, there were those who adopted a wait-and-see approach that would only countenance a second referendum in the event of clear evidence that public opinion in Scotland had shifted on the issue. Support for the latter position was also often linked to calls for the SNP to concentrate on governing Scotland effectively rather than on campaigning for an independent Scotland. However, these divisions were modified somewhat by the outcome of the 2016 EU referendum, which forced Sturgeon explicitly to state that a second independence referendum might be the only way of resolving the constitutional tension between a UK-wide vote to leave the EU and Scotland’s support for continued EU membership. In March 2017, Sturgeon formally backed a second independence referendum.
Green Party
The Green Party (officially known as the Green Party of England and Wales) was formed in 1990 when the Green Party of Great Britain separated amicably into three political parties, the other two being the Scottish Green Party and the Green Party in Northern Ireland. The Green Party of Great Britain had originated in 1973 as a political movement called ‘People’, subsequently recognised as perhaps the world’s earliest green party. People was renamed the Ecology Party in 1975, and was known as such until 1985. A moderate environmentalist party committed to the principle of ecology, the Green Party has ten core values. These include a commitment to social and affirmative action, the preservation of other species, a ‘sustainable society’, ‘basic material security’ (a universal, permanent entitlement) and non-violent solutions to conflict. The party’s first MP, Caroline Lucas, was elected in 2010 and re-elected in 2015; it also has three MEPs and two members of the London Assembly.
In the 2015 general election, the Green Party placed, as ever, a distinctive emphasis on environmental issues. It promised, for example, to work with other countries to ensure that global temperatures do not rise by more than 2°C and committed itself to spending £85 billion on a programme of home insulation, renewable electricity generation and improved flood defences. However, in the areas of economic and social policy, the party’s position has much in common with the left-populism of the Corbyn-led Labour Party and the SNP. The Green manifesto for the 2017 general election thus contained a commitment to renationalise energy, water, railways, buses and the Royal Mail, to scrap university tuition fees, and to introduce a wealth tax on top earners.
Ecology: The principle that all forms of life are sustained by an unregulated network of relationships with the natural world, creating balance between living organisms and the environment.
SHORT QUESTIONS:
1 What is a political party?
2 Distinguish between a political party and a faction.
3 What is party government?
4 What is a two-party system?
5 What is a multiparty system?
6 Distinguish between a manifesto and a mandate.
7 Define consensus politics, using an example.
8 Define adversary politics, using an example.
MEDIUM QUESTIONS:
9 Explain three functions of political parties.
10 How do political parties carry out representation?
11 How do political parties achieve their aims?
12 How do the Labour and Conservative parties elect their leaders?
13 Explain three policies of the Conservative Party.
14 Explain three policies of the Labour Party.
15 Explain three policy differences between the Labour and Conservative parties.
16 Explain three ways in which ‘New’ Labour differed from ‘Old’ Labour.
EXTENDED QUESTIONS:
17 How effective are parties in promoting political participation?
18 Discuss the view that the main UK parties are each dominated by their leaders.
19 To what extent does the UK still have a two-party system?
20 To what extent has the Labour Party abandoned traditional socialist policies?
21 To what extent has the Conservative Party abandoned Thatcherism?
22 Why, and to what extent, is there a policy consensus between the major UK parties?
23 To what extent do the Labour and Conservative parties differ on economic issues?
24 How far did coalition government force the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats to revise their traditional ideological stances?
25 Discuss the impact of ‘minor’ parties on political argument and debate in contemporary Britain.
