During her time as the Leader of the Opposition, Margaret Thatcher travelled light on policy detail. But it would be hard to claim she did not have a mandate for the bold reforms she brought in after she became Prime Minister. She rejected socialism and embraced free enterprise. Her impatience with managed decline and the corporatist consensus of her more defeatist colleagues was apparent from every speech and interview. Appeasement of the Soviet Union and of trade union power was to end.
Under her leadership the Conservatives embarked on a passionate battle of ideas – not least via the Centre for Policy Studies, of course – representing a break from the Tories’ previous apologetic, technocratic timidity. The case for freedom was entwined with her patriotism as a moral imperative. Though Thatcher had served in Ted Heath’s Cabinet, it was obvious that she offered change rather than continuity to his approach.
It is apparent from these reminiscences that there are parallels between Thatcher and her successor Kemi Badenoch – rather more significant ones than them both happening to be women.
On the BBC, yesterday, Laura Kuenssberg asked Badenoch about Nigel Farage’s charge that she is ‘more of the same, no change’. Badenoch responded that such a charge was ‘actually quite hilarious’. She added that she made clear that the Conservative Party had not been ‘clear enough and consistent enough about values and about how we were using those Conservative values to deliver to the British people’.
But if Farage and others are still in doubt about what the new Tory leader stands for, the tenets of Badenochism, I suggest reading a paper her campaign Renewal 2030 put out during the leadership contest entitled: ‘Conservatism in Crisis: Rise of the Bureaucratic Class’.
In the introduction, she wrote:
In nearly every country, a new progressive ideology is on the rise. This ideology is based on the twin pillars of constant intervention on behalf of protecting marginalised, vulnerable groups, including protecting us from ourselves – and the idea that bureaucrats make better decisions than individuals, or even democratic nation states.
Socialism was still the enemy, though it had taken a different form since the Thatcher era. Badenoch continued:
This ideology is behind the rise of identity politics, the attacks on the democratic, sovereign nation state, and ever-more government via spending and regulation. It is driving the economic slowdown seen across the West and social polarisation in country after country. A new left, not based primarily on nationalisation and private sector trade unions, but ever increasing social and economic control.
Increasing dominance has been granted to ‘a new and growing bureaucratic class’ which is ‘focused around administering government rules’.
True, she doesn’t specify policies, but read on and you can pick up a few clues. For instance: ‘The growth of pointless degrees pushed by government so that a middle-class job requires a major millstone of debt, funding a growing university administrative class’. It does rather follow that if Badenoch regards many university degrees as pointless, then under her government the taxpayer would cease to fund them.
The paper includes a section on regulation:
In housing, the regulatory burdens that restrict housing supply have driven up housing costs, with house prices rising by 254% from 2000 to 2023. On childcare, we have driven out the informal childcare sector, so in recent years, “a part-time (25 hours per week) nursery place for a child under two rose by 59%. This is around twice as quickly as overall inflation.” Consumer electricity prices rose by 200% from 2000 to the early 2020s ahead of the war in Ukraine. In America, where they embraced the shale revolution, electricity consumer prices had risen by just around 50% from 2000 to January 2020.
No details of what she would do differently but the implications are clear enough, aren’t they? Sufficiently bold planning liberalisation for home ownership to become more affordable. Ease the ratios and other bureaucratic burdens that make childcare so expensive. Get fracking.
Another section adds that ‘to take on the bureaucratic class means to ditch radical environmental politics, unpick identity politics, focus on a strong positive national identity, limit migration, streamline HR, compliance, sustainability, planning, to focus on bringing down the cost of the welfare state and much more’. It will be necessary ‘to roll back the quangos and independent bodies’ and ‘take on the supranational bodies encroaching on democratic control’.
There is a fearlessness about addressing issues that are important but other politicians might prefer to ignore as too ‘sensitive’. The paper declares:
Whereas once psychological and mental health was seen as something that people should work on themselves as individuals, mental health has become something that society, schools and employers have to adapt around. Alongside rising educational needs and employment issues, the rise in welfare claims related to mental health, in the UK at least, has outpaced any conceivable clinical explanation.
The report concludes that ‘it will take time to develop an agenda as radical as the Thatcher agenda was fifty years ago, the last real successful reinvention of Conservatism. We will need a reinvention that faces the challenges of the times now, not looking back to past solutions’.
As this new conservatism is unveiled, the Left will respond in consternation – they have become used to their intellectual hegemony going unchallenged. A couple of Conservative MPs will discover that they aren’t really conservative at all and defect to parties they are more ideologically compatible with. Others may decide to quietly stand down after the barrage of emotive personal abuse from all the vested interests on social media and in their email inboxes.
Yet Badenoch will show great resilience and focus on winning the argument. There will be strains, but I doubt the Conservatives will oust her. Most realise they couldn’t go on as before – including her rival in the final phase of the contest Robert Jenrick. ‘Rob: You and I know that we don’t actually disagree on very much,’ she told him in her acceptance speech.
The Conservative Party had better fasten its seatbelt, it’s going to be a bumpy ride. Yet my prediction is that Badenoch will find her courage will be rewarded.
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