website title

Student Zone - Update Materials

Update 11: January 2007 - Cameron’s Conservatives one year on

When David Cameron was elected Leader of the Conservative Party on 6 December 2005 he immediately committed the Party to change. How successfully has he achieved that ambition in his first year in office? Cameron’s efforts have focused on three areas: the character of the Party itself; campaigning style; and the substance of policy. Much debate surrounds his efforts in all these areas.

Cameron’s reference to the need to change was addressed to the first of the above – the character of the Party. He followed the remark about change by observing how far the Parliamentary Party was like himself – white, male, middle or upper middle class. Part of the effort at change has focused on changing the social character of Conservative parliamentary candidates, especially in safe Conservative seats, or in seats targeted by the Party as winnable at the next election. In the 2005 intake just nine per cent of the Parliamentary Party were women and only two Tory MPs came from ethnic minorities. Cameron created an ‘A’ list from which local parties were encouraged to select candidates. Though derided because it included various celebrity candidates such as TV soap stars, it represented a real effort to transform the social character of the Party in Parliament: of the 150 initial names on the list, over half were women and 10 per cent were from ethnic minorities. Were the Conservative Party in Parliament to reflect that composition it would amount to a social revolution. So far 27 seats have made selections: of those chosen one third are women, and only one ethnic minority candidate has been selected from the list, though another has been selected from outside the list.

In short, some change of the kind promised by Cameron has happened, but it is so far very limited. The reasons for this tell us important things about the Conservative Party that Cameron inherited. First, it is still a highly decentralised Party. Candidate selection is much less amenable to central control than in the Labour Party, and this is especially true in the most winnable seats, which are also likely to have active and prosperous Conservative Associations that jealously guard their autonomy from the national leadership.The Cameron leadership can provide encourage, persuade and provide – but it cannot compel. Changing the social composition of the parliamentary party will therefore be a long job. This argument implies, of course, that there is resistance to change in the constituency associations – and there is. The source of this takes us to the second feature of the Party, its social character at local level. Local Conservatives are not notably ‘upper crust’, but they do have one overwhelmingly important distinguishing feature: they are old. Although we do not have systematic up to date information about the party nationally all the historic and anecdotal evidence paints a picture of an ageing activist Conservative body. What is more, there is serious long term decline in membership, so many Associations are controlled by relatively small numbers of activists who have run them for many years. This breeds ‘conservatism’ with a ‘small c’: a resistance to the kind of social and cultural change that Cameron sees as imperative for the Party’s survival. In the 1980s the Labour Party leadership found changing the character of their Party hard because of ‘entryism’: the infiltration of local parties by radical socialists. In 2007 Cameron’s problem might be described as the opposite: the lack of entryism of any kind, leaving the local parties in the hands of an ageing activist core which is suspicious of initiatives like the ‘A’ list.

The second aspect of Cameron’s change – his campaigning style – is distinguished in several ways. As befits a Leader who won because of his gift for media management (see Update 7) a huge effort has gone into photo opportunities: these have ranged from driving huskies in the Arctic (to publicise sensitivity to the consequences of climate change) to a photo with Nelson Mandela, the latter event an important symbolic renunciation of the attitude of Thatcherite Conservatism throughout the 1980s. Of course all modern leaders seek photo opportunities, but there are distinctive strands to Cameron’s: they are consistent in their attempt to picture the Leader as attuned to modern life. The Cameron style has also sought to soften the language of the Party on social and moral issues, but in a fashion that will not unduly alarm traditionalists. The most noticed – and in places derided – was his ‘hug a hoodie’ speech. In fact Cameron never used the phrase. In a speech on criminal justice on 10 July 2006 he said that hoods worn by teenagers were not themselves an important issue, that teenage criminals should be shown ‘a lot more love’, and that the fundamental problems had to do with the breakdown ofinstitutions like the family. Thus in a single speech he sought to soften the perception of the Party as punitive on crime, but also appealed to entirely traditional Conservative attitudes on the family.

Balancing symbolic modernisation with retention of traditional values is tricky. Just how tricky is shown by the efforts so far to convert all this into policy. Cameron is often accused of being interested only in style at the expense of substance. But his first year has been remarkable for the range of working groups he has commissioned to conduct detailed policy reviews. There are six separate review groups, but the experience of two that have reported shows some of the problems involved in turning modernist symbols into policy substance. The report on the commission to review taxation policy (chaired by Lord Forsyth, who made his name in the 1980s as an enthusiastic supporter of Mrs Thatcher) produced a report in October from which the Shadow Chancellor rapidly moved to distance himself. And no wonder, for it was dominated by highly traditional tax cuts: abolition of inheritance tax, a cut in corporation tax and a 2p cut in the basic rate of income tax. The report on social justice from the group chaired by former Leader Iain Duncan-Smith (Breakdown Britain: Interim Report on the State of the Nation, December 2006) illustrated a very different kind of problem. Whereas the message from the Forsyth group was all too clear, the Duncan Smith Report was an immense, nuanced two volume dissection of modern Britain, more like an academic enquiry than a policy paper. And while Duncan Smith glossed it in traditional Conservative terms by stressing the role of family breakdown in the creation of social problems, it left open precisely how the Cameron leadership will reduce it all to policy terms. That specificity is something we still await.

<< back to Update Materials list