UK Left losing the plot

It is now widely accepted that the years of New Labour government were an almost unalloyed national disaster. Whichever measure you take — moral, social, economic, or the respect in which Britain is held in the world — we went into reverse.

Nevertheless, historians may come to judge that these 13 years of Labour misrule served a vital purpose. In retrospect, the Brown/Blair period may be seen as a prolonged experiment which taught the liberal Left that its ideas cannot work, do not work, and have no chance of ever working. It takes time to ruin a country.

But 13 years of Left-wing government has produced a mountain of evidence that the Conservative analysis is better and more truthful. The vital importance of this experiment lay in the special circumstances of the post-war period. Throughout this time, the liberal Left, as general election results show, has tended to be unpopular with voters. But its progressive ideas have enjoyed a disproportionate amount of traction among British governing elites. This, in turn, led to a structural imbalance. By the mid-Nineties, the Right had secured victory in four consecutive general elections.

However, the broad Left had secured control of vast tracts of our national life. It was powerful way beyond its traditional power bases of the Labour Party, the trade unions and the British working classes. It dominated the higher reaches of the universities, education, the public service bureaucracy, local government, Whitehall, the media (and in particular the BBC), the churches, and the police.

So rampant and all-pervasive was the influence of this liberal-Left elite that by the end almost every meaningful action taken by the democratically elected John Major government could be sabotaged or blocked outright by a progressive alliance, which stretched through the Civil Service, the BBC, and the universities. These progressives believed that the institutions of the British state were corrupt, that state spending was automatically virtuous, that traditions should be destroyed, that the European federal idea was benign, that the British monarchy was outdated and wrong, that mass immigration was an unmitigated boon, and that any criticism of the welfare state should be dismissed.

Economic mismanagement

They had a powerful sense of their own moral virtue. Anyone who challenged them was automatically assumed to be venal. We Conservative supporters were, by definition, vermin: immoral, arrogant, self-interested. Own up to being a Conservative and you were made to feel like a criminal, not fit for polite society, an object of contempt. The liberal Left was in charge of the government for 13 years and by the end had come close to destroying Britain.

Let's start with economic management, the scene of New Labour's most obvious debacle. In the early months after the 2010 general election, Labour's shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, refused to accept the clear fact that high spending and high borrowing had driven us to economic disaster. He called on George Osborne to spend even more in order to avert recession.

A year on, Balls has lost the argument. Even he agrees with the need for drastic cuts in public spending. The only remaining matter of dispute between Government and Opposition is the relatively minor detail of timing — i.e. how quickly the cuts should be made. In all essentials, Ed Miliband's Labour Party now accepts the fundamental economic insights of the Cameron Coalition. It's the same story with the welfare state. It is the lot of most prime ministers to operate within the parameters they inherit from their predecessors, and there is nothing dishonourable in taking the view that their primary job is simply to carry on Her Majesty's government.

But a handful of prime ministers have led governments that reshaped the world we all live in. Since 1945, only two — Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher — have fallen into this very rare second category. It now looks as if Cameron may turn out to be the third. He has taken the job at a fulcrum moment, when some of the most intelligent minds on the Left have come to realise that the facts of life are Conservative.

This has granted the Coalition extraordinary power and freedom, because as ministers transform the British state they can take their bitterest political opponents with them on their mission — and thus ensure that their reforms settle in and shape Britain for good.

— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2012