Cameron is going where Thatcher feared to tread
In preparing for government, David Cameron’s Conservatives made great play of their post-Thatcherite credentials. The ‘nasty party’ of Keith Joseph, Nicholas Ridley and Norman Tebbit was no more. In its place was the party of the prime minister’s great hero, Harold ‘Supermac’ Macmillan: pragmatic, non-ideological, and above all, committed to One Nation Conservatism.
It now turns out to be nothing of the sort. The prime minister’s reforms to public services are more neo-Thatcherite than One Nation Tory. Moreover, such is the messed up nature of our politics today that what Cameron is doing could very easily have been part of a Blair-led Labour-Party agenda, too, something which the former prime minister has never tried to hide. Blair is in so many ways ideologically closer to Cameron than he is to Ed Miliband, which is what makes the Blairite John Denham’s sniping at coalition higher-education policy for England just a tad hollow.
Cameron Conservatism is neo-Thatcherite in its determination to remove all traces of public spending from what were once regarded as bedrock public institutions: these are the kinds of institutions which Macmillan would have said provided citizens of the UK with a minimum level of security, a minimum level of quality of life and an opportunity to climb the social and economic ladder.
Thatcher, as we know, saw things differently, and mass privatisations of utilities, telecoms, and railway companies followed. Thatcher also sought, via the Research Assessment Exercise, much tighter control of spending in other areas, such as research, where the state was still a player.
There were, however, some areas where even the Iron Lady and later John Major refused to go. In 18 years of Conservative government, neither sought to interfere too radically with the idea that further and higher education and learning must be free for all citizens. And because of this belief neither sought to make drastic changes to the organisation or funding of the UK’s system, envied across the world, of free public universities and colleges, free adult education and free public libraries.
In 1979, Thatcher too inherited a situation in which public spending had to be cut. But she had the good sense to understand that closing libraries, cutting back on adult education classes and charging students to attend university might make short-term savings but, in the long run, could be disastrous for the country by eroding skills and obstructing social mobility.
Given that both of his Tory predecessors refused to take such a course, why then is Cameron so determined to stick to it?
One reason undoubtedly is the supine level of opposition from within the universities and their supporters. We are ready to mobilise to save our forests, but not our education system. A second reason is that neither Major nor Thatcher came from inherited wealth. Indeed, unlike Cameron, and much of today’s Conservative cabinet, they didn’t just understand the value of subsidised learning, they had benefited directly from it.