Going, going...

I don't know if any Conservative MP reads this blog, and as I have never voted Conservative in a general or local election there is no reason he should pay attention to my views if he does. But I hope that Iain Duncan Smith ceases to be leader after the party's confidence vote later today. His continuation in office would mark a futile sentimentality about a man who is manifestly not a plausible candidate for prime minister. It would also be an abdication of responsibility comparable to the abandonment by the Labour Party of any claim to be taken seriously as an alternative government when it elected Michael Foot as leader in preference to Denis Healey in 1980.

I care about this – more than I had thought I might – because I want a revitalised Conservative Party to be a serious contender for public office. Here's why I believe non-Tories should be concerned.

In the 1980s the Liberal-SDP Alliance, later known as the Democrats and more recently as the Liberal Democrats, argued a plausible but profoundly misguided case that the quality of British government had been harmed by continual ideologically-driven fluctuations in public policy. In reality the only example Roy Jenkins (who had argued this case in his influential Dimbleby Lecture in 1979) could come up with when pressed was the nationalisation and denationalisation of the steel industry.

In fact Britain's poor post-war relative economic performance had much less to do with ideological swings between Left and Right than with bad administration by both main parties. With certain serious lapses (exchange rate management in the early 1990s; fiscal profligacy by Gordon Brown more recently, after his excellent early record), economic management and industrial relations policy have been broadly successful under both parties since the early 1980s. The much-mocked Norman Lamont, who ought to have resigned over the ERM debacle in 1992, nonetheless put in place of that failed policy a system of economic management – the central feature of which was the Bank of England’s inflation reporting - that was well-designed and effective. Gordon Brown's subsequent granting of operational independence to the Bank of England in setting interest rates stands as the best thing that Labour has ever done in domestic policy.

This record refutes the claim of the Liberal Democrats, under their various names, that adversarial politics and a first-past-the-post electoral system are inimical to good government. In fact, it is more often proportional representation that is the enemy of good government (at least in a mature democracy: I can imagine circumstances, where the management of communal strife among different nationalities is a pressing political aim, in which PR might be the least bad system available). By entrenching in office a set of politicians who appeal to the electorate's highest common factor but whom few electors voluntarily choose, it encourages cynicism about government.

The minimal requirement of an effective polity is that a government that is plainly failing can be removed cleanly and decisively, as happened with the Conservatives in 1997. A secondary requirement is, however, that the principal political parties observe certain informal conventions of a healthy democracy, the main one being not to flatter the opinions and single-minded partisanship of party activists. I have met many active members of the main political parties who are public-spirited and decent, but I have met few who will acknowledge the value of having a tolerant and rational opposing political party with whom public office can legitimately alternate. Yet one has only to look at recent history to see the point. I stand on the moderate Left, and I believe a Labour government led by Healey in the 1980s – such as I worked for at the time – might have arrived at the sensible and urgent economic reforms that Mrs Thatcher introduced while avoiding her stridency of tone. But I'm glad nonetheless that Mrs Thatcher did these and other things (such as supporting Nato's deployment of Cruise missiles) when they were needed. I'm also aware that if Labour had won the 1979 general election, a Michael Foot premiership would have been probable a year or two later, with damaging consequences for the country and our standing in the world.

I stress that such a catholic approach is fundamentally different from the traditional Liberal (and now Liberal Democrat) complaint about adversarial politics. I welcome adversarial politics; I just want the main parties to be reasonably well-matched political adversaries, as they are not under the present Conservative leadership. The Liberal Democrats affect to transcend such distinctions, but in reality theirs is the most partisan and destructive form of party politics: the notion that they embody rationality and sense in contrast to their ideologically-driven opponents. They have never shaken off - indeed they've increasingly grown into - the caricature described by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe in their standard history of the SDP:

Many outsiders viewed the new party [in 1981] with moral and even aesthetic disdain. The SDP's public image struck its opponents as a sickly over-sweet mixture of Little Lord Fauntleroy, Mary Poppins and the sanctimonious George Washington with his cherry tree.

I want the Tories at least to have a serious politician as leader so that they do not become an atavistic sect comparable - in importance if not ideology - to the declining French Communist Party. If they do not, then they risk ceding the role of official Opposition to the Liberal Democrats, whose absurdity and extremism I have dealt with on this blog at some length. Triggering a confidence vote on a failing and flailing leader is the first sign for a long time that the Conservative Party understands the gravity of its situation. It isn't merely that the Party lacks an articulate and presentable leadership: more damaging still is the descent into an incoherent populism of pacifying interest groups. It is laughable - or it would be if it weren't so dismal a reflection on a once great party of state - that Iain Duncan Smith can proclaim (in today's Times) among the virtues of his leadership:

[P]erhaps most importantly of all, we have policies on pensions, law and order and the public services that are popular, genuinely Conservative and which will make a real difference to people’s lives.

He's alluding to commitments to state-funded entitlements (linking pensions to growth in average earnings, abolition of tuition fees) that will subsidise the better-off. We know this is true, because these policies have all been done before. Take university tuition fees. Australia abolished them in the early 1970s (only to reintroduce them later), and over the next 20 years recorded large absolute and relative increases in university entry rates on the part of the top third of the income scale (from Alison Wolf, Does Education Matter?).

Changing the leadership is a prerequisite of restoring the Tories' fortunes but nothing more than that. It is extraordinary that the most qualified candidate for leader, Michael Portillo - whose combination of political weight, economic and social liberalism, and seriousness on defence makes him an attractive candidate for prime minister - is unelectable within the modern Conservative Party, and that in itself indicates how unsuitable a method of election the party has. But nothing good will come - for the Tories specifically, but for the rest of us too - of failing to recognise the weakness and intellectual flaccidity at the centre.

Comments

[Charles Stewart]

The defects of PR are well known, but a well-designed PR system, such as I believe Germany has, makes it possible for flawed political parties to fail without breaking the political system.

[Vivienne Raper]

You are fighting a straw man here... I've never heard the argument (before you writing it) that adversary politics is a bad thing. However, it is apparently the case that only 18% of the population's votes actually made a difference in the last General Election. Furthermore, where MPs have small majorities, turnout tends to be larger than where an MP has been entrenched for a long period. One of the best arguments for PR is that it makes votes count.

Whether it works or not depends on the system that you implement. Poorly implemented, it becomes ineffectual and also the candidates become detached from the people they are supposed to represent (some list systems). I think there is a better case now for PR than there ever was given the emergence of issues that cut across ideologies and parties, and dissolution of traditional left/right politics.

[Oliver Kamm]

Vivienne - If you've never heard the argument that adversary politics is a bad thing, then it would be worth your looking out an influential book edited by Professor S.E. Finer and published in 1975 entitled Adversary Politics and Electoral Reform. It was on this thesis - that British government is subject to unnecessary fluctuations in which each party acts as the prosecutor of the other - that the campaign for proportional representation sought support in the 1970s, notably in Roy Jenkins's 1979 Dimbleby lecture, which in retrospect could be seen as the original manifesto for the SDP. I'm sympathetic to your reluctance to associate with the argument yourself, for it has been thoroughly debunked by the practice of government under both parties over certainly the past 15 years, but you severely overstate your case in claiming that this highly influential nostrum is a 'straw man': it was in fact the central idea of your own party in the 1970s and 1980s.