New broom is not a clean sweep

If and when — and even before — the Conservative Party get into government this year we’re going to hear a lot of talk about David Cameron’s First Hundred Days. Experience suggests, however, that it is what prime ministers do by the time they leave Downing Street, rather than what they do when they first get there, which really counts.

Clearly, setting the right tone is important, and anyone wanting to achieve anything has to try to hit the ground running. But government — as any old hand will tell you — is a marathon rather than a sprint. Voters — and especially the media — demand quick results. But success often comes painfully slowly.

Moreover, tempting as it is for a new administration to try to undo the work of its predecessor, post-war political history suggests that governing is often about conceding and moving on. It also suggests that achievements are often more easily recognised in hindsight than at the time. And it reminds us that, like it or not, many of the items on the to-do list of a new PM are simply those things left undone by the man or woman he takes over from.

To govern, it is often said, is to choose, and one of the first and most important choices facing any incoming administration is to decide which of its predecessor’s policies are going to be left in place in order to prioritise its own positive agenda.

The Conservative government of 1951-1955 is generally acknowledged as one of the most successful of the postwar period: it moved swiftly to de-regulate the British economy and to lower taxation and, in so doing, presided over a period of non-inflationary economic growth and relative industrial peace that was the envy of many of its successors, Labour and Tory alike. But the key to its success lay not just in what it chose to do but also in what it chose not to do.

Despite siren voices from the right — admittedly less clamorous and less numerous than they were to become later on — ministers like Butler (pictured), Macleod, Macmillan and now-forgotten names like Monckton, committed themselves not to disbanding the hugely popular welfare state constructed by Attlee’s Labour government but instead to trying to run it more efficiently.

Full employment and constructive relationships with the trade unions (then run by moderates) were also preserved. Nationalised utilities (most of them natural monopolies) were left well alone and privatisation limited to those sectors — road transport and steel — where state ownership made no economic sense.

Policies such as these, rather than some woolly centrist commitment to Disraelian paternalism, were what constituted ‘One Nation’ Conservatism to those ambitious young Tory MPs who penned the eponymous pamphlet back in 1950.

The Tories could not prevent the Labour government that squeaked back into Downing Street in 1964 from trying, albeit half-heartedly, to renationalise those industries they had privatised. But, once again, one is struck by how many of the policy decisions taken during the thirteen supposedly ‘wasted’ years after 1951 were left in place, however much they had been criticised by Attlee, Gaitskell and Wilson when in opposition.

Three examples will have to suffice. Despite Labour’s condemnation of the Tories’ decision to allow commercial television in 1955, there was no return to a state monopoly on broadcasting — something that still characterised most European countries, believe it or not, until the early 1980s.

By the same token, the supposedly racialist and inhumane restrictions on immigration finally passed by a Conservative government in 1962 were not overturned but tightened further under Labour, albeit balanced by anti-discrimination measures — measures which the Conservatives, who were distinctly lukewarm if not hostile to them in opposition, kept on the statute book when they returned to government under Ted Heath in 1970.

Nor, we should note, did the Tories make good in government on all their huffing and puffing when in opposition over Britain’s unilateral withdrawal from its defence commitments ‘East of Suez.’ And we all know who it was who, as Education Secretary between 1970 and 1974, approved the wholesale creation of comprehensive schools, thereby ending in most places the grammar school / secondary modern divide — one that had become massively unpopular with middle-class as well as working class parents and which wasted so much talent by selecting too early.

The Heath government, of course, is widely derided as one of the worst this country has ever seen. Its carefully-prepared, proto-Thatcherite programme of greater selectivity in welfare, rewarding the talents and the hard work of the ‘pacesetters’, taking a firmer line with the trade unions and going all out for growth collapsed into chaos characterised by a shift to corporatism so brazen that the term U-turn entered day-to-day political parlance — where it has, of course, remained to haunt politicians from both main parties ever since.

