In the 1980s, the current shadow cabinet were the golden boys of Conservatism. They believed, as Oliver Letwin put it, that ‘you can privatise just about anything.’ Since then, their party has been in search of a new identity and, thanks to Iain Duncan Smith, it seems they might now have one: today’s Tories are just quiet Thatcherites.
After two devastating defeats and six years of demoralising opposition, the Tories have been satisfyingly drained of their smugness. ‘Reasonable, honest and with integrity’ was how Duncan Smith first said he wanted the Tories to appear and two years on the shadow cabinet take every opportunity to convince voters that their character and their social values have changed. Their talk is of ‘better public services and a more socially just Britain’ and they are determined to ditch their image as the party of the elite and the extreme.
Take Letwin, for example. He excelled in Thatcherism. He earned his stripes in the Conservative policy unit and his dollars working in the International Privatisation Unit for Rothschilds. Towards the end of the decade, Letwin spent some time in Canada and advised the Saskatchewan provincial government on a series of privatisation programmes. The kind of advice he was giving was summed up by one representative in the official parliamentary report for March 23, 1989: ‘Oliver Letwin has told them that the way they went about privatising the dental plan was one of the worst examples that he has ever seen. He says: you don’t do it that way. You got to be smoother. You got to con the people more. You got to work slower. Privatise some other things first and then work your way at health once you soften people up.’
Like many of today’s frontbench Conservatives, Letwin’s image has softened since he was appointed to the shadow cabinet. Now he is thought of as a more humble and moderate man. The Mail thinks of him as the face of Tory ‘new niceness’; the Telegraph says he’s ‘eminently sane and likeable’; and even the Observer calls him ‘likeable, self-deprecating Letwin’. His reinvention as a moderate liberal is in keeping with the image the Tories now wish to portray, but his policies are more extreme than ever: a consultation paper put forward by Letwin at the 2002 Tory conference proposed cutting one-quarter of the Sure Start budget in order to run a Home Office initiative to identify possible young offenders in disadvantaged areas. Instead of helping primary school kids learn to read, Letwin wants to screen them for potential criminals.
A decade ago, Iain Duncan Smith set out his own stealthy model of privatisation in a pamphlet entitled Who Benefits?, which he co-wrote with members of the Thatcherite ‘No Turning Back Group’. The pamphlet proposes giving tax rebates to those who can afford to insure themselves privately against sickness, unemployment, invalidity and even maternity, and to encourage middle-income households ‘to take on the role of providing the kind of insurance for which National Insurance contributions must currently be paid’.
In Duncan Smith’s vision, taxpayers would be spending less on public services, the private sector would be raising standards while growing and getting cheaper, and public services would benefit because, in theory, fewer people would be dependent upon it. In health, for example, those who could afford to pay for private health insurance can choose to do so instead of contributing towards the NHS.
For anyone with a social conscience, there are some real problems with these proposals. Those who can afford private insurance would benefit from lower taxes, but the rest of society would remain dependent on public services that lacked investment. As more people paid for private services, there would be fewer taxes raised to pay for public services. Public services would shrink but the poorest would remain just as dependent on them as they are today.
More worryingly, the pamphlet suggests that eventually there would be no need for the state to provide public services free at the point of need. Instead, individuals might get some help to pay for private services: ‘Ultimately the state may provide no insurance of its own – instead concentrating on assisting those who cannot afford to insure themselves with the private sector.’
It is hard to imagine the modern Conservatives campaigning on a platform to ditch public services, but there are no signs that the shadow cabinet have given up on their old ideas. In one of his first interviews as leader of the Conservative party, Duncan Smith was asked if he thought it was ‘a good idea to bring back tax relief on private health insurance.’ He agreed: ‘I think all of that must be part of a package of what we do when we come up with our proposals.’
The Tories still want an expanded private sector and a skeletal public service, only now they are determined to do it on the quiet. Accordingly two of their key policies, the Patient’s Passport and the State Scholarship, are intended to encourage people to start paying for the kind of healthcare and education that currently is provided free. At a Conservative meeting, Letwin has even described these policies as taking the Tories beyond Thatcher’s ambitions: ‘We are taking steps which, despite all the courage and all the determination that remarkable lady showed, we never had the courage to take during eighteen years of Conservative government.’
If the Tories seem nicer, smoother and softer than their forebears, that may just be because they are doing to modern Britain what Letwin did in the 1980s to places like Saskatoon and Moosejaw. Their rhetoric has changed, but their thinking has not: the Tories are still extreme.
‘We retreated, we retracted’ In a speech delivered to the Centre for Policy Studies fringe meeting at the last Conservative party conference, Oliver Letwin described how the Tories had repackaged Thatcherism for modern Britain: ‘We’ve dinned into [the media] for the last year that we’re about helping the vulnerable. In the 1980s people thought we were just advocating selfishness. I worked for Mrs Thatcher for three years. I worked for a year before that for Keith Joseph. During that entire period we thought endlessly about the possibility of setting schools free, of setting parents free. Of enabling parents to take the state’s money and go to a school of their choice. It went on being thought about after I had left, through the latter years of Margaret Thatcher and through the Major years. During eighteen years of radical Conservative government most people thought we were bringing out policy after policy. And yet we never had the courage to say what Damien Green said yesterday in this conference. Similarly, we thought during those years that we should consider how patients who could not get excellent treatment with the NHS could find a way out. We sought a way of helping them to help themselves. We never did it. We retreated, we retracted. In eighteen years of Conservative government, we never made the statement that Liam Fox made in the hall yesterday. We are taking steps which, despite all the courage and all the determination that remarkable lady showed, we never had the courage to take during eighteen years of Conservative government.’