For some time, I have been worried about the perception of David Cameron by Prof. Vernon Bogdanor, at Brasenose College, Oxford, as a “classic Tory pragmatist”, that he is an “instinctive Conservative”. Bogdanor feels, apparently, that the closest comparison is with Harold Macmillan or Stanley Baldwin. In a way which I can understand, it is symptomatic of a Government which ‘is in office but not in power’, as Norman Lamont so famously said of a previous Conservative administration. Attempts deconstructing Cameron’s biographical roots appear to have overall drawn a blank, although Jason Cowley’s attempt in the New Statesman does not unearth evidence for a strong ideological passion. Cameron simply looks like a person who has been at the right place at the wrong time, or the wrong place at the right time, but never unfortunately the right place at the right time; although due to misfortune rather than design he seems to have attracted also the wrong people at the wrong time, such as Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks who through alleged activities at News International face severe allegations from the Crown Prosecution Service.
The word ‘pragmatist’ means in political circles means, to a large degree, that he is a consensus politician; it is a matter of personal preference whether you embue into that a sense of compassion. I sense that Cameron would like to be seen to make tough decisions, such as exposing the NHS to the full opportunities and challenges of operating in a regulated market, or by taking certain legal services, such as welfare benefits legal advice, out of scope simply because we cannot as a country afford it. Further, it has been observed that Cameron, in his general style of decision-making, has shown raw pragmatism in trying to minimise the negative aspects of policy, particularly in areas of immigration, Euroskepticism, and multiculturalism. However, the ultimate denouement of this nature of politics has fundamentally been exactly the same problem faced by a business wishing to take into account views of its stakeholders – what Ed Miliband calls ‘responsible capitalism’, but what the recent of the business and legal fraternity have known for ages as ‘corporate social responsibility’. That denouement is that it is actually impossible to reconcile all of the views all of the time, and, as in many multinational corporates, some views will simply be irreconcilable.
As a style of leadership, it means that David Cameron is not a leader, but a manager – given the nature of the Coalition politics, some will necessarily view him, in fact, as a ‘caretaker manager’. It’s what the late great Prof. Peter Drucker would call ‘doing things right’ typical of managers, rather than ‘doing the right things’, typical of leaders. David Cameron cannot unfortunately rely on natural charisma necessarily, though few of us have met him. The media have been effective in painting a view, and the public have been keen to accept the depiction, of Cameron as a Bullingdon Flashman-type figure, completely at odds with Cameron wishing to present himself as a one-nation Tory, certainly very far away from Benjamin Disraeli’s character or performance. The ‘come on Dear’ putdowns to Angela Eagle may have been a flashman-in-the-pan, but it is fact that he can call Nadine Dorries ‘frustrated’ to roars of public which attracts concern from the spin-doctors of the Conservatives. As a leader, possibly Cameron is a ‘transformational’ leader, but he has in fact, with the help of George Osborne, transformed the country from a deficit to an even bigger deficit; whatever deficit he has paid off, the benefit paid out coupled with decreased income till receipts and horrendous growth, meant that plan A has objectively failed, and the Government had to swallow their pride yesterday. The investment policy is better late than never for Keynesians, but there is a definite sense of lost time, such that most economists believe that the UK will not emerge from recession until 2018-2020.
This all puts Ed Miliband and Ed Balls in a tricky position. People will be quick to criticise any agreement with austerity at the time of the General Election, but Ed Balls has a powerful morale high-ground in being able to claim that the double-dip recession was exactly as he had predicted. Sunder Katwala in 2010 warned a meeting of ‘Next Left’ of the Fabian Society in Manchester that, even if the programme of austerity worked, the social damage to the UK would take many years to recover from. Since then, austerity has been totally discredited in Europe. All of this of course assumes that David Cameron is solely pragmatic, but lacks an ideological mantra.
I do not believe David Cameron lacks an ideological mantra, he may be pragmatic, but his policies are entirely impractical. His ‘pragmatic’ policies have seen the deficit get worse, the raison d’etre of the coalition, even if there had been an initial element of ‘crisis’ which had brought the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats together. His economic policy was an ideological rejection of investment in the UK; it is a fact that stopping the ‘Building Schools for the Future’ starved investment in the country, leading the Q3/4 2010 construction industry growth figures to deteriorate, precipitating the overall decline of the weak recovery in the UK. This fact is a clear prediction of Keynes’ General Theory of 1948, a school of thought from meaning leading economists, wilfully rejected by Cameron.
I also believe that David Cameron’s doctrine is not simply to ‘make the state smaller’. He has a specific ambition to outsource or subcontract the state, and we have seen this policy run into clear difficulties as the general public reject the notion of unaccountable people in the private sector taking no responsibility for catastrophes in policing to security. The behaviour of private sector organisations in generating money through illegal or unlawful means has also shocked the general public, illustrated by the A4e, News International and Barclays scenarios. Whilst it is a complicated argument, this argument, best seen as mostly ideological but partly pragmatic, is not one which the public appear to support. The largest democratic movement in England, the Unions, are furthermore keen to represent the statutory duties of employers, or overzealous corporate directors, although their scope for shareholder activism is somewhat muted by the English courts at present.
David Cameron is best seen as a manager, but in meantime it is very unfortunate that George Osborne has murdered the economy in the UK, either through a mens rea of intention to kill the recovery through rejection of Keynesian economics, or through extremely recklessness (or incompetence) rather in running the economy. With Cameron through a highly ideological, but perhaps pragmatic, management procedure in outsourcing the State, the public is already noticing a clear lack of leadership in any time. It is this rejection of what the Conservatives stand for, illustrated by mismanagement of the last budget despite seeing a tax concession for the highest income citizens of the UK, will mean that this is possibly not the wrong time to demonstrate this particular style of “pragmatic politics”. A weakness of this “pragmatic stance” is that Cameron quite often has not been able to please many of the people much of the time, and this indeed has been a problem in general of the Coalition needing to appease the views of different factions, especially in the field of social welfare and justice. Another weakness of this stance has been Cameron’s apparent eagerness to show the politics of ‘divide and rule’, living a nation very unease with itself; pitting employed versus unemployed, the City against non-City, the rich against poor, the non-disabled versus the disabled, and so it goes on. This all smacks of the style of government of David Cameron, characterised by the approach of ‘whose time then is it to be unpopular?; One term governments are most unusual, but, as I suspect Cameron will find out on 8 December 2015, entirely possible.
Thanks to Ram Lakha for a comment on a previous version of this blogpost.
