How a decade of crisis shaped Labour and the Conservatives #1
Analysis of how crisis and ideology intertwined to produce political change 2008-15
Why has the last thirteen years brought so much ideological change in the party system? It's a question historians studying this period will tangle with for decades to come. Historically, Britain’s domestic politics has been well insulated from global pressures and thus ideological change, partly because of its powerful Empire. International events rarely reached London, shielded by a wall of red on a map and the institution which upheld it: the Royal Navy. The navy ensured absolute safety on an island nation throughout centuries of war – partly relinquished of its constitutional role by the RAF in 1940. Political change, through revolution, invasion or otherwise, could thus be filtered through a top-down system of ‘change to conserve’. Even Margaret Thatcher’s radical intervention in the 1980s was designed to save market-based conservatism, as Karl Polanyi famously said: “even Laissez-faire was planned”. But since the 2008 financial crash the UK has experienced a decade of polycrisis, experiencing financial crashes, pandemics and war. These crises have violently diffused into the British political system and have triggered rapid change in the parties. Crisis is no longer preventable by gun or sword, or guaranteed by geography and balance of power politics. Political isolation is now impossible on this island. Edmund Burke’s “I would rather have the rights of the Englishman than the Rights of Man” is telling of the success the old British nation-state enjoyed, but that protected success, built on a political system of insulation and stability – the epitome of English exceptionalism – is of the distant past.
As a result, the acute global-crisis pain felt by the nation, and inability of domestic ideas to cure it, has enabled parties to metamorphosise between several contradictory ideologies over the last decade. The result is a cacophony of noise and division without a stable throughline of political discourse or government. It may have benefited certain politicians' careers, but it has had a catastrophic effect on the country’s well-being.
The Great Financial Crash, Eurozone and Austerity
The Conservatives have only had fleeting moments of ideological invention – notably under Robert Peel and Thatcher. This is because the party’s self-defined role in the UK political system was to win power – and they have successfully done so by ignoring the constraints of an agreed ideology. Michael Oakeshott, a pivotal conservative thinker, went as far as arguing that Conservatism was not itself an ideology. However, over the last thirteen years the Conservatives have produced their most ideologically-diverse period of government. The period began with intriguing signs of internal-party change with Theresa May’s 2002 speech clamouring for change after many were still calling the Tories “the nasty party.” David Cameron’s subsequent victory brought modernising reforms to the party, most notable in his diversity push. He even had the gall to tell the Conservatives to “stop banging on about Europe” after it had bitterly divided the party’s final years of the Thatcher / John Major governments. But without projecting current political circumstances onto the past too much, was it not inevitable that these words were doomed to fail?
Cameron entered government without undertaking a Conservative-equivalent of the 1980-90s Labour internal battles (whether Militant, Tony Benn or Clause IV), leaving the party ideologically undefined for 21st century modern politics. The process, it was said at the time, was not needed because the Tories were a party of power, not ideology. Cameron’s project, instead, was to emulate Blair, modernise the party’s image and win in 2010 after thirteen years out of power. There was no real attempt to ‘fix’ the underlying ideological divisions such as Europe. This became so glaringly obvious in CCHQs lacklustre attention to the 2010 Conservative MP intake, who ended up being much more Eurosceptic and rebellious than expected, some even suggesting only 13% of MPs were of the ‘Cameroon’ faction.
Ideologically, however, Labour were also in a perilous state – many at the time disillusioned by the legacy of New Labour, hot with recent memories of the Iraq war and the aftermath of the 2010 election, which halted the idea of a New Labour revival. The saving grace for many in the party was that Gordon Brown had handled the 2008 financial crash well (especially in the 2008 G20) and had started a reasonably sensible recovery, even if his desires for further government intervention were halted by those in his party and the city – particularly Bank of England Governor Mervyn King. Regardless, the party, enabled by the financial crisis, had partly rediscovered its classic desire for a bigger state after a period of vicious proxy ideological warfare between Brown (seen as the 'left') and Tony Blair (the as the 'right') . The lingering pain, though, of Brown's difficult behaviour in No.10 and the missed opportunity of the 2007 general election put pressure on the legacy of New Labour after defeat in 2010 (see Andrew Rawnsley's End of The Party).
While Labour had regrets, paradoxically, the Conservative's undefined ideological position allowed Cameron to mould the party’s position to his will – implementing a policy of austerity when the opportunity of the 2008 financial crash hit. However, Cameron’s argument only gained serious political headwind when the Eurozone crisis followed in 2010, compounding the lingering fears of 2008. At the heart of this crisis was Greece’s debt default and economic destruction it produced. This was used by Cameron to argue that Greece was the rule, not the exception, of a nation which relied on high deficits and borrowing. But this was a purely political construction to allow for austerity to be assumed as a ‘pragmatic’ option of safety, even reviving the Thatcherite metaphor of ‘borrowing on the country's credit card’ to create an over-hyped fear of national default. This was project fear version 1.0. In reality, the dual crisis of a financial crash and a Greek debt crisis originated in the highly-leveraged (and interconnected) private banks, which were acutely entangled with the Eurozone. The Eurozone itself had huge economic issues and no political structures to deal with large financial crises – especially within the European Central Bank which originally refused to even buy new sovereign bonds. The issue was thus global, and not born from the domestic politics of deficit.