All this resulted in an ignominious (though very narrow) defeat at the ‘Who Governs Britain?’ election of February 1974, since when the Heath government has had to endure ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’, not least from Thatcherite Tories for whom it became Exhibit Number One in their case against the supposed ‘post-war consensus’ — a caricature that, for what it’s worth, few historians have much time for any more.

Yet while it would be foolhardy to attempt to rescue too much from the historical wreckage of 1970-74, only those who believe — either openly or in their heart of hearts — that Britain would be ‘better off out’ of the EU would refuse to acknowledge Heath’s achievement in getting this country into Europe on relatively favourable (though of course by no means ideal) terms. And it was his government that finally acknowledged the need to float the pound after fifty years of periodic sterling crises had contributed so much to this country’s sub-optimal economic performance.

Moreover, although tame in comparison to the ‘Big Bang’ initiated by a future Conservative government, Heath’s banking liberalisation benefitted both the City and the country as a whole, while taxes on consumption were finally rationalised with the introduction of VAT.

In short, neither truly historic achievements, nor more prosaic policy innovations that simply stand the test of time, are the preserve of administrations that are deemed successes by contemporaries or that meet with the wholehearted approval of their party in years to come. Even those governments that do get re-elected and/or are admired by future generations often find that their re-election and their reputation in years to come depends on policies whose importance they were only dimly aware of when they first got their feet under the Cabinet table. Often, indeed, they benefit from the law of unintended consequences

The Thatcher government, for example, initially placed its faith in control of the money supply and ending public subsidies, trusting that market forces would soon see the economy right itself, freed at last from the inflation that had first begun to bedevil Britain back in the late 1950s. Some additional unemployment was expected, at least temporarily, but not to the extent that actually occurred. Yet it was this return to levels of joblessness that would have horrified previous post-war Conservative administrations that, as much as any legislation the government also introduced, cured Britain’s trade union problem.

Meanwhile, few Tories — even those who might have expected to be in the know — imagined early on quite how extensive or quite how electorally important sell-offs of public sector housing and utilities would turn out to be.

Paradoxically, one thing Margaret Thatcher never really managed to do was squeeze inflation out of the economy when it was growing — that took another recession, the ERM, a post-devaluation squeeze on consumption (all under the Conservatives), and then the independence of the Bank of England and a Labour Chancellor supposedly committed to ‘prudence with a purpose.’

Such a commitment was, of course temporary, and in some ways merely rhetorical. For all the talk of the Tories winning ‘the battle of ideas’ and New Labour abandoning the left for the centre, or even the centre-right, Blair and Brown, while they were clearly prepared to ‘concede and move on’ when it came to labour market reform and privatisation, pretty soon made it clear that their party’s mission to spend massively on health and education remained intact.

Indeed, having been careful to start by reassuring the markets and to keep economic growth ticking over nicely, they found it much easier to sustain that spending than their Labour predecessors ever had.

As far as David Cameron is concerned, however, it is what Blair and Brown left undone that matters most. And it is not only the urgent need to secure better value for money in public spending that will mean that the Tories’ to-do list will, as is the case for almost every government before them, need to take a higher priority than their wish list.

Other obvious items which Labour have fudged, put off or (in some cases understandably) simply found it very difficult to sort out include energy policy, higher education funding, constitutional reform, a strategic defence review, Afghanistan, and Northern Ireland — a list which is by no means exhaustive but could certainly prove exhausting, especially if combined with an ambitious agenda to, among other things, ‘mend broken Britain’ and end the ‘social recession’ as well as its economic equivalent.

If Cameron is as sensible and strategic as he looks, he will presumably do some conceding and moving on of his own, realising that he may need to suffer short-term hits (some from his own side) in order to secure both his reputation and his re-election in the longer term. The First Hundred Days may be fun: after all, even Gordon Brown enjoyed his. But, as Brown and every other British prime minister has found, the verdict of the voters — and of history itself — depends not on how you start but rather on how you finish.