I put it down to former British prime minister Tony Blair. Also to former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and to former Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東).
To understand this British government, you need to appreciate the debt that it owes to these three influences — Labour’s triple election-winning prime minister, the Conservatives’ most radical postwar prime minister and the Chinese dictator responsible for the deaths of more of his own people than any other leader in history.
To be fair to the coalition, it is not their ambition to replicate the body count heaped up by the Chinese Communist Party during Mao’s lethal reign, nor does this government share many of the late tyrant’s political ends. Yet in its methods, I am increasingly struck by the strange similarities between the regime of Chairman Mao and that of Chairman Cameron.
Some of the coalition’s senior figures are conscious of this — some of them are even proud to draw the parallels between themselves and the author of The Little Red Book. In recent weeks, I have heard one important figure in the government talk of unleashing a “cultural revolution” in public services and another hailing devolution of power away from the center using Mao’s old slogan: “Let a thousand flowers bloom.”
The Observer reports the remarks of Nick Boles, a sparky backbencher on the Cameron wing of his party. The member of parliament for Grantham celebrates as “a good thing” the “chaos” that will ensue from ripping up central planning. Some in the media are likely to interpret this as “a gaffe” for which Boles will get into trouble with his seniors.
However, he really should not. For he is articulating the animating belief among the senior members of the government. It is this belief in the creative chaos of individual decision-making that is the glue that binds British Prime Minister David Cameron’s liberal conservatives with the liberals close to Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, the junior coalition partner.
Boles merely says out loud and in an especially vivid way what has been the common currency of many private conversations within the government. I have actually heard more than one member of the Cabinet explicitly refer to the government as “Maoist.”
UPHEAVAL
Just about anywhere you look in Whitehall — the district of central London that house the pillars of the British government — there is a secretary of state unleashing upheaval.
British Justice Minister Ken Clarke challenges two decades of orthodoxy about the criminal justice system. British Education Secretary Michael Gove battles the educational establishment to create his “free schools.” British Secretary for Work and Pensions Iain Duncan Smith has ambitions to be the man who definitively reformed welfare. Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne is dramatically recasting energy pricing. Clegg wants to rewrite large parts of the Constitution. Over at health, Andrew Lansley proposes the greatest upheaval in the tax-funded National Health Service since its foundation.
They are urged on from within No. 10 Downing Street by the prime minister’s principal strategist, Steve Hilton, who is probably the most Maoist person in the government. He has been heard to tell colleagues: “Everything must have changed by 2015. Everything.”
Some of their plans may win your approval, some of them may leave you skeptical, some you will hate. Most people on the liberal-left will be supportive of Clarke’s challenge to the philosophy of “prison works.” It is traditionalist Tories and the right-wing tabloids who are worked up into a froth about what they caricature as being “soft on criminals.”
Some of these ministers may have a great success with their reforms. Others will prove a dismal flop or a ruinous mistake. What we can say with certainty is that both the degree and the range of experimentation is quite breathtaking.
It is the more so because the radicalism of this government has come as such a surprise to most people. It was widely assumed to start with that the coalition would not want to invent any more challenges for themselves when they were already committed to with one of the most ferocious spending squeezes ever embarked upon by a modern government in Britain or anywhere else in the world. The protests and unpopularity provoked by the cuts would be quite enough to cope with.
As it has turned out, the squeeze has not dampened a reforming zeal, but fired it. One Conservative member of the Cabinet says: “The state of the public finances has forced us to be more radical.”
Another Tory Cabinet minister offers a differently nuanced explanation: “It has been politically easier to argue for reform — it gave us an excuse, if you like.”
SONS OF THATCHER
As British Foreign Secretary William Hague said recently, the generation of Tories now in power are “the sons of Thatcher.”
The woman who did more to change Britain than any other postwar Conservative prime minister was the formative influence in the years of their youth when they first entered politics. That does not make them all unalloyed admirers of the “Blue Baroness.” Stylistically and temperamentally, Cameron has so far proved a quite different sort of prime minister. However, for a Tory, she is always there in the background as the benchmark of what it is to be a radical reformer.
Counterintuitively, coalition is another spur. There is an urge to prove that coalition can be a bold and decisive form of government, a motivation that is particularly strong in Clegg and like-minded Lib Dems. Another driver is the feeling that time is against them. True, the coalition still has four-and-a-half years to run if it can endure for the full stretch of this parliament. That is a long time in party politics, but it is a short time in Whitehall politics, especially if you are trying to execute and embed reform to complex public services.
They have to take — or so they believe — a “big bang” approach to government if they are to get serious things done before the next election is upon them. This is where Blair comes in. Talk to members of the Cabinet and they all claim to have drawn the same lesson from his memoirs. Despite winning a massive landslide in 1997, he wasted much of his first term by being over-cautious. He confesses to this in his memoirs, though it is not really a “revelation” because he started saying it when he was still at No. 10.
Speaking to his party conference in 2005, Blair said: “Every time I’ve ever introduced a reform, I wish, in retrospect, I had gone further.”
Blair could and should have acted more radically in his first term — before he became fatally diverted into the war in Iraq and unpopularity began to drain away his political capital. However, the risk run by the coalition is that it learns this lesson too well and lurches to the opposite extreme.
Where Blair was too timid, they are too zealous. Where he crept cautiously on domestic reform, they leap recklessly into the unknown. Where he was nervous of making any enemies during his first term, they attempt to fight on too many fronts at once.
The biggest bolt from the blue has been unleashed by Lansley. He inherited a health service enjoying record approval ratings with the public after the years of Labour largesse. Even with the promise to ringfence the budget — ringfencing that now looks rather shaky — the health service faces some tough years as the demand for care and the cost of it rise faster than funding.
WINTER CRISIS
Important figures at the top of government have become increasingly alarmed by the specter of a “winter crisis,” made worse by the severe weather, which could undo Cameron’s pre-election efforts to convince the public that the health service is safe in Tory hands. Nervous voices in government are asking whether they really want to experiment with the Lansley plan to hand over control of ￡70 billion (US$108 billion) of the health budget to local doctors.
You can find few people confident that it will work, many fearful that it won’t and some who predict that it will disastrously destabilize the health service. Doctors, managers and health economists have been joined by Stephen Dorrell, a former Conservative health secretary who is listened to within No. 10, in warning that Lansley wants to go too far, too fast.
Cameron, who only lately seems to have fully grasped the implications of the Lansley plan, has become so nervous that Conservative lawmaker Oliver Letwin and Liberal Democrat lawmaker Danny Alexander have been appointed as “minders” of the health secretary.
Yet Lansley is determined to plow on. From where he sits, you can see why. Before he became health secretary, he had shadowed the job for six years. That long stretch was spent developing what he, at least, believes is a transformative master plan. He does not see himself as a steady-as-she-goes minister, while all around him other members of the Cabinet pursue radical glory.
Unkind colleagues suggest that the best explanation for the Lansley plan is its author’s ego. However, even if that is true of him, it is in the mix with them all. For Duncan Smith, this is his great opportunity to be remembered as something other than a failed Tory leader for when he led the party for two years from September 2001. For Clarke, probably in the final senior ministerial post of his long career, this is his last great hurrah. Younger members of the Cabinet with leadership ambitions want to burnish their credentials as reformers.
This competition for glory has been facilitated by Cameron’s chairman-like style of managing the Cabinet that encourages ministers to have their head. So, in the most surprising discovery about this coalition, we find that Britain is governed by Maoists.
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