David Cameron (National-Centre-Liberal-Ulster Unionist Alliance)
2006-2014
The Chameleon
Whatever one may think of him, it must be said that David Cameron has dominated his political generation. Born in London and raised in rural Berkshire, Cameron was the son of a stockbroker and a scion of an upper-middle-class family with strong connections to the National Party. When he went to Oxford it was natural for him to step into the party, and aside from a brief stint in a City bank, he would remain a professional politician for most of his career. He first gained nationwide attention when he ousted the sitting Young National chairman, taking over the league for himself and eventually using the chairmanship as a springboard onto the front bench under Iain Duncan Smith, where he served as Shadow Health Secretary. After IDS' ignominious departure, Cameron was able to paint himself as the change candidate, and won the leadership ballot of the much-reduced National parliamentary party by a broad margin.
He immediately set about projecting a new image of the National Party, realising that IDS' right-wing rhetoric had probably put off more voters than it won. The new party slogan portrayed it as “the party for working people”, a blatant rhetorical grab from Labour, and the official rhetoric moved away from the constant talk of “a change of systems” (read: massive tax cuts and privatisation) that had dominated the party's previous image, toward measures to help the life of the common man. Proposals such as tougher crime prevention, improving the quality of education and lower taxes for low- and middle-income earners proved popular with the “naturally-conservative” English working class, while not being far enough away from the traditional message to alienate the base.
Most notable, however, were Cameron's moves toward a unified right. In 2004, he met with Brian Paddick, Annabel Goldie and Ulster Unionist leader Basil McCrea to hash out terms for an “Alliance for Britain” – a coalition of the traditional right that could serve as a ready-made alternative to Labour rule, increasing the opposition's credibility as it went into the election campaign. This paid its dividends, as a united opposition was able to attack a tired government with far more efficiency, and when the dust had settled and the 2006 General Election was over, Britain found itself with a majority right-of-centre government for the first time since Winston Churchill's caretaker ministry in 1945.
In contrast to his rhetoric, Cameron ran a fairly standard right-of-centre government, cutting taxes and denationalising a number of state-run businesses – British Telecom was first to get the axe in 2007, followed by British Airways and the government's share in the Midland Bank in the budget for 2008. The railways were deregulated, with British Rail yielding responsibility for regional rail services to the various regional PTEs. Private operators were introduced as part of the NHS system with the Health and Social Care Act 2008, and the free school programme, originally launched by the Portillo government and hitherto sparingly used, was massively expanded. For the first time, free school operators would be allowed to draw a profit off their state-provided budget, a hugely controversial move that the opposition argued would lead to “welfare oligarchs” taking over and running schools and healthcare centres purely for profit. The government countered by pointing to the fact that PFI construction firms were already allowed to do the same, a measure that was apparently without controversy and had, in fact, been
introduced by Labour.
The reforming zeal of the Cameron government was cut short somewhat when the global financial markets crashed in August of 2008. It became necessary to shore up state finances in the face of this, and the government proceeded to institute a harsh austerity programme, limiting benefits and cutting back social services. Some eyebrows were raised at the fact that this was combined with large tax breaks – corporation tax was brought down to 22%, wealth tax was completely abolished, and most prominently the government launched a scheme of tax breaks for people in gainful employment, designed to increase the gap separating those earning wages for work from those on benefits. This was the cornerstone of Cameron's ambition to be “the party of the workers” – there should be clear incentives to seek employment rather than be reliant on benefits to get by.
These measures contributed to make the government deeply unpopular, but the opposition wasn't doing much better. After Prescott's ignominious retirement in 2006, the party found itself largely without feasible leadership figures – Mo Mowlam had been the designated successor prior to her death, and Prescott's leadership style allowed few others to make themselves prominent. In the end, Harriet Harman's second bid in a decade went unopposed, and she found herself at the helm of the party. However, her past scandals marked her as an unsuitable Prime Minister-in-waiting from the very start, and her lacklustre performance at PMQs did her no favours. When Cameron decided to call a General Election for the spring of 2010, Labour had formed their own version of the Alliance, teaming up with the Greens to form the “Red-Greens” – after pressure from the trade unions, Harman was forced to include the Socialist Left, in spite of frosty relations with Dave Nellist and his party. This somewhat motley mix of tax-dodging Labour grandees, unapologetic former Eastern Bloc apologists from Coventry and beard-and-sandal Islington liberals proved unconvincing to the public, especially compared with the clear united front presented by the parties of the Alliance.
The Red-Greens weren't helped by the election campaign, which was seen as somewhat complacent and focused more on smearing the Alliance's record in government than presenting any sort of alternative. This was problematic for two reasons: firstly, Labour was seen as “entitled to govern” and convinced that they needed to do very little except wait to return to government, and secondly, the attacks on the Alliance went over rather poorly with a public who still felt like things were getting better and Cameron was fighting their corner. When confronted on their record, Cameron and his ministers could simply point to the continent and the governments there who had faced the financial crisis with far less success than Britain had.
So the Alliance found itself re-elected, in an upset that would go down in the history books – it was the first right-of-centre government since the war to call an election at its own preferred time and be re-elected to a second full term. The Nationals were the big winners, gaining over 30 percent of votes cast and coming within an inch of edging out Labour as the largest party. The election held yet more surprises as the far-right British Democrats entered Parliament with some twenty seats, denying a majority to either one of the traditional blocs. However, the Alliance remained the largest bloc, and citing the precedent set by Prescott after the 1998 election, they remained in power without calling a confidence vote.
