While I was writing my article in the current Liberator, I searched for the quotation below - the last paragraph in particular.
I didn't find it, because I was convinced it came from The Strange Death of Tory England by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, which was published in 2005.
It doesn't. It comes from Endgames: Questions in Late Modern Political Thought by John Gray. Impressively, this was published as early as 1997. Perhaps there's something in the idea that Gray's a bit of a seer after all.
Because I couldn't find the last paragraph, I had to write instead:
Beyond this, there has been a collapse in Conservative values to such an extent that it’s possible to argue that the Conservative Party’s fundamental problem is that it’s no longer Conservative. It was said of Margaret Thatcher that she hoped her policies would produce more men like her father, but she ended up producing more men like her son.
I felt a little unhappy with this, because I knew that not everyone in Grantham saw Alderman Roberts as the pillar of civic virtue that his daughter did.
But enough from me. Here's the quote from John Gray:
The self-destruction of British conservatism by New Right ideology and policies is best interpreted as an exemplification of a central neo-liberal theme - the importance of unintended consequences in social, economic and political life.
The radical free market policies implemented in Britain since 1979 have had as one of their principal effects an unravelling of the coalitions of economic interests and the social hierarchies on which pre-Thatcher conservatism depended. In sweeping away the postwar settlement which all major parties endorsed for a generation, Thatcherism demolished the social and economic base on which conservatism in Britain stood, and created several of the necessary conditions for a prolonged period of Labour hegemony.
The medium-term effect of neo-liberal Conservative policy in has been to destroy ethos in institutions such as the Civil Service and the National Health Service by remodelling them on contractualist and managerialist lines. In addition to squandering a large part of Britain's patrimony of civilized institutions, this neo-liberal project of refashioning social life on a primitive model of market exchange has speeded the delegitimation of established institutions of such as the monarchy and the Church.
Further, by stripping democratic local government in Britain of most of its powers and building up the unaccountable institutions of the Quango Sate - the apparatus of committees appointed by central government to oversee the operation of the newly marketized public services, which is now larger in manpower and in the resources it allocates than democratic local government in Britain - the Conservatives have marginalized their own local party organizations and thereby contributed to the steep and swift decline of the Conservative Party itself ...
As for Tory England - that rich network of interlocking interests, social deferences and inherited institutions that Tory statecraft has successfully protected and reproduced for over a century by its skilful adaptation to democratic institutions in Britain - it is now as good as dead.
John Gray cites these as unintended consequences. I disagree.
ReplyDeleteEvery reform introduced by the Thatcherites and her pale mimics were designed to tip the gaming table in conservative's favour.
It was working exceedingly well.
The failure came when the party abandoned its "one step at a time" approach.
The Cameroons sold the Post Office and lock down education as a "no povvo" zone.
But they overreached: The FCS teens escaped the box that Tebbit had trapped them in. They installed "Boris", brexited got pissed and went full Bullingdon. All in the middle of a lockdown.
Few in the Tories expected to be outflanked on the right by th eone man who should have been sunk by Brexit's failure. Saint Nigel Farage.
Every tilt of the table to favour Tory over Labour doubled Reform's advantage.
And the Thatcherite revolution has almost eaten all its children.
As the post says, Gray was writing in 1997.
DeleteDo not forget the missing neo-liberal administration between Major and Cameron. Famously Mrs Thatcher answered a question about her greatest achievement with the words, "Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds." She had changed the climate of opinion in the political class who would be allowed into government. This is the Democracy in Chains theory.
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