A Son of the Rock

In an article in the Guardian on 29th August, Labour has got Cameron wrong, David Marquand says David Cameron is not a raging Thatcherite in disguise.
The first point to make here is that Cameron does not have to be. (Disguised, that is.)

He would not be taking over from a radical reforming Labour government like the 1950s Tories were. Instead he would succeed a government which has seen the woman’s policies outstripped and which has presided over the greatest rise in inequality since the nineteenth century.

Merely to continue their policies would be to carry forward her legacy and, in any case, despite his attempts to be cuddlier Cameron has adumbrated some pretty right wing stuff.

However, Marquand’s contention that Cameron is really a Whig and not a Thatcherite manqué (which given George Osborne’€™s pronouncements over tax and the like I do not accept for a second) raises a more interesting question.

Just how did Thatcher and her cohorts manage to hi-jack the Tory Party?

Marquand states correctly that the 1950s Tories did not alter the framework that the post-war Labour Governments had erected (beyond denationalising steel and road haulage.) They were, in other words, conservative. Yes, Harold MacMillan affected to be about change, as Cameron does at the moment – with little in the way of policy to back it up – but who noticed any?

Now, whatever else Thatcher may have been she was certainly not conservative. She took a wrecking ball to the post–war consensus – and a lot of babies went out along with the bathwater.

Note that she also thoroughly undermined the other main strand to the Tory party in that the Unionist part of its name became redundant as a result of her endeavours. She was such a spur to anti-unionism she might almost have been an SNP or Plaid Cymru mole. (Perhaps not Sinn Fein, though; the IRA did try to blow her up.)

The Scottish Conservatives are now firmly behind the devolution settlement – but that’s only because it gave them the oxygen of (Scottish) Parliamentary seats. They’d drop it in a flash if they thought it would harness them more influence or a chance at power.

So how on Earth did Thatcher do this at the head of a party whose purpose (stated in its name) is to preserve things? Were they all blinded by the fact that she was a woman?

I never could comprehend Thatcher’s appeal, neither to the Tories nor to anyone who voted for her. She always seemed blatantly insincere to me. How could they not see through her?

Was her electoral success really something to do with the wish to be nannied? (What does that say about Tories?) I don’t want to think that it was a tendency towards selfishness and greed but her policies did stoke the drift in that direction which has lately become a surge among the highest paid – and devil take the hindmost.

However she managed it, the party she presided over and bequeathed was a very different beast to the one she had joined, largely as a result of her promptings.

And we live in its shadow.

So, was it really she who was the enemy within?