After the disastrous election, Labour went into full catatonia. The party was not used to long spells in opposition, and Harman's leadership was widely seen as having cost them their guaranteed victory at the polls. The knives went out immediately and decisively, and the party changed course in a dramatic manner. Elected as new leader was John McDonnell, a noted firebrand of the party left who was nonetheless personally popular with the voters of his West London constituency, managing to get two Labour members elected in the five-seat constituency of Hillingdon and Harrow in spite of the meltdown in much of the rest of the country. It was felt that a return to Labour's roots of grassroots activism and genuine left-wing opposition would be of help in the troubled times, and for a while it worked – until McDonnell was faced with an expenses scandal, having claimed the entire £1200 a month rent on his inner London flat in spite of sharing it with his partner. The Daily Express made this front-page news, in spite of there being no rule against such claims, and McDonnell was publicly embarrassed.
His off-the-cuff speaking style stoked further controversy, as he was seen making a hustings speech in his constituency in which he produced a copy of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book which he proceeded to quote from – he claimed this was to lampoon the government's tendency to “privatise” public assets by selling them to foreign governments, including the Chinese one. However, the damage was done, and his troubles continued throughout 2011, as Labour slumped to the mid-20s in the polls. It was clear that McDonnell was more of a liability than an asset by this point, and in early 2012 he resigned effective immediately. Yvette Cooper became acting leader until a new leader could be appointed – this time the job would go to someone with no skeletons in his closet, who could be guaranteed not to provoke either side of the party.
Meanwhile in Whitehall, the government continued its reform business, aided by the slow easing of the financial crisis. The pharmaceutical market was deregulated in late 2010, having previously been nationalised in 1969, and while British Chemists was allowed to continue under state ownership, a significant portion of its outlets were sold off to various private firms. Defence expenditure was cut back significantly, as sixty years of National Service came to an end and the Armed Forces were made to adjust to being an understaffed, underfunded professional military.
Most prominent, however, was the major educational reform undertaken by Michael Gove, the new Liberal leader and Education Secretary since Paddick's resignation in 2007. Secondary education was completely reformed by this, as two separate forms of secondary school would exist – secondary professional schools and secondary preparatory schools (the latter became known in colloquial speech as “grammar schools” from more or less the word go). Only the latter would grant students the CSE diploma necessary to apply to higher education, whereas previously everyone who graduated secondary school had received such privileges automatically. Students at professional schools would be able to study an additional year to receive their CSE, and it was argued that with the increased focus on workplace skills, few of them would need this as they'd be able to get work easier on their secondary degree alone. In spite of this supposed increased focus on practical education, however, professional school curricula would be required to include History and Citizenship courses.
Overall the second term of Cameron's government was less eventful than the first, especially from 2012 and onwards. It seemed that most of what the government had set out to do had been done, and Labour's monopoly on power had been decisively broken. There were even those who started talking of the government being fatigued, much like Prescott's had been in its later years, and certainly it seemed like the opposition was ruling the day in the Commons more than Cameron himself. The Alliance depended on a divided opposition to pass its agenda – passive supply and confidence was normally granted by the British Democrats in the form of abstentions, but when the 2014 budget was called, including significant funding increases for immigrant services, the British Democrats joined the opposition in voting it down. They were emboldened in this by their euro-election results, which had seen them entering the British delegation for the first time with an almost unbelievably impressive nine percent of the vote. The subsequent no-confidence vote was lost by the government, and a General Election scheduled for early September.
The election campaign, which was the longest in memory, proved eventful. Labour had held a steady lead for much of the term since McDonnell's departure, but it whittled down somewhat over the summer as the Alliance reasserted its position, pointing to its relatively successful record in government and the fact that the recession seemed to be ending. The Centre, which had been slumping in the polls ever since Annabel Goldie's retirement and the election of Chloe Smith, a “renewer” in the party who was associated with the metropolitan green-libertarian wing of the party derisively known to its traditionalists as the “Sloane Square set”, began to recover after Smith's impressive debate showings. The Liberals, on the other hand, sank like a stone through a wet paper bag, as Gove seemed unable to hold on to the voters that Paddick had brought in. On the opposition side, the Socialist Left made significant inroads into Labour's support, as Jeremy Corbyn made an eloquent case against allowing private healthcare and education providers to profit off state funding. The Greens, too, seemed on the up and up, especially given their impressive euro-election result, in which they beat the Nationals into second place by a narrow margin. Overall, days were good for minor parties, and neither Labour nor Nationals were able to gain significantly on their 2010 results, with the latter falling significantly below it.
Polling Day came and went, and the result was a major upset – Labour failed to gain much of anything in voteshare terms, the Nationals fell back down to its 1990s levels, and the British Democrats managed to gain thirteen percent, a significant increase from any previous result of theirs. The Liberals too slumped slightly, but other than that, nothing much changed. The Centre did not lose any seats, there was no Green surge as had been so confidently predicted by the London chattering classes, and nor did the Left take all that many votes from Labour. The situation would've been deeply unclear, except insofar as Cameron, apparently burnt out from years in government, went on the BBC on the Friday morning to announce his immediate resignation as both Prime Minister and party leader. With the National Party in chaos, the premiership more or less fell into the lap of Labour's new leader, a grey man wholly unsuited to this decidedly non-grey age.
