NEONEOLIBERALISM:

Tories rule: but liberal Tories with a New Labour legacy: The bold risk Cameron and Clegg took means that instead of a lurch to the right, this regime will keep vying for the centre (Martin Kettle, 5/13/10, guardian.co.uk)

This week, both Cameron and Clegg did very brave and hazardous things with their parties to create Britain's new government. In this paper, much of the attention has inevitably focused on Clegg, his tough negotiating tactics with a weak hand, his deft outmanoeuvring of Labour, his determination to take the Liberal Democrats back into government for the first time since the steamship era, his willingness to risk the political price. Like it or loathe it, Clegg's strategy has been a bold leap in the dark.

But don't underestimate what Cameron has done too. To take the Conservative party and force it into coalition with anyone, especially the Liberal Democrats, took some nerve. To do it on the basis of a notably liberal programme, involving concessions over many cherished, more rightwing policies, is genuinely audacious, especially when it also meant excluding some of his own lieutenants from cabinet seats. Cameron's bold thrust has been compared with Blair's overthrow of clause IV in 1996. But whereas Blair's victory blighted no Labour career or interest group, Cameron's has created a resentful salon des refusés within his own party.

No Conservative leader has taken such a risk for such essentially liberal ends in living memory. Disraeli's embrace of parliamentary reform in 1867 is a distant parallel – a move that overturned Tory orthodoxy and catapulted the party of reaction towards the democratic era. Baldwin's readiness to let the Labour party into government in 1924, thereby killing the Liberals for nearly a century, has echoes too. Both were daring ploys that ensured the longterm health of a new kind of Tory party.

However, those future rewards were by no means obvious when Disraeli and Baldwin threw the dice. And the same must surely be said about Cameron's ploy.

Think of it as Thatcherism with a smiling face.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 14, 2010 5:48 AM