.gif)
The EU referendum outcome, Theresa May entering Number 10 and another protracted Labour leadership contest – given the level of political upheaval and speed of change over the past couple of months, it is understandable that little attention has, thus far, been expended on assessing Cameron and Osborne’s period in charge.
As the summer holidays come to an end and May’s government looks to kick-on in earnest, it seems a good moment to reflect briefly on the two men who, lest we forget, were at the top of British politics for six years.
It goes without saying that Cameron and Osborne will be forever associated with taking Britain out of the EU. Once the decision to hold a referendum was made, both put their political careers on the line to campaign for Britain’s continued membership of the EU – and in the case of Osborne, threw the full weight of the Treasury into ‘Project Fear’. The visibility Cameron and Osborne had at the top of the defeated Remain campaign will be front and centre of their political biographies.
To his critics, the EU referendum and its fallout reflects the failings of Cameron’s premiership – one where political expediency and short-term tactics were given priority over a long-term strategy or coherent ideology. Promising to hold an EU referendum, ‘hugging a hoodie’ then ‘cutting the green crap’, promoting the Big Society – for those opposed to Cameron (notably on his own backbenches) these decisions smacked of a short-term desire for headlines rather than a thought-through vision of government. Cameron’s inability to reconcile his leadership with a significant rump of his parliamentary party and the wider grassroots will be a key part of his legacy.
Yet it was only May 2015 that Cameron and Osborne delivered the first Conservative majority government in 23 years, a remarkable achievement having already resided in Number 10 for five years as the head of a coalition administration preaching austerity and implementing spending cuts. What else, then, might Cameron and Osborne’s legacy entail?
As May 2015’s victory demonstrated, Cameron and Osborne made the Conservatives electable again. Whilst it’s possible to question how far and how complete Cameron’s modernisation programme went, his leadership shifted the thinking and centre of gravity within the party. Positioning the party in the centre-ground, notably driving through gay marriage legislation, and articulating the role of government in achieving social reform and social justice all shaped Cameron’s leadership and will leave an impact on his party.
As the 2010 and 2015 generation of Conservative MPs ‘mature’ we can expect this strand of thought to become further embedded within the party. Equally, Theresa May’s rhetoric regarding delivering social justice and social reform suggests her administration isn’t going to diverge from this approach. Part of Cameron’s legacy will be a reminder that to win, the Conservatives must fight to control the centre-ground in British politics.
The reforms that were driven through in Cameron’s first term, particularly in education, health and welfare should not be understated. The – at times – radical zeal with which Cameron allowed senior Cabinet ministers (Gove, Lansley then Hunt, and Duncan-Smith) to pursue reform has and will continue to bring about substantial change regarding how our schools operate, how our health system works and how welfare and employment is approached. Of course, there has been more success in some areas than others – Universal Credit has proved a particularly difficult reform to deliver. Overall, the shape of Britain’s public services and how they are delivered, with an increasing acceptance of outsourcing and private sector partnership, hugely changed during Cameron’s period as PM.
Like Cameron, Osborne’s political legacy will be shaped by the EU referendum campaign and his subsequent swift sacking as Chancellor by May. Yet during his time at Number 11, Osborne can also claim credit for having shaped the post-recession economic environment and the approach to resetting the UK’s public finances. One of the more remarkable aspects of the coalition period was the relatively limited opposition to the rhetoric of austerity and the programme of spending reductions implemented. Osborne successfully constructed and articulated the case for an austerity programme, forcing government departments and local authorities to deliver large spending reductions. Osborne set the tone on this approach to the UK’s public finances and achieved a relative degree of consensus on the need for spending restraint. Whilst May and Hammond have scrapped Osborne’s target for a budget surplus by 2020, a focus on fiscal discipline will remain. For Labour, the party’s difficulty in developing an alternative to an austerity programme whilst retaining economic credibility has proven the most problematic issue over the past few years. Osborne’s legacy will be his successful framing of the debate over economic policy, the fundamentals of which are unlikely to change in the near future.