The soggy consensus of our times is about the very future of Western civilisation

The image of Tony Blair and David Cameron exchanging frilly skirts and pearls is certainly arresting, but the Prime Minister’s reference in California last weekend to rampant cross-dressing was, disappointingly, political. For all the comment that his remarks have engendered, however, we have been here before. When the Economist coined the term ‘Butskellism’ in 1954, it was simply observing that, as Gaitskell wrote after being succeeded by Butler as chancellor, the Conservatives ‘have really done exactly what we would have done, and have followed the same lines on controls, economic planning, etc….’ Both parties were effectively interchangeable, working within the same framework of a mixed economy and government responsibility for full employment.

Today’s fixed points may have changed but the story is essentially the same. There is almost nothing to choose between Blair-ism and Dave-ism. But just as Butskellism was, despite its apparent solidity and safety, fundamentally dangerous — the Keynesian consensus, the soggy centre and the muddled middle which it represented led Britain into potentially terminal decline in the 1960s and 1970s — so today there is another perilous cross-party consensus. This time, however, it is not domestic cross-dressing which poses the threat; capitalism won, and stifling as today’s puny debates over the levels of taxation and public spending may be, they take place within a sensible framework. The worrying consensus today is, rather, about the very future of Western civilisation.

In the 1970s the inevitability of British decline was challenged by a small group of thinkers who championed such supposedly nutty ideas as privatisation and low taxes. They were dismissed as lunatics. Today there is a similar reaction to those who are preoccupied by the threat posed to Western civilisation by militant Islam and push for resistance to it. The great mass of the political class deride those who believe this to be the defining issue of the 21st century as — to quote Matthew Parris about Michael Gove — ‘stark staring bonkers’.