Ian Dunt

So you had these guys, David Cameron, George Osborne.

They just didn't dare state that they were going to go back to the Thatcher period.

People didn't really want it.

They liked having public services that worked and they liked having a degree of social cohesion and decency to the society.

Right.

Not the old images we had from the Thatcher period of like minors in running battles with the police, you know, on strike and that sense of pulsating hatefulness.

But when the crash came, they split from that previous position and said, no, you know what, we need to cut spending.

Why did the Conservative Party walk away from that?

Well, I think, I mean, there have been periods... I agree with that approach, and it's the basic Keynesian approach.

There are periods where it stopped working.

So, for instance, in the late 70s.

And that allowed the sort of thought... Basically, the people around Hayek and von Mises, the old sort of laissez-faire neoliberal economics that have been building since the end of the Second World War, that allowed them to put forward their proposals for Thatcherism that made Thatcher triumphant, and that...

for conservatives like David Cameron and George Osborne, was the conservatism that they were raised on.

It was conservatism triumphant, not just at the polls, over and over again.

It was conservatism that won the Falklands War.

It was conservatism that faced down, you know, the NHS and the BBC and the miners and the trade unions.

And that sense of thumping, triumphant conservatism, they were born in, and they never really lost it.

They were prepared to say things like, yeah, we'll match Labour spending.

Just in the same way that Labour was prepared to say all the Thatcherite things they needed to say to get into power.

But they didn't really believe it.