This activity is based on a feature article by The Guardian (edited for pedagogical purposes) summarizing David Cameron’s legacy as Prime Minister from a critical perspective. The questions and in particular the three topics up for discussion are designed to encourage students to engage critically with key concepts of political science, such as “coup” or “social policy”. They can be used either for a debate organized in class or for students to write essays.
Please note that this article was published in 2015 before the general election. Brexit is therefore not mentioned in the article, as the focus of the authors is the 2010-2015 period.
Instructions: Read the following article and answer the corresponding questions.
Cameron’s five-year legacy: has he finished what Thatcher started?
On 12 May 2010, in the sunlit rose garden of No 10, David Cameron and Nick Clegg announced the creation of Britain’s new coalition government. The coalition agreement that was hashed out in the days before the rose garden show was a strange magna carta. It promised a national tree-planting campaign, “honesty in food labelling” and a pledge to “encourage live music”. These turned out to be distractions – only the thundering final clause mattered: “Deficit reduction takes precedence over any of the other measures in this agreement.” From then on, the Liberal Democrats were a sideshow, passively approving the most brutish cuts and offering negligible contributions of their own.
Cameron seized the 2010 “crisis” to realise his ideological ends. By exaggerating the parlous state of national finances, he was able to pursue his longstanding ambition to diminish the public realm. Margaret Thatcher privatised state-run industries; Cameron’s ambition was no less than to abolish the postwar welfare state itself. The Office of Budget Responsibility recently announced Cameron’s victory – by 2018, it forecast, we would have a state the size it was in the 1930s.
This was a coup, though Cameron, unlike Thatcher, would never triumphantly produce from his pocket a crumpled copy of a pamphlet by the rightwing economist Friedrich Hayek. From Tory central office, where he worked for two years before his heroine’s fall in 1990, he breathed in the accepted wisdom that the state is an impediment, the market solves all ills and individualism trumps collective endeavour. “Frankly, I don’t like any taxes,” Cameron told the Federation of Small Business a year ago.
Despite failing to win the election, the Tories proceeded to savage welfare, destabilise the NHS, decouple schools from collective control and replace public service provision with markets and contracts. These developments were foreseeable, but even Cameron’s fiercest critics might not have expected that during its five years in office, the government would go on to jeopardise the unity of the UK itself and threaten Britain’s standing in the world.
Juvenile irresponsibility
In his book Capital, Thomas Piketty observed that in advanced economies wealth has become so concentrated among the few that most people are virtually unaware of its existence. Great wealth is secret, and its hold on power even more so. Cameron provokes nothing like the visceral response that Thatcher did, but he has not erased people’s resentment of privilege. George Osborne’s mantra, first chanted at the 2012 party conference, “all in it together” raises a hollow laugh.
Good fortune aided the Tories. In 2008 GDP contracted; by May 2010 growth had returned, but Osborne’s passion for deficit reduction held back recovery. The argument in 2010 was not about the principle of getting public finances in order: it was about the timetable and at whose expense. A cabal of bankers, economic commentators and corporate influencers demanded that net public debt as a proportion of GDP be lowered to 30%, the lowest ratio for 300 years. The figure was plucked out of US neoliberal texts.
However baseless Cameron’s economic assumptions, nothing seemed to dent the assertiveness of the deficit hawks. Austerity, they argued, was unavoidable. Unsurprisingly, the poor suffered the most. Child poverty has started to rise, ending the downward trend established before 2010. This was inevitable once Osborne decreed that four-fifths of deficit reduction would come from spending and welfare cuts but only one fifth from tax increases. The government, like its predecessor, turned a blind eye to billions owed in tax.
Broken Britain
Toryism is now in deep intellectual disarray. What is the party for, beyond cosseting corporate interests, the much‑praised “wealth-creators”? Shrinking the state is a reflex, not a vision. Business goes on demanding public investment – and rightly so. Businesses, like everyone in Britain, depend on the state to maintain the roads, promote the health and education of a useful workforce, manage the police who provide security, and ensure the quality of air they breathe and the water they drink. The desirability of Britain as a place to live, work and invest all depends on the strength of the state.
Cameron bequeaths a country that is fractious and anxious. He has proved to be the great separatist. Once his party were unionists, now Wales never escapes prime ministerial mention without a sneer; under him Scotland came close to dissolving the United Kingdom. Us and them has been his governing style. His macroeconomic policy failed; national debt has kept rising; productivity and investment levels are as dismal as the trade balance. Unpicking the values of the welfare state has meant undermining the idea that people should care for others beyond their own. The big society is hardly spoken of these days.
Before Margaret Thatcher’s era, the Tories had a penchant for muddling through, avoiding confrontations and sharp edges; they were conservators, not wreckers. Cameron has gone much further than Thatcher dared. The survival of the United Kingdom itself is in doubt and it’s an open question who “the British” now are. An election result leaving the Tories at the helm would see more destruction, financial, social and moral. What they offer as a vision of who we are, what we value and where we belong in the world is small and mean.
Adapted from Polly Toynbee & David Walker, The Guardian, January, 28th 2015
Questions
1. Introduce and comment on the pictures.
2. Introduce the article – pay attention to the date of publication.
3. Look up the following references: No 10, Margaret Thatcher, Nick Clegg, the welfare state, Friedrich Hayek, the NHS, austerity, George Osborne, a coup, the Big Society, magna carta, Thomas Picketty, Torie/Toryism.
4. What does David Cameron have in common with Margaret Thatcher?
5. What are the main characteristics of Cameron’s economic policy?
6. According to the authors of the article, what are the results of Cameron’s policies?
7. Why are the authors using inverted commas for the word “crisis”?
8. Summarize the article in your own words (150 words)
9. Discussion topics :
- The authors of the article, Polly Toynbee and David Walker, write that Cameron has done “a coup”. Do you agree with this idea?
- You are George Osborne and you must convince anti-cuts protesters that you “are all in it together”.
- Do you think that the priority of a government should be to fight inequalities or to reduce its deficit?
What's the English for 