David Cameron radicalised by events, not ideas

Politics is sealed off from the outside world by language. Like any industry, it has a herd vocabulary that binds insiders and smears their work in a patina of mystique. A story is a “narrative”.

Any intention to do anything is dignified as a “strategy”. We also bend the word “radical” into a compliment. A minister will sell a policy as radical as if that were a clinching argument.

Every contender for the UK opposition Labour Party leadership over the summer professed their radicalism, as if nothing could be radical and bad, as if the Khmer Rouge were not radical.

Using the word properly – that is, neutrally – David Cameron will be remembered as a radical, and an accidental one at that. The prime minister did not enter politics itching to change Britain. When he took over the Conservatives a decade ago, his ease with the New Labour settlement of fiscal and cultural laxity marked him out.

The left, loudly present in protest in Manchester during this week’s Tory conference, always gets the politics of poshness wrong: privilege does not spur Cameron and his like to do unspeakable things to the poor. It inclines them to do nothing at all to a status quo that has worked for them.

Formed by the sylvan Home Counties, Cameron was going to be another Harold Macmillan – the Tory grandee elegantly steering his country to no particular destination. Instead, he is turning out to be a disruptive prime minister. He will probably leave the state substantially smaller than he found it, and so tarnish the idea of increasing expenditure faster than economic growth as to make any re-expansion electorally untenable for some time. Already far fewer people work for the state or receive transfers from it.

Government is loosening, not just contracting, and in ways that are hard to reverse. Manchester is the first northern English conurbation to become a self-running polity under an elected mayor. Others are bidding for the same autonomy.

On Monday, George Osborne, the chancellor, said he would allow local authorities to retain revenue from business rates, which used to be remitted to Whitehall like tribute to an imperial capital. In cash and population terms, these changes inflict a deeper rupture to the unitary British state than the founding of the Scottish parliament in 1999.

Cameron will also bequeath a schools system in which the role of government does not go much beyond funding; the majority of secondary schools are already self-managed “academies”. Individuals can draw down their pension pots instead of buying annuities. What meagre power the trade unions had after their rout in the 1980s is being pruned.

Fiscal cuts

Some or all of this may turn out to be foolish. The coming around of fiscal cuts chills the blood of many Tory MPs and the new rates regime could make life harder for places without much business to tax. The general transfer of power from state to citizen comes with risks that ministers only advertise sotto voce. But this is what radicalism means: the doing of big things, the going to the root of a problem. You need not share an ambition to recognise its grand dimensions.

In Manchester, the right’s purists nag about Tory plagiarism of “unsound” Labour ideas: the national infrastructure commission, paid grandparental leave, the living wage. Neutrals are taken in by the show of heterodoxy. But these statist gestures are rounding errors next to the cuts and structural upheaval. They provide political cover for the real work of Cameron’s premiership, which is searingly right of centre.

If we struggle to see that, his English aversion to ideology and its articulation is the reason. The speech he gives on Wednesday will be all “security” and “stability” and plodding common sense. This is never intended to deceive but it is deceptive: under the flannel is a provocative government.

Doubters of Cameron’s claim to historic status say he has no coherent worldview, no Cameronism. But neither does any normal person. Our beliefs are a dog’s breakfast of instincts and biases.

Running a state according to a system of thought is neither human nor, to judge by the 20th century’s body count, humane. Cameron shows that it does not take a philosophy to change a country, just the knack of responding dynamically to circumstances.

Met with a hung parliament five years ago, he formed a coalition. Flanked by headstrong cabinet colleagues, he lets them work. Discombobulated by the crash, he tore up his economic policy. He was radicalised by events, not books. But he was radicalised.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2015