Margaret Thatcher’s death has inevitably prompted intense reflection among Tories about what lessons the party should learn from her time in office. ‘We must finish the job’ is the refrain on the lips of Thatcherite ministers, and there are more of those today than there were a year ago. The experience of office has had a radicalising effect on the Cameroons. To be sure, today’s circumstances are not the same as those of 1979 or ’89. Her exact policy prescription is not what is required. This is something that Thatcher, a politician who relished fresh thinking, would have appreciated. But what the party does need is the spirit of Thatcherism, that understanding of what a centre-right party should be in the modern age.
Thatcher understood that it was not enough for a Conservative government to seek to conserve things. In a world in which change is inevitable and the Labour party, the academic establishment and the self-appointed representatives of civil society are all doing their best to move the country to the left, Conservatives have to do more than to try and hold the line. As she warned in her 1982 conference speech (arguably her best), ‘Where the left stood yesterday the centre stands today.’ This makes it imperative that, in government, the Tories move the centre to the right.
Thatcher grasped that, while Karl Marx’s political economy is wrong, there is something to be taken from his understanding of how politics works. Council house sales created a new class of property owners, privatisation a new private-sector workforce, and economic and regulatory reform empowered the entrepreneur. Cameron is, in places, trying to do something similar.
His deficit reduction plan is based around shrinking the public sector and expanding the private sector.
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