Are Cameron's Tories Ready to Govern?

UPDATED: David Cameron has addressed the Conservatives' political problem, but not their policy problem. Margaret Thatcher had an approach to elections, but above all an approach to government. Does Cameron?

At the website of the UK magazine, The Spectator, John O'Sullivan and Allen Massie are engaged in a high-stakes debate about the British election. Start reading now, this debate will be crossing the Atlantic soon.

The issue is: Why not a bigger victory for David Cameron's Conservatives? After all the rebranding and detoxifying, the Conservatives look on track to receive somewhere south of 40% of the popular vote. They will surely win the largest block of seats in the Commons, but possibly not enough for a majority and nothing like the huge majority Labour gained in 1997.

John O'Sullivan opened the debate at NRO's The Corner. O'Sullivan argued that Cameron's repositioning has actually cost the Conservatives votes.

[T]he Tories ought to be winning easily and by a landslide. That is what has happened in other countries where a Left government has collapsed as completely as Labour. Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party in Hungary has just won more than two-thirds of the popular vote and the right to redraw the country’s post-communist constitution in exactly these circumstances. Orban in fact has just re-fashioned Hungary’s fractious opposition into a broad conservative coalition on the British Tory model by uniting patriotic, free-market, and social conservatives under a single standard — at exactly the moment when the Tories had broken up their own original and successful coalition in pursuit of “progressive” voters with many other places to go.

O'Sullivan specified:

The Tory party used to win about a third of the working-class vote with its conservative social values and patriotic instincts. For the Tory modernizers, however, these Labour voters are the wrong kind of voters too. David Cameron has spent most of the last few years resolutely refusing to highlight the issues of immigration, Europe, and national solidarity that appeal to them, lest such brutish policies alienate “soft center” votes. Just recently, the Tories have begun to talk about such things, but too little and maybe too late. Cameron will probably get a boost from these voters — and probably a larger boost than that going to the Lib-Dems — but still below what the Thatcherite Tories got in the despised 1980s.

Massie rejoined on the Spectator site:

The assumption that an unreformed conservatism could prevail in Britain is questionable at best. After all, how did the Tories do in 2001 and 2005? Perhaps conditions were tricky for them then but while that's true it's also the case that the public has shown precious little enthusiasm for that kind of Toryism.

Indeed, it's the failures of the past and that he inherited that make Dave's task so difficult. If 2005 hadn't been such a ghastly failure perhaps the Tories wouldn't need to win an extra 130 seats to win a majority. In other words, they essentially need a landslide just to win a small victory. That's what Cameron inherited and his critics might care to remember the abject failure of their kind of Toryism. If three thumping defeats don't demonstrate that the Tories "own original and successful coalition" has disappeared then I don't know what does.

Massie contended that O'Sullivan had prejudged the outcome, that he would have condemned Cameron regardless of result.

The anti-reform crew won't let Dave win, regardless of the election result. If the Tories win a landslide they'll say that they'd have won without reform anyway; if they eke out a small majority or simply end as the largest party then the reformers are to blame for failing to win a more handsome, sweeping victory.

O'Sullivan rebutted yesterday.

I think that the Tory leadership as a group forgot how to manage its "broad Church" coalition. They went from realizing that the base was insufficient for victory to believing that it was an obstacle to victory. In pursuing centrist voters they were insouciant about losing voters to their right. Their desire to demonstrate Tory support for public services led them to embrace Labour's budgetary strategy until shortly after the roof fell in. And they tried only fitfully to integrate their new ideas into the party's tradition and sense of itself. Not only did this approach drive some traditional conservatives into UKIP, but it also gave an impression of inauthenticity and even cynicism.

Massie posted a final statement early Tuesday:

[I]t really isn't the case that the Conservatives are doing badly. Not only may Cameron beat Labour by the same margin  - in terms of the popular vote - that Mrs Thatcher triumphed by in 1979 (seven points) but his triumph will be much greater than hers. For while the Lady could get to 339 seats by winning 62 extra seats, Cameron will need to win double that number just to win an overall majority.

