London
“The problem with politics today,” Gisela Stuart complained over coffee in the House of Commons cafeteria, “is that there’s no passion, no big ideas. No wonder the public’s not inspired.” An iconoclastic Labour MP for Birmingham, Stuart herself is inspiringly intense, but her diagnosis is a common one: Locked together in a mutual embrace of managerialism, Britain’s political parties stand for nothing more than the quest for a triangulated victory.
This view contains an element of truth, though Britain is not the only democracy in which a majority of the votes are to be found close to the center. But since the last general election, in 2010, Britain has debated austerity (without really practicing it) and rejected both proportional representation (firmly) and Scottish independence (barely). Its third party, the Liberal Democrats, has collapsed, as has Labour’s support in Scotland. Together, the U.K. Independence party (UKIP), the Scottish Nationalists (SNP), and the Greens now poll a quarter of the vote. This is not a politically placid nation.
It is nonetheless true that the differences between Labour and the Conservatives in Westminster, while loudly proclaimed, are limited in practice. Both are led by a metropolitan elite. Both Conservative prime minister David Cameron and Labour leader Ed Miliband would prefer Britain stayed in the European Union. Neither party says much about foreign policy, and both tacitly accept that British defense spending will continue to fall. Both opposed Scottish independence, and neither sees much room for tax increases or spending cuts, never mind a wholesale rethinking of government. Neither evinces any discomfort with the toxic combination of po-faced political correctness and paternalist nanny-statism that is characteristic of contemporary Britain.
But this is not the first time that observers have remarked on the growth of political consensus in Britain. In 1954, the Economist, arguing that certain similarities existed between R.A. Butler, a Tory, and Hugh Gaitskell, of Labour, dubbed the composite “Mr. Butskell.” This in turn gave rise to the claim that the early 1950s were dominated by Butskellism, a British version of the supposedly placid consensus of the Eisenhower era in the United States.
Today, the strenuous partisan warfare between Cameron and Miliband belies the emergence of a comparable composite, Mr. Camerband, who embodies a near-convergence that goes well beyond finance. The only exceptions in the current Tory-led coalition are Michael Gove’s reforms in education, which got him demoted, and Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare revolution, which has survived largely thanks to Smith’s passionate commitment and seniority within the party.
Historians have not been kind to Mr. Butskell, pointing out that the philosophies of Labour and the Tories were actually quite distinct. Yet there was a degree of convergence in practice, created not by shared beliefs, but by the systemic pressures acting on both parties. Postwar Britain wanted a welfare state, high growth, low inflation, and full employment, while, in order to maintain the fixed foreign exchange value of the pound, it needed a positive balance of trade. As long as Britain refused to choose between those objectives, which were defined partly by ideology and partly by international financial realities beyond Britain’s control, neither party had much room for maneuver. Mr. Butskell was the product of those constraints.
Of course, Butskellism didn’t last. Britain’s very refusal to make choices made it steadily harder for the nation to accomplish anything at all. Margaret Thatcher’s achievement was to choose in practice between aims that were all, in principle, desirable: Like Reagan, she chose to focus on inflation. The reward for Britain was political and economic recovery; the reward for the Conservatives was the unparalleled feat of four successive victories over a Labour party that had lost touch with the aspirational classes.
Today, the Tories would give a lot for just one such victory. Objectively, the campaign shouldn’t be close: The growing British economy contrasts strikingly with the sickly performance of the eurozone, and only 15 percent of the British public views Miliband as a plausible leader of the nation. Labour’s collapse in Scotland bids fair to lose the party 50 seats, while UKIP looks likely to take only a handful from the Tories. Senior Conservatives privately profess faith in victory, and even candidates in no-hope seats believe the party’s chances are brightening. If politics is the art of the possible, it is hard to see how the Tories can possibly lose this one.
But the polls say otherwise. In an electoral sense, the fundamental problem is the Conservative performance, amounting almost to a collapse, in England, which controls 533 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons. In the 2010 election, when the Tories narrowly failed to win an overall majority, they led Labour by over 10 percentage points in the vote in England and Wales. Today, their lead is 1 percentage point. In order to win on May 7, they need to be ahead by at least 12 points.
It is certainly possible that the Conservative lead will grow after the campaign formally opens at the end of March, and many Tories argue—or at least hope—that the same “hidden Tories” who won them their surprise victory in 1992 are lurking today. It’s true that a strikingly high percentage of voters have yet to make up their minds, and it’s true that Green and UKIP support, in particular, is vulnerable to being squeezed. But YouGov’s Anthony Wells, one of the closest observers of British polling, doubts that there’s much undetected Toryism in the murky waters: In 1992 all the pollsters used the same methodology, and all of them got it wrong.
This time, there is methodological diversity, but the results are broadly the same: No party seems at all likely to win a majority. Right now, Tory confidence amounts to little more than the sense that they should be doing better and therefore will at some point do better. But even if the Tories win the most seats, as Wells believes is likely, the outcome could be a minority Labour government that holds power by the sufferance of the other parties. This is political fragmentation with a vengeance, and it is going to have profound consequences. Scottish independence, a question supposedly settled for a generation, will be back on the agenda. So will proportional representation, which will be harder to oppose when at least five parties each get at least 5 percent of the vote. And with those questions come others about the future of Westminster and the devolution of power within England itself.
Of course there is managerialism in British politics: That is the tendency of politics in all mature democracies. But this is not a system dominated by managerialism. It is a system, as in the 1950s, that is profoundly constrained by both ideology and reality. The ideological constraint is that, as columnist Allister Heath has pointed out, no party is willing to address the challenges centering on the long-term affordability of the National Health Service, Britain’s still-burgeoning debt, its inability to build enough housing—and, I would add, its desire to be a great power on the cheap.
The Tories have not addressed these problems for fear of being called elitist, nasty, and austere, while Labour has no interest in addressing them, because to do so would not be in the short-term interest of its base, which it only needs to mobilize to win. The constraint of reality, on the other hand, is that the mobility of capital profoundly limits Labour’s ability to tax and spend, which is where its post-Blairite heart lies. As in the 1950s, the problem is that managerialism is what you are left with when you refuse to make choices between desirable objectives and try instead to live by kicking the can down the road.
In political terms, the result is a campaign conducted between narrow lines, in which the main parties are being pushed closer together than their memberships would prefer. Earlier this month at the Freedom Festival—an annual gathering in Bournemouth of mostly Tory and UKIP activists organ-ized by the Freedom Association, a 40-year-old lobby for individual freedom—the discontent was palpable. The after-dinner speech, by Donal Blaney of the Young Britons’ Foundation, was a vigorous critique of leading conservatives who fail, as he sees it, to uphold Thatcher’s legacy. And since the Conservatives, like Labour, now stand for the status quo, it’s true that what’s missing in the mainstream British political spectrum is a party of genuine, aspirational radicalism.
The rise of UKIP, the SNP, and the Greens shows there are lots of people who want conviction politics so badly they’re prepared to leave the major parties to find it; they reject Mr. Camerband as entirely inadequate to the needs of the time—which, in truth, he is. The main difference between the 1950s and today is that, in Britain as across the democratic world, established parties receive less respect, and new parties grow more easily as a consequence. The result is a campaign for the major parties that remains within the Westminster political consensus, but which, because of its very narrowness, is unable to meet the needs of the growing share of voters who live outside that consensus—or of the nation in which they all live.
Ted R. Bromund is senior research fellow in Anglo-American relations in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation.
