Tories for Washington - UK politics - NR's Guide to the New Majority

National Review, Dec 11, 1995 by Gary L. McDowell

How are the British Conservatives, the political party abroad that is closest to the GOP, faring in the Age of Newt? They languish nearly thirty points behind Labour, and even the third-party Liberal Democrats have begun to nip at their sluggish heels.

At one level, it is hard to figure out why Prime Minister John Major has so dragged down their fortunes. He is, after all, a decent man with impressive political experience. Before moving in No. 10 Downing Street, he had variously served as Chancellor of the Exchequer and as Foreign Secretary. Moreover, in an increasingly egalitarian Britain, Major is a product of state schools, unencumbered by higher degrees of the Oxbridge variety and dedicated to the classless society he thinks will reinvigorate his nation's fortunes. And beyond all those apparent political virtues, Major was even handpicked by Margaret Thatcher to bear her standard when she was dumped so scandalously back in 1990.

Reagan and Thatcher were hard acts to follow because they had clear beliefs which they pursued throughout their time in office. When they had to compromise, which they both frequently did, they could be forgiven by their most zealous followers because no one doubted for a moment that such political realities pained them more than anyone else. Reagan and Thatcher were, in Lady Thatcher's words, conviction politicians.

John Major, like George Bush, is a consensus politician, a man more interested in bringing all sides together than in staking out a position where compromise is difficult if not simply impossible. For consensus politicians like Major and Bush, interests matter more than ideas; ideology is anathema.

The price to be paid is that such leaders soon find they have no stalwart followers. What is most striking about the Conservative Party, and what constitutes the heart of John Major's problem, is the complete absence of what one might think of as "Majorites." This is due, of course, to the fact that one would be hard pressed to define with any satisfaction what "Majorism" might be. When it comes to a set of core beliefs, a collection of fundamental principles, there is simply nothing there.

Nor is John Major the only consensus politician in British politics today. There is at least one other: namely, the leader of the Labour Party, Tony Blair. Increasingly, it is like watching a man peer into a mirror where while left is right and right is left, the basic image in the same.

The good news for Britain is that while conviction politics has all but vanished from Downing Street and Whitehall, it has not been extirpated from the land. In rather American fashion, it has sought asylum in the think tanks that ring Westminster. That is where Thatcher's ideological children are holed up, biding their time until Major, and then perhaps Blair, pass from the scene.

Last summer when John Major called a leadership contest to quiet the carping of his right-wing critics, the only person to stand against him was John Redwood, then Secretary for Wales in Major's cabinet. Although he lost, Redwood earned his stripes; he has become an important player in the Conservative Party. Since his loss and departure from the Cabinet (not even John Major is willing to compromise that much) Redwood has set up his own think tank, Conservative 2000. From that base he hopes to forge the principled policies necessary to take the Conservative Party into the next century.

Redwood is not alone. As Ed Feulner documents in these pages, there is in London an impressive network of thriving conservative think tanks. They run the gamut from the old libertarian strongholds of the Institute of Economic Affairs under the intellectually ambitious eye of John Blundell and the Adam Smith Institute of Madsen Pirie, to the institutional child of Margaret Thatcher and the late Keith Joseph, the Center for Policy Studies, to newer operations such as the Social Affairs Unit, run by Digby Anderson, the European Foundation of the leading Euroskeptic in the House of Commons, Bill Cash, Andrew McHallam's Institute for European Defense and Strategic Studies, and the newest of the new, Politieia, founded just this month by Sheila Lawlor, formerly with the Center for Policy Studies. All told, there is a rumble of ideas emanating from conservative cauldrons, bubbling just beneath the decorous drawing-room floor of Mr. Major's government.

This is less the Americanization of British conservatism than the idea that conservatism is bound neither by party nor by geography. The Thatcherites know they have at least as much in common with Newt Gingrich and the conservative Republicans as they do with John Major. And they are dedicated to the restoration of that sturdy relationship Britain enjoyed with the United States during the Reagan - Thatcher years.

This is not simply wishful thinking. They took notice when Gingrich orchestrated the restoration of the Reagan Revolution in November 1994; since then they have been taking notes and actively pursuing contacts with their conservative brethren across the Atlantic. Thatcherism, like Reaganism, may no longer be in office, but, also like Reaganism, it is too strong a force to be kept out in the cold.