Though Cowards Flinch

Martin Smith, Professor of Politics at Sheffield University, presents a necessarily simplified but still useful model of the way central government works in Britain.  He calls it the ‘core executive’:

All actors in the core executive have resources, with no actor, or institution, having a monopoly….Because no actor or institution controls all the resources necessary to achieve their goals (for example, although the Prime Minister may have authority, he or she does not have all the information necessary for policy making) actors within the central state depend on each other (p.1)

In my still developing analysis of the New Conservative regime, there are broadly three types of actor within and around its core executive.

First, there is the upper class inner circle of Cameron and his Eton/Oxford coterie, about whom I’ve written in detail here. 

This socially homogenous grouping is very different from the Thatcherite leadership to which it is most often compared by its opponents.  Under early Thatcherism, public spending rose because she and her colleagues recognised the social strains under which her economic vision was putting the working class, and that the maintenance of a welfare state was an essential pacifier. The New Conservatives simply don’t get that.

Beneath the thin common man veneer of Cameron is a member of the ruling class most comfortable with the high politics of state, who simply doesn’t get the low politics of what has come, since 1945, to be accepted as the job of government.  Cameron and his chums are a throw back to the 1920s and 1930s, not simply because this is where their economic policy is rooted, but because their idea of estate management is to do with grouse, not social housing.

Second within the core executive is the grouping of ardent neoliberals, including Lansley, Shapps, Pickles and a few influential think-tankers from the likes of Policy Exchange, the Adam Smith Institute and even the Tax Payers Alliance (as attack dog), a sort of diffuse British Mont Pelerin society for the 21st century, complete with plenty of dosh from mysterious sources.

This grouping has an archetypal (Martin) Smithian resource dependent relationship with Cameron’s inner circle.  They get patronage from the inner circle, on the basis that they will remain subservient at an official level, while the inner circle gets the policy ideas it needs to keep the troublesome non-Core parts of the party happy in their quest to appeal to the Daily Mail. 

It doesn’t generally matter to the inner circle that most of the policy ideas coming forward are either impossible to implement, or only implementable at huge social cost.  What matters is that it make it look like Cameron has some kind of social programme beyond attending royal weddings.

Nick Clegg, despite his upper class background, is probably better assigned to this group.

Third, and the final piece in the core xecutive jigsaw, are the apologists.  These are the group of people who receive patronage, and therefore enhanced social status and power within their own networks (aside from the core executive).  In return they offer credibility to the other two groupings with the core executive; they do the dirty work, seeking to persuade people on the receiving end of the New Conservative regime that there is sense in the apparent madness.

Within the politicians, Vince Cable is the most obvious of these.  Unlike Charles Kennedy, for example, he has allied himself to the regime for reasons of personal status, and perhaps also initially because he was under the hubristic impression that he had more resources at his disposal than he actually has. 

Vince Cable is an intelligent man, and perhaps he felt that his powers of persuasion might actually have some effect on government policy, only to find quickly enough that intelligence in itself is not a sought-after resource.  That’s why he now languishes in the political dog-house, in just the same way as Paul Sagar and I languish in the lower divisions of the blogosphere; we’re good, intelligent bloggers, but it takes more than intelligence to win the Orwell prize for blogging.

Vince must by now be a very unhappy man.  It’s unfashionable to do so, but I feel sorry for him.   It’s easy to say he should have acted more in line with his political principles and his decent understanding of economics, but what would you have done in his shoes?  Take the ministerial car and hope against hope that the Tories will listen to sense, or walk away and never know what might have been?

He still has a choice.  Closely allied to Smith’s core executive model is the ‘Exit, Voice and Loyalty’ model, developed in the 1970s by Albert Hirschman but adapted to Richard Rose’s analysis of the British civil service under Thatcher.

Under this model, Vince has tried ‘voice’, but found that he could not be heard.  it waits to be seen whether he will now stay loyal to the core executive, or whether the pressures of his own conscience (and the non-Core private and semi-public networks with which he also has a resource-dependent relationship) will mean that exit becomes the best option.

But Vince is a spent force, and from a political point of view his loyalty or exit makes little difference. 

If he stays loyal to the Tories, Vince will remain a forgotten man. Just watch next week for who’ll announce the 1o0,000 job creation from his own department’s Regional Growth Fund, then mouth the words ‘bastard Clegg’. 

And if he exits, Vince will be a forgotten man, though his old mucker Ken Livingstone may invite him back into the Labour fold in May 2o12.

Of more interest in the LibDem apologist brigade is Chris Huhne.  Like Vince Cable, Chris Huhne is an intelligent politician, who actually gets stuff.  Like Vince Cable, as and when he becomes leader of the LibDems, perhaps as early as September 2011, he will have choices.  His initial choice will be to try and speak with a louder ‘voice’ than Clegg did (because Clegg is in group 2 of the core executive) for the concerns of his party.

When this voice goes unheeded, he may stay loyal to the coaltion, or he may exit. I don’t know which will happen, and it’s something that the Left will have very little influence over anyway, so it’s not really worth second-guessing to any great extent at this stage.

Where I think the Left may have a part to play in chipping away at the core executive edifice is with other actors who make up the apologist group.  

The obvious example here is Phillip Blond.  Like Vince Cable, he has tied himself to the Tory mast for the present, but in setting out his Red Tory thesis in the first place he has left himself wiggle room. 

This isn’t to say that Phillip can bring anything useful to the Left - his work is little more than a collage of previous thoughts around co-operative business models and, er, being nice to each other – but simply his removal from the core executive (if indeed he still remains within it) will be a useful little act. 

Phillip’s not a bad bloke - I had a slightly bleary chat with him about 3am at Labour conference, and the fact that he was there is indicative – and he’ll be happier if he’s given the right opportunity by Labour to speak out  against what he will perceive as Cameron’s betrayal of the befuddled ideas he convinced himself had been bought into by the Tory elite.

Then there’s Nat Wei, the Tories captive Big Society guru.  He’s a very special case for the Left, I contend, but he’ll have to be next time as I’ve got other stuff to do.