The Conservative Party commands a majority not just in the House of Commons, but also in the wider political landscape. It holds the political loyalty of expanding and powerful voting constituencies, such as the retired population and private sector businesses and their workers. It is dominant in English politics outside the largest urban centres, and it has ambitions to consolidate its position in the South West and to move into the “Northern Powerhouse”. Most ambitiously, it aims to detach irreversibly the skilled working classes from allegiance to the Labour Party, something that was attempted by Thatcher in the 1980s. Its goal is the building of new political hegemonic bloc that might be termed the Osborne supremacy, after its chief strategist.
The new Conservative hegemony is not simply based on stealing Labour’s political clothes or co-opting the odd political figure, such as Andrew Adonis; it runs much deeper and has been more than a decade the making. While leading conservative thinkers have not seriously engaged with the work of Antonio Gramsci, they act as if they have done. They do this instinctively, although they also work hard at enacting political domination.
Adaptiveness through a conservative ‘double shuffle’
A major source of the new Conservative hegemony has been its fundamental intellectual political thinking and its adaptive nature. The intellectual foundations were laid in the decades of Keysianism when free market thinkers, notably Hayak and Friedman, pioneered neo-liberal thinking that would burst onto the political scene in Reagan/Thatcher era. Despite setbacks, following the exhaustion of the Thatcherite political project in the 1990s, it has sprung back to life again in a more malleable form. Its strengths lie not only in its roots in a neo-liberal economy and state, but in a conservative ‘double shuffle’: the combining of neo-Thatcherite economics and social and civil liberalism, represented by a highly flexible and cordial relationship between Osborne and Cameron.
Right intellectual and political resources
The Conservative Party has also mobilised an integrated set of highly effective political and intellectual resources that are constantly seeking new avenues of economic, technological, political and social development, able to appropriate the language of the Left and to summon and frame popular common sense. These include well-resourced Right think tanks such as Policy Exchange; campaigning attack organisations, notably, the Taxpayers Alliance; a stratum of websites (e.g. ConservativeHome) and bloggers linked to the more established rightwing press that provide easy outlets for key ideas and stories. Moreover, a modernized Conservative Parliamentary Party provides essential political leadership and is highly receptive to new ideas.
Very Machiavellian – conservative coercion and consensus
No longer restrained by the Liberal Democrats, the Conservatives have also opted for a strategy of coercion to erode the remaining political bastions of the Left with proposed legislation against trade unions, attacks on charities with social missions, reform of the Human Rights Act, and measures to make it more difficult for trade unionists to affiliate to the Labour Party. Coupled with proposed boundary changes and English Votes for English Laws (Evel) in the House of Commons, these are aimed at crippling the organisational capacity of Labour and the wider Left. It is these twin strategies of consensus and coercion that they anticipate will cohere and expand the Conservative political bloc – a set of economic, political and social alliances underpinned by new institutional ‘facts on the ground’ that aims to irrevocably shift the centre of political gravity.
The strengths and limits of the Conservative political bloc
In 2015 the conservative political bloc constitutes an extensive and well-organised array of ‘ramparts and earthworks’ geared to fighting successful political and ideological ‘wars of position’ and occasional “wars of manoeuvre”. This contrasts sharply with the ramshackle political and ideological trenches of Labour and the Left, which could be characterised as fragmented and in a state of serious disrepair.
The terrain of the Conservative bloc is not impregnable, however, having potential fault lines and weaknesses that might be exploited by a committed and skillful adversary. These include an ideological approach to austerity and shrinking the state that will hit their voting blocs; Europe; a social ‘holding pattern’ and dependence on the older voter that fails to tap into the dynamism of a younger and increasingly estranged generation and, crucially, vulnerability to a new economic crisis because the underlying systemic issues remain unresolved.
Is the Left capable of building an alternative political bloc?