Rarely have the Tories faced such a daunting task. In 1931 they won an extra 210 seats, in 1924 they took an additional 154 and in 1910, after the great disaster of 1906, they increased their presence on the green benches by 116. So Cameron may end up by matching Thatcher's 1979 margin of victory while increasing the number of Tory MPs by more than 50%  - an achievement that would be one of the three or four most notable of the last 110 years.

And yet people still ask why he's not doing better?

 

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Not to be wishy-washy, but there is truth on all sides here.

Massie is right: The emerging Conservative win is a triumph, not a disappointment. The party had to claw its way out of a very deep hole. It was not inevitable that Labour would collapse, not predictable that Gordon Brown would be televised flattering a lifelong Labour voter to her face, then insulting her behind her back. Any plan based on the assumption of a Labour collapse would have been a bad plan. Nostalgia for the successes of the 1980s would have been even worse. Britain has changed over the past 30 years even more radically than the United States: many fewer white working-class voters, many more educated professionals, many more single women, many more nonwhite voters. In the face of these changes, David Cameron will win anyway, and possibly win big.

But O'Sullivan is right too about the risks of inauthenticity and seeming cynicism.

The big danger in the Cameron project is that Cameron has addressed the Conservatives' political problem, but not their policy problem. Thatcher had an approach to elections yes, but above all an approach to government. Does Cameron? Not so clear. How does a modernizer respond to a budget crisis as extreme as that which now faces Britain?

The extremity of the British crisis has simultaneously destroyed Labour (the government that presided over the crisis) and weakened the Conservatives (because voters fear how the Conservatives might respond to the crisis).

The extremity of the crisis has turned Cameron's appealing freshness into a potential liability, with anxiety over whether he will be equal to the crisis.

The extremity of the crisis has cast skeptical light on the Conservative rebranding, by underscoring how much of the Cameron project - like George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" of 1999-2000 - took for granted a now-vanished prosperity. A party leader who worries about melting glaciers and dwindling communities might once have seemed an attractive addition, but now may look like a costly indulgence.

However it's also true that the extremity of the crisis enhances the value of Cameron's sympathy and approachability. Cuts are coming, everybody in Britain knows that. A leader who does not seem over-eager to cut - who has presented himself as a reluctant butcher and convinced the public of his care and concern for the vulnerable - may have more leeway to cut than a leader who breathes fire.

A relevant comparison. Nobody doubts Margaret Thatcher's steel. Yet coming to power in the throes of another savage recession, Thatcher could achieve only a very moderate budget-cutting success. Most impressively, she cut spending on state-owned housing by 50% over the life of her government, 1979-91. But social security spending rose in the Thatcher years by over 75%, and health spending by over 40%. Thatcher bumped into unsurmountable public resistance, but did she also create some of that resistance herself? Is it possible that Cameron's smoother style might enable more decisive and more permanent achievements?

Likewise, the extremity of the crisis makes more relevant than ever the concerns for society expressed by the Cameron Conservatives.

Britain faces tougher problems of poverty and social delinquency than almost any other developed country. Poor Britons are less likely to rise out of poverty than poor people in France or Germany. British family structures are especially unstable, British children have special troubles in school, obesity and other public health concerns are especially prevalent. British government is intensely mistrusted; British society is fiercely and even violently divided - and more than any country in Europe, Britain is menaced by terrorism emanating from an alienated and radicalized Muslim minority.

A conservatism that fuses economic rationality with a concern for social cohesion is for Britain more than an electoral proposition. It is the kind of conservatism a riven and troubled society requires. Like John O'Sullivan, I feel my due share of nostalgia for the crusading conservatism of the Thatcher years. Margaret Thatcher saved her country from ossification into socialized stagnation, and she deserves for that achievement all the credit history will lavish on her. But in addition to that ongoing concern, Britain struggles today with many other troubles. Does Cameron have the answer? Maybe no. At least he has the questions, and that's a start.