Cameron's uphill battle

Thursday, 27th September 2007

I've only just got round to digesting John Gray's must-read Statesman essay, "Maggie's Gift to Gordon". Not exactly cheerful reading for the Cameroons - or disgruntled Thatcherites, for that matter. Gray sets forth a list of reasons why the Tories are struggling. Class, image and tactics all play a part, but Gray singles out a philosophical reason for the party's disarray:

To a considerable extent, 21st-century Britain is an unintended consequence of Margaret Thatcher... She believed that by rejuvenating British capitalism she could revive the stolidly bourgeois Britain she had known in the Fifties; but that country was a product of Labour rule, and the upshot of reshaping public institutions on a market model was to create a society of a kind she had never imagined.
In an essay that had a powerful influence on the intellectual fringes of early Thatcherism, Friedrich Hayek distinguished between two rival versions of individualism - a "true", Burkean variety, rooted in tradition, that accepted the constraints of conventional morality and a "false", Romantic version in which personal choice and self-realisation trumped all other values. Hayek believed that a revitalised free market would bring with it a return to "true" individualism.
Instead, it was a version of Romantic individualism that triumphed... In many ways this has been a benign process... But the country created by freeing up the market is in many respects the antithesis of the one Hayek and Thatcher aimed to restore. If ever there was such a thing as a conservative philosophy, its central values were social cohesion and cultural continuity in a settled form of common life. Yet when it is released from restraint the market works to unsettle established ways of living. So, far from reviving an older Britain, Thatcher wiped away its last traces.