The answer is not straightforward. On the one hand, Corbynism is focused on building and energizing a committed core and historically may be recognized as having saved the Labour Party from collapse after a catastrophic defeat in May. The Core may be the foundation of an effective counter bloc, but cannot represent it. A counter-hegemony will need to be built by reaching out around new vision of a productive economy; a more democratic state that balances national leadership and local discretion (a more democratic version of the Northern Powerhouse); a new social alliance that really articulates the idea of ‘one nation’ and an ability to represent these ideas and visions in everyday, common-sense language.
If the Conservatives instinctively understand political hegemony Labour politicians, with one or two notable exceptions, behave as though they have little or no understanding of what is actually going on. If they hope to win in future this has to change and a good start would be a collective sober analysis of the Conservative’s political and ideological achievements.
This article was originally published in the New Statesman on 8 October 2015 – http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/elections/2015/10/how-can-labour-break-osborne-supremacy
As always, we’d love to know your thoughts.
Whilst I am anti-Tory I would prefer tge slogan ‘The Tories are wrong’ to ‘i hatecthe Tories’. I do believe there are even a few quite nice Conservatives. And when I worked in the treasury in the 1950s and ’60s there were Tory governments who strongly believed in full employment.
Compass shoukd be attacking the wrong economics of budget balancing when the humane objectives are high employment and price stability. It should certainly support the idea of peoples’ QE. and should even consider the unthinkable notion of financing deficits in times of recession by direct money creation. (This would shock the banking community!) The Bank of England should be nationalised. But the ShadowcChancellor put his foot in it when he told us he was going to ‘tackle tge deficit’. Alas, the Coalition government succeeded in persuading tge public and the media that our budget deficit is akin to that of Greece (who is not allowed to print Euros). Cameron even said it was like a credit card debt. Householders have to repay their debts, but governments only need to repay foreeign currency debts. There is a huge task of education to be done if we are ever to demolish Osborne’s economics.
I submitted the first comment on this post. It has not appeared. This has happened several times before and complaining seems has made no difference. Is this censorship or just gross incompetence?
My initial impression is that everybody has missed the moral point that if you do everything to balance the books, and for the money, you miss the purpose of the enterprises whether economic or governmental. To go to extremes during the Napoleonic and World Wars what mattered was to win the war, not to balance the books and we arrived both in 1815 and 1945 with a national debt of 250% of GDP but eventually worked it off – even as people work off their mortgages but meanwhile get on with their lives. To take an opposite type of example, if the Dutch do not keep up their dykes there will be no Netherlands so we must also think in terms of what sort of Britain do we want. The T—s want to kick the poorest tenths into the ditch but then they are next
Hi David, I’m sorry you’ve had problems posting. Unfortunately, we do have to approve comments before they go live to ensure collegiate discussion and prevent spam. I’ve had a look on our control panel and can’t find an earlier comment from you anywhere (i.e. not pending approval or deleted) so I’m afraid I’m not sure what’s going wrong. Do keep letting us know when you have a problem (I’m clare@compassonline.flywheelsites.com) and I can ask someone technical to look into it.
I think Ken is right in his Compass essay to highlight Osborne as the key factor behind the Conservatives’ resurgence. I have no doubt that without his guile and strategic acumen the result in May would have been very different, and certainly the Tories would not have achieved a majority (albeit one that would have been much more precarious in the days before five-year fixed term parliaments).
One thing Labour needs to do if it is to return to government in 2020 is get much better at opposition, and soon. The previous leadership made huge strategic misjudgments, particularly over the economy. Chris Mullin put it brilliantly in his review of two new biographies of Cameron in last Sunday’s Observer: in his view the greatest achievement of the last government was “How he [Cameron] and Osborne managed, by the repeated, cynical use of mendacious slogans… to convince a fair swath of the electorate that the economic crisis of 2008, which began in the American mortgage market, was almost uniquely British and mainly the fault of overspending by the previous administration. How did the party of bankers, hedge funders and light touch regulation manage to turn what was by any measure a crisis of capitalism into a crisis for the public sector? Far from inheriting chaos, most of the difficult decisions had already been taken by the time the Tories took office. What they inherited was a growth rate of 1.9% that was not exceeded until 2014… There was a small structural deficit, but the Conservative narrative is simply wrong. If so, how were the Tories able to pull off such a giant deception? Certainly they had a largely compliant media and a useless opposition, but they must have sat around a table planning it”.
