A Conservative spring?

The results of last week’s votes will have emboldened David Cameron, but recent history shows that a party can be vulnerable when it is in the ascendant, writes Richard Hall.

It feels at last like a Conservative spring. It has come a year late for the party to win the general election, but it has certainly put a bounce in the step of the Tories. SNP leader Alex Salmond may have been the big winner from last week’s round of voting, but prime minister David Cameron will be quietly just as satisfied.

English council gains and a resounding ‘no’ vote in the AV referendum will have compensated for the party’s continued failure to make significant progress in Scotland and Wales. The coming electoral battles will be fought on the Conservatives’ preferred system, and on terrain that has been rebalanced in their favour by the reduction in the number of seats in the Commons.

Celebration of the royal wedding appeared to chime with conservative values, and at the referendum, a ‘progressive majority’ for electoral reform was restricted to enclaves in London, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Cambridge and Oxford. Labour under Ed Miliband is still in the foothills of its climb back to power.

The Lib Dem collapse helps Cameron in the Tory-Lib Dem marginals in the south, with Labour voters now more reluctant to lend their vote to Clegg’s party in an effort to keep out the Conservatives. Cameron’s opponents within his own party will be quietened by the strength of the ‘no’ vote in the referendum, and impressed that voters found their leader much more persuasive than Labour’s.

Whilst Nick Clegg looks to re-establish some distance between himself and his Conservative colleagues with promises to restrict private involvement in the NHS and a push on Lords reform, many Tories see this as a moment to listen less to their damaged coalition partner,not more.

Indeed, around the world centre-right parties are in the ascendant – reaping the reward of an economic crisis born in no small part of a flawed financial regulation regime designed by governments of the centre-left. While the left scratches its head over why a crisis of global capitalism has ushered in a period of right-wing dominance, in the UK, the Conservatives can enjoy their strongest moment since 1987.

Between the end of the miners’ strike and Margaret Thatcher’s third election victory, her government hit trouble, with the Westland Affair and difficulties over a US bombing raid of Libya being played out to a background of Labour opinion poll leads, backbench rumblings and a disastrous by-election defeat in Brecon and Radnor.

But by polling day in June 1987, the Conservatives had comfortably been re-elected on a manifesto pledging to increase share-ownership, reduce taxation, limit trade union power and accelerate privatisation. A year later, the basic rate of income tax was cut to 25p and the top rate to 40p, setting the tone for the politics of at least the next 25 years.

Thatcher appeared at the height of her powers, and the Conservatives in charge of the nation’s destiny. But today’s Tory high command should look carefully at what happened next. The government over-extended itself on the poll tax, and began a long and public obsession over Europe – exemplified by Thatcher’s speech in Bruges in 1988. Although John Major managed to squeeze out another term in office, the Conservative moment had passed.

Today, the coalition is implementing parallel radical reforms on health, welfare and education – and is coming under increasing pressure from some backbenchers to take on Europe over the planned budget rise and the scope of its powers over Britain.

Last week’s votes may embolden those who wish to proceed full steam ahead on the reform programme, and to take on Europe. But they must be careful not to deviate too far from mainstream opinion and priorities.

The Conservatives appear to have escaped blame for the tax rises and spending reductions implemented by the coalition. They will feel that hard decisions, made in adversity after the general election a year ago, have paid off. But the 1987 Parliament demonstrates that it is just as important to make the right choices when times are good.

Richard Hall is the managing editor of The House Magazine.

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