Radicalism or Retreat? The Conservative Party under Cameron
| Author | Libby McEnhill |
| Date | 01 December 2015 |
| Published date | 01 December 2015 |
| DOI | 10.1111/2041-9066.12108 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
16 POLITICAL INSIGHT • DECEMBER 2015
David Cameron has been leader
of the Conservative Party for a
decade. In that time, he has taken
the Party from the wilderness of
opposition and three lost general elections,
into government rst in Coalition with the
Liberal Democrats and now, in a development
that confounded pollsters and commentators,
as leader of the rst single-party Conservative
government in almost 20 years.
Cameron won the leadership on a platform
of modernisation and detoxication: the need
for the Conservative Party, in some way, to
move away from its recent, Thatcherite past
and reach out to voters lost to Labour in 1997
as a means of achieving electoral recovery.
At the ballot box, Cameron’s leadership can
undoubtedly be judged a success. However,
in 2005, Cameron argued that in order
to alter perceptions of the Conservatives
as the ‘nasty party’, the Party needed to
embody ‘fundamental change’, not ‘some
slick rebranding exercise’. Ten years on, the
extent of substantive ideological change that
Cameron’s leadership has eected is much
less clear.
In opposition, the Conservatives began to
develop ideas and policy around areas that
Radicalism or Retreat?
The Conservative
Party Under Cameron
A decade into his leadership has David Cameron fundamentally
changed the Conservative Party, or has he simply re-framed
Thatcherism for the 21st century? Libby McEnhill investigates.
they had hitherto rather neglected, most
notably social policy. In government, the
Coalition pushed through extensive reforms
driven by both these ideas and the need to
cut public spending. The Conservative Party
under Cameron has certainly formulated a
more developed approach to such issues
than was visible under Thatcher, but this does
not necessarily indicate an ideological shift:
what we might instead be seeing is the use of
dierent instruments and strategies to reach
similar Thatcherite aims, particularly when it
comes to the role and size of the state. On
the other hand, since 2010 there have been
some policy developments that do seem to
suggest a shift: notably same-sex marriage
legislation in 2013 and the new ‘Living Wage’
in 2015. Through examining these policies
and the ideas surrounding them, we can
Image: © Press Association.
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