What this means is that, when I hear people say, as Emma Reynolds MP has just done on the World at One, that the economy is Labour’s big weakness in the eyes of the public and it needs to show an understanding of this, I think yes but we need to remember that the perception is factually wrong and deserves to be loudly and constantly corrected, otherwise it will be hung around Labour’s neck for decades like the Winter of Discontent was (it kept coming up even in 2010). It is the product of a “giant deception”, in Mullin’s words. Labour needs to be much more perceptive and artful in its communications. Whether the new Labour leadership is capable of that remains to be seen, but it will be critical, as it was in the last parliament.
Despite that failure, I disagree with Ken and many other commentators, notably Jon Cruddas, that the election result was catastrophic for Labour. It was in Scotland, but elsewhere there were clear signs of progress, albeit limited. The Labour vote increased by 3.6% in England while the Tories went up by just 1.4%, and less than one in four of the total electorate voted for them. The common assumption seems to be that Labour votes leeched to the Tories in large numbers but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Most analyses of the result and its lessons that I have seen are far too simplistic and fail to take account of the complexity of the movements that took place, particularly those involving the votes for UKIP and the Greens and those that left the Lib Dems.
The Conservatives’ current attempts to build a hegemonic position, which Ken charts very effectively, seem likely to have been prompted by their recognition of weakness rather than strength, in spite of the election result. How Labour responds to this challenge will be key to the future of our politics.
Test comment
“The Conservative Party commands a majority not just in the House of Commons, but also in the wider political landscape.”
No it doesn’t check the facts.
“Most ambitiously, it [the Conservative Party] aims to detach irreversibly the skilled working classes from allegiance to the Labour Party …”.
Hardly a new phenomenon. It can describe it as building “hegemonic blocs” if one wishes but it is the normal stuff of politics. Political parties of any substance always like to put themselves forward as representing the common interest.
“While leading conservative thinkers have not seriously engaged with the work of Antonio Gramsci, they act as if they have done.”
No they do not and this claim is not borne out by a passing quip from Michael Gove.
“A major source of the new Conservative hegemony has been its fundamental intellectual political thinking …”
What is “fundamental” about its “intellectual political thinking”? Is an assumption that the free market is better at providing solutions to public problems and example of such fundamental thinking?
“… the Thatcherite political project in the 1990s, it has sprung back to life … in a conservative ‘double shuffle’: the combining of neo-Thatcherite economics and social and civil liberalism …”.
Is the assault on trade unions or the increasing restrictions on political demonstrations and example of such “civil liberalism” . Backing gay marriage and not being fussed about not wearing a tie in the House of Commons are not the whole deal. This claim of civil liberalism hardly goes with the description of coercion of civil society outlines later in the same piece.
“Moreover, a modernized Conservative Parliamentary Party … is highly receptive to new ideas.”
“Highly receptive”? In what way does this show? Don’t we need some examination of the type of ideas to which it is receptive?
We are told the Tories have a “well-organised array of ‘ramparts and earthworks’” for fighting successful ‘wars of position’ and occasional “wars of manoeuvre”.
It would be so much more meaningful if the discussion were conducted in terms of the political reality (e.g. Tory Travails over tax credits) than in terms of military metaphors.
On Labour we are solemnly informed that “Corbynism is focused on building and energizing a committed core” but that “The Core may be the foundation of an effective counter bloc, but cannot represent it.” If this has any meaning I suppose that it is to say that the wave of support for a change of direction that made Corbyn leader still only touches a small section of the population and now has to learn to take its ideas and enthusiasm to the wider population. But if so why not say so?
“… the Conservatives instinctively understand political hegemony” but “Labour politicians, with one or two notable exceptions, behave as though they have little or no understanding of what is actually going on.”
This is such an absurd claim that it is difficult to know where to begin – after the above points I don’t see the point of trying.
I am more than happy to read unfamiliar and challenging ideas but I have time for sloppy claims, waffle and verbiage. I am afraid that all of these are well in evidence in this piece.