Content area
Full Text
Introduction
An egalitarian policy ... will discourage wealth creators.
Keith Joseph (Joseph and Sumption, 1979, p. 9)
The Conservative Party has never sought to promote equality.
(Gilmour, 1992, p. 128)
This article addresses the related issues of poverty and inequality as subjects of debate within the Conservative Party. It does so through an examination of Conservative attitudes in two distinct periods. The first part of the article examines the nature of debates between the right and left of the Conservative Party during the 1970s and 1980s. The debate between the so-called 'wets' and 'drys' was largely over economic policy, Keynesian economics versus monetarism, but also involved a clear difference of view over social policy as well. The 'wets' or 'One Nation' Conservatives sought to defend the idea of poverty as relative to the distribution of income and wealth present within society at a given time. They further sought to defend the welfare state as the most effective means of reducing poverty. In contrast, the New Right (dry) Conservatives sought to defend an earlier notion of poverty as an absolute condition and further argued that although a residual welfare state should be maintained, the most effective means of reducing poverty would be the market through the so-called 'trickle down' theory. Although the One Nation view had been dominant in the post-1945 era, the New Right dominated from the late 1970s.
The second aim of the article will be to examine the nature of contemporary Conservative attitudes to poverty and inequality. The New Right continued to influence senior figures within the Conservative Party after 1997 and attempts at modernisation were aborted under William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith while the short leadership of Michael Howard marked in many ways the victory of the Party's right-wing; the 2005 General Election campaign being based on a number of issues designed to appeal to the core vote including crime, tax cuts and immigration. It was only under Cameron, therefore, that the pace of modernisation accelerated and there has at least been a change of emphasis in a number of policy areas including taxation and the environment. Cameron has defended the Union and thereby resisted calls for a greater sense of English nationalism within the Party. He has maintained the Party's...