Loyalty to an ideological programme is rare in Britain. The labels that political activists use, often pejoratively, to define one another – “Thatcherite”, “Blairite”, “Trotskyist” – do not inform the voting intentions of the majority. Theresa May understands this pragmatic sensibility. “I don’t have an ‘ism’ other than Conservatism,” she has said. And by that she does not envisage a policy menu. Mrs May sees Tory values not as a doctrine but as cultural inclination and a social milieu – the parochial heart of Middle England. The prime minister’s unwillingness to define “Mayism” doesn’t mean such a thing will not emerge, as such concepts generally do, from the operation of her instincts on events. Already there is a discernible trajectory from old Conservative ideas towards something tailored to the challenges facing the country.
A starting point is to understand what Mrs May is not. She is not an apostle of Margaret Thatcher, nor is she a Tory “moderniser” in the terms established by David Cameron. Most revealing is Mrs May’s complex relationship with liberalism. She is evangelical about global free trade but ready to compromise on economic openness for tighter immigration control. She supports gay marriage and women’s right to choose abortion, although she has voted in parliament for shorter term limits. As home secretary, she was no friend of penal reform. Leaving the European convention and introducing a British bill of rights remains on the agenda. She quietly endorsed the remain campaign and the tone of her subsequent embrace of Brexit goes beyond the technical task of decoupling from Brussels.
The first post-liberal PM
The prime minister interprets the referendum as an instruction to reshape the state to address the grievance of voters who felt marginalised through the years of accelerating globalisation. That is a cultural project as well as an economic one. It posits pre-referendum supremacy of an elite that was liberal, cosmopolitan and quick to ignore – even to despise – alternative perspectives. It follows that this elite should now be sidelined and its opinions discarded. It is true that a broad consensus – merging aspects of social and economic liberalism – gave continuity to the succession from New Labour to Tory-led coalition government in 2010. Mr Cameron’s claim once to have been the “heir to Blair” was not without foundation. Mrs May’s choice to define Brexit as the reaction to that continuum makes her Britain’s first post-liberal prime minister.
Influential figures in Mrs May’s close-knit entourage are sympathetic to the “Red Tory” school of thought that combines a critique of social liberalism and free market libertarianism. This analysis identifies a corrosive interaction between two successive revolutions of the 20th century: the left-leaning, permissive culture of the late 1960s and the rightwing fixation on profit-seeking as the agent of progress that was the kernel of Thatcherism in the 1980s. Red Toryism rejects neither movement outright but says that their combination led to a cult of individual self-gratification, expressed through materialistic consumption, at the expense of community wellbeing.
Red Tories explain selfish individualism as an unintended consequence of the 1980s. Mrs Thatcher, they say, extrapolated too much from her own Methodist faith and austere work ethic, believing that people would use their economic freedoms judiciously and charitably – restraining licentious appetites and diverting surplus profit into philanthropy. She underestimated the importance of the state as referee in the distribution of fair reward. There is an intriguing symmetry here with the “Blue Labour” critique of liberal third-way politics. In this account, New Labour was insufficiently sceptical of the capacity of the state to effect social change by cash redistribution from the centre, overly squeamish in facing the impact of mass migration and neglectful of the resonance in traditional Labour-voting areas of identity, community and place as drivers of political allegiance – faith, flag, family. Insofar as Mrs May imagines herself occupying a new post-liberal centre ground of politics, it is in the space where Blue Labour and Red Tory sensibilities intersect.
Europe still matters
By the end of the 20th century, left liberals had won the culture war, and right liberals had won the economic war. Cultural conservatives felt aggrieved that their values were being traduced while the left felt they had been sold out. Mr Cameron’s Tory “modernisation” aggravated the offence on both sides. The reactionary right saw it as an ultra-cosmopolitan project symbolised by Mr Cameron’s support of gay marriage and short-lived dalliance with environmentalism. The left saw his “big society” rhetoric as a front for reheated small-state Thatcherism. Liberalism was the dominant governing ethos of a generation, yet liberals were scattered across party lines. The closest they came to unity was the gathering of disparate forces in defence of EU membership – an unloved proposition which became the proxy for a social and economic settlement that, in reality, had little to do with Brussels.
Mrs May is now committed to delivering radical change through that same proxy. Brexit has become the totemic mission of national renewal and yet EU membership is not the underlying cause of voter discontent. None of the ambitions she has declared for a fairer society is obviously connected to that mission. She talks about rebalancing the economy with an “industrial strategy” and professes commitment to workers’ rights. She pledges corporate governance reforms and crackdowns on tax avoidance to social responsibility on big business. She understands that a housing shortage and wage stagnation feed anxiety that today’s children will never sustain the lifestyle enjoyed by their parents. In her 2016 conference speech she invited her party to remember “the good that government can do”. She wants to deploy state power in defence of people who feel they are “just about managing”. But she must know that the destabilising consequences of divorce from Europe’s single market will worsen their plight before any benefits are realised.
Balancing act
The place where Brexit most satisfies the post-liberal narrative is also the point where the argument is weakest – the assertion that social and economic malaise can be healed by ending foreign infiltration of British workplaces. There is a grim logic that will lead Mrs May to indulge that misconception in order to buy permission from her party to pursue other things. But she has only a vague aspiration to palliate the negative consequences of British capitalism and no policy equal to the task.
It is unclear how deep a commitment to that agenda runs through the Tory party. The more radical side of Mrs May’s ambition is a partial repudiation of an economic legacy still fetishised on the right of her party – the conviction that government is the obstacle to progress and that a shrunken state, with fewer labour protections, yields a more enterprising society. A backlash has been averted because the prime minister is simultaneously satisfying a long-held desire of the same section of her party – hardline Euroscepticism. Conflict is deferred, not avoided. Meanwhile, extracting Britain from EU membership will consume all of the administrative capacity of government for the foreseeable future.
