A central aspect of David Cameron’s message is that the Conservative Party has changed. It is now, we are told, environmentally friendly, socially liberal and completely at ease with multiculturalism.
Yesterday – as part of a conscious attempt to appeal to progressive voters – the multimillionaire Old Etonian grandson of a baronet was even claiming that the Tories are now more committed than Labour to the eradication of childhood poverty. Welcome to the new cuddly centre-right.
And even speaking as someone who came out of the 1980s with a visceral loathing for Conservatism and everything it represents, it seems idle to insist that there are no differences between then and now.
Perhaps I shouldn’t too surprised. An ability to move with the times is one of the characteristics that distinguishes a living political organisation from a cult.
Being an openly gay Tory MP during the Thatcher years would not have been an option, for instance. Nowadays, nobody is bothered about Alan Duncan’s civil partnership.
There are even signs are that the once substantial minority of rather nasty racists present among the Tories’ local level activist base are much diminished. I have no reason to disbelieve the official assurances that the leadership was glad to see the back of Bob Spink, the clearly racist MP who recently defected to UKIP.
Yet clearly the old class instinct is still there. Even as his boss was pushing his credentials as the only true friend of poor kiddies, his sidekick George Osborne announced that the Tories are considering a further toughening of employment law following the recent spate of industrial action.
Workers, Osborne insultingly claimed, go on strike ‘at the drop of a hat’. This is nonsense, of course. Indeed, the degree of detachment from reality inherent in this statement is quite remarkable for a serious politician.
For a start, thanks to the anti-union laws that formed a key plank of Thatcherism’s offensive against the working class, it takes weeks to go through all the legal hurdles necessary to take lawful industrial action.
You can see the impact in the statistics. The total number of strike days taken last year, at just over 1m, is minimal compared to the average of 12.9m in the 1970s and 7.4m in the 1980s.
The truth is, Britons have substantially fewer rights at work than workers in any other industrialised country. When Labour was elected in 1997, employment rights were a national disgrace. Even after Labour’s introduction of a national minimum wage, the European social charter, union rights at GCHQ and the Employment Relations Act, they remain arguably the worst in the EU. Welcome to UK plc, where workers can be sacked by text message.
Unions are marginalised, little more than one lobby among many others, with the auxiliary role of unpaid health and safety inspectors. Rather than extending existing restrictions, there is a need to repeal the 1980s class war legislation and replace it with a charter of positive employment rights.
However much the Tories try to present themselves as the human incarnation of the Care Bear Bunch, their project remains that of providing a political voice for the minority of wealthy people that control society.
That’s why they have opposed everything in history that has helped the poor at the slight expense of the rich, from the abolition of slavery and the Factory Acts right through to the minimum wage. However slick the marketing, they remain at bottom the nasty party.
Posted at 14:36, 29 April 2008
Comments (11)
George Osborne seems to believe there is more votes to be won bashing the unions, I don't think it will wash as regards the Grangemouth dispute because most people i have spoke to admire their fight to keep the final salary pension for new workers.Osborne goes on to say in the same article that the dispute is Gordon Browns' fault because of the pension tax raid 10 years ago. But didn't Norman Lamont and Nigel Lawson do the same.!
Look, the Tories may not be social democrats - fair enough, no-one's expecting them to be and that's not what they're claiming to be. Nor are they trying to be the Care Bears for Gawd's sake.
But to say they must be Thatcherites, red (as it were) in tooth and claw just because they were in the 80s, is just as fallacious.
And even if they were it counteracts your idea of them being just for the wealthy. If I remember correctly Thatcherism was very much driven by the enrichez-vous petit bourgeois, not the rich Old Etonian toffs who seemed to have much more of a social conscience.
As for the abolition of slavery and the Factory Acts, Wilberforce and Ashley were both Tories. So much for history!
I guess that's a response (of sorts) to my earlier post on your LC piece.
Pointless trading arguments I suppose because I suspect this is a 'never the twain' type situation Dave. Still, as 'Parasite' points out a little more historical awareness wouldn't go amiss - Tories were passing union legislation and social healthcare legislation a generation before Labour was formed. Some sort of recognition of this might make your argument a little more robust...
``Tories were passing union legislation and social healthcare legislation a generation before Labour was formed. Some sort of recognition of this might make your argument a little more robust...''
I believe Mssrs. Marx and Engels had a few things to say about that. (As did Karl Polanyi.) That legislation was passed under pressure from below (M & E), and because it was clear to many Conservatives at the time that the unrestrained capitalism of the day was tearing society apart (Polanyi), which was not conservative at all :-)
Yes I agree with you, sadly I did not see Labour reverse any of these laws against the Unions, or really give anyone any hope that New Labour would help the working class, people say what about the Min wage, well it's hardly made us better off has it. People who got £1 an hour also had benefits to make it up to a living so called wage, now they are getting £5.25 they still need benefits just not as much.
Well, as I understand it, although Wilberforce was a Tory, the Tory Party opposed his bill to abolish slavery, which relied on Whig support. That's right, isn't it?
But didn't Margeret Thatcher say that she was in the political tradition of palmerstone, and that the modern Conservative Party are the heirs of the whigs?
Leopards don't change their spots.
Wilberforce was a Tory politically, but not officially a member of the Tories. Nor did Wilberforce 'abolish slavery' - he was responsible for leading the parliamentary wing of the British abolitionist movement which succeeded in passing an Act abolishing the slave trade in the British Empire in 1807. However, slavery continued on in the British Empire until it was officially abolished in the 1830s, and Britain continued to profit from slavery and the slave trade until about the 1880s through its trade with the American South, Cuba and Brazil.
Moreover, most historians would argue that it was the actions of the enslaved themselves that were central to their own liberation - through a series of revolts and rebellions climaxing in the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804 - an event which is critical to the British Parliament agreeing to pass Wilbeforce's bill abolishing the slave trade in 1807. And lets not forget it was a slave revolt on Jamaica in 1831 that helped force the British Parliament to proclaim Emancipation in 1833. Still, 'so much for history!' eh?
Leopards do not change their spots, well Labour did from red to pink to light blue
``they remain at bottom the nasty party''
I think the phrase you are looking for is ``lower than vermin'' (A. Bevan, 1948).