There were, as Paul Johnson argued, certain structural deficits that Labour had built up in the UK (see The Coalition Effect, Anthony Seldon and Mike Finn, p.165). The UK's deficit was not, however, the cause of market or national meltdown – nor was it large enough to limit government intervention indefinitely. In a period of economic downturn and cheap-borrowing Cameron ideologically prioritised the deficit as the enemy – skillfully utilising the fear which the crisis had produced to help him implement his ideology. Regardless of the monetary policy innovations such as Quantitative Easing, which enabled a host of non-fiscal stimulus and low borrowing, his position stubbornly remained. This was ideology, not traditional Conservative pragmatism. As Adam Tooze elegantly put it “Austerity without QE would have been paralysing in economic terms. QE without austerity would have been impossible politically for Conservatives to bear.” (Crashed, p.537) ”Politically” is the watchword – the Cameronite years were a political project built on ideological grounds of late-Thatcherism. There had been no ideological revolution in opposition. Only through the financial and Eurozone crisis could their political ideology become government policy, regardless of economic reality.
Cameron’s, and his Chancellor George Osborne's, successful narrative on austerity, chiming as it did with the small-c conservative electorate of Britain, posed a serious challenge to the Labour leader Ed Miliband, who had defeated his brother in a rebuke of the New Labour establishment. Miliband was considered ‘soft left’, and the most left-wing leader since John Smith, but ruled a party (especially in Parliament) which retained strong New Labour (centre) affiliations, most of whom wished the other brother had won. In reaction to the financial crash and Cameron’s crisis-enabled austerity Miliband edged Labour down a path to higher state interventionism and spending, installing the idea that government should do more in an age of global insecurity – even coining the ‘cost of living’ crisis a decade before it happened.
But the result was messy – Miliband failed to see how Cameron’s austerity argument was seductive to a key section of the electorate. Many were searching for security in a new age of globalisation and crisis. Cameron exploited the idea of security threefold. First, using the aforementioned fear of defaulting on Britain's debt, the ‘Greece’ argument. Secondly, in a defensive move, he promised an EU renegotiation and then referendum – hoping to stem off the both unresolved ideological division in his party and also the rise of UKIP on the back of higher immigration, and the 2014 refugee crisis in Europe. This delivered a sense of control over Britain’s future. Thirdly, Cameron and the Conservatives aggressively amplified a possible Labour-SNP coalition, creating a headache for Miliband who could (if the polls were right) not govern without SNP support. Labour had no response to the polycrisis unfolding in Britain as Miliband was consumed by the pace of events that were shaping the Conservative party and country, while also attempting to push the inbuilt New Labour tendencies of his party towards a more traditional left position.
In the end it was too much for Miliband, caught between the project of winning (producing the ‘Ed Stone’ and Immigration mugs) and attempting to transform a party addicted to neoliberal-lite economic ideas. It’s no surprise the age-old adage “Better the devil you know [Tories] rather than the devil you don’t know and can’t trust [Labour]” stuck in the 2015 general election (See Philip Gould’s Unfinished Revolution). An economy perceived to be limping back to recovery in 2015, fear of the SNP and the ploy of the EU question, which was only heightened by the Eurozone / Refugee crisis, was enough to sink Miliband’s nascent post-2008 soft left ideology. The 2015 election was the beginning of the end for Labour’s traditional vote, realigning rapidly in the face of global crisis and the party’s lacklustre reaction, which was only to compound in later elections. Many left Labour for nationalism – whether to the SNP in Scotland or UKIP in England. But, importantly, the break with Rome was made – Labour was no longer New. It was Thomas Piketty before Piketty was trendy, and Miliband’s leadership set up the ideological shift to come. For the Conservatives, though, Cameron’s complacency of building political strategy on risky, globally-fuelled ideological opportunity, while producing short term success, was to prove disastrously naive. A shock was to come, and with it further ideological change.
So why crisis and ideology?
Focusing on the political history of crisis and ideology elicits a more wholesome explanation as to why and how the main two parties have travelled such divergent paths over the last thirteen years. Ideology change is in effect part of ‘agency’ theory – where high politics (the actions of elites in power) plays a significant role in how political history unfolds. However, analysing ideology shifts in isolation fails to see the underlying currents which enabled political players to shift each party’s path. Different ideologies rise and fall either enabled by or in reaction to crises. Rapid ideological change has happened because of rapid polycrsis. The crises themselves are in effect shifting the political battleground and thus the ‘Overton window’ of what is politically possible and acceptable to the electorate. Part two of this series will complete the argument, analysing how the EU Referendum, Covid, Ukraine and inflation crisis have all enabled crisis-dependent ideology change, ending with the overall effect a decade of polycrisis has had on current Labour and Conservative party ideologies.
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