In today's Guardian, David Marquand argues that "Labour has got Cameron wrong: this is no crypto-Thatcherite but a whig". His contention is that Cameron belongs to a Conservative "Whig imperialist" tradition going back to Burke, and to which Baldwin, Butler and Macmillan all belonged.
I'm not personally convinced that Baldwin the protectionist can really, as Marquand has it, be the "quintessential" representative of a tradition with its origin in Burke, the advocate of free trade (though perhaps one might attempt some intellectual construction of "free trade within the Empire"). But be that as it may, it seems entirely correct to me that the party aspire, at present, to a coalition of its classical Whig (free trade, the mixed constitution, tolerance, ordered liberty) and its Paternalist traditions, as I have argued for many years.*
One way in which Cameron sits within the Burkean tradition should, I think, be emphasized (and it is a way in which Cameron is more Burkean Whiggish than I am): Burke was a great believer in the power of the "little platoons" of civic society - we might today think of charities, churches, social action groups, awareness campaigning organisations, and the like. I believe that a sustained period of Cameron government would bring about a true revolution in the role of the little platoons in the delivery of public services, in a way that later generations would regard as truly radical.
In that sense I believe that Marquand is mistaken to emphasize that the "Whig imperialists" he notes - Butler, Macmillan, and so on - carried forward the policy consensus established by (interestingly) Liberal (not Socialist) thinkers during the late part of the Second World War (e.g. on the welfare state) and also did not seek to reverse the (many genuinely) Socialist changes of the Atlee government (e.g. the nationalisation programme). The Whig imperialism of the 1950s may have been pragmatic compromise, but the Whig imperialism of a sustained Cameron government would be radical.
I say this not because I particularly favour a little platoons programme, but because I believe that it is clearly what would occur. There has been much talk about how Cameron would change nothing, but just manage a New Labour "paradigm". I believe this totally misreads what Cameron is about. Just because he would not bring about the radical change some traditional Thatcherites would hope for does not mean that he will not be radical in his own, interesting and dangerous, way.
* Historical/terminological note: Disraeli taught Conservatives to think of ourselves as Tories, going back to old debates. Samuel Johnson took matters further, proclaiming that "the first Whig was the Devil". However, in fact in the eighteenth century there was no "Tory" party - the party of that name from the seventeenth century simply ceased to exist. The Whig Party later split into factions, one of which subsequently (for reasons we won't go into here) came to call itself the "Tories" briefly, whilst the others, by default, were known as the "Whigs". The core (though by no means the whole) of the foundational "Conservative Party" was drawn from this "Tory" Whig faction, and for a couple of decades thereafter, there were "Conservatives" facing "Whigs". Later, the Conservative Party re-absorbed virtually all of even the Whig Whig faction, and is truly the daughter of the eighteenth century Whig party. Sometimes, when people say of Conservatives that they are "Whigs" they mean that they come from the tradition of the Whig Whig faction. I do not. When I talk of Whigs I typically mean adherents to the tradition of the unified Whig party of the eighteenth century. I mean someone in the tradition of Burke. I mean by this to distinguish that school of thought from "Tories" not of the Tory Whig faction but someone like Disraeli, who was never a Whig, and Tory Romantics. I also mean to distinguish the Whig from the Corporatist (or "Corporativist") of the Catholic social tradition. There are also Paternalists. I prefer to think of them as Tory Paternalists, but if someone else prefers to think of Paternalism as a Whig tradition - as Marquand thinks of it, clearly - I am not too bothered.
