As the UK’s Conservative Party faces potential extinction after 200 years of dominance and South Africa’s ANC struggles with similar decline, Tony Leon argues that the era of “natural parties of government” is over, replaced by voter disillusionment that demands the kind of decisive, conviction-based leadership exemplified by Margaret Thatcher rather than today’s consensus-seeking politicians.
Today, here and abroad, there is no such thing as the natural party of government.’
Case in point is the defeated, demoralised and diminished British Conservative Party that this week convenes for its annual political conference in Manchester, in the UK.
Difficult to remember – in the last election it won its lowest haul of seats (121) in its 191-year history – that this party too was once dubbed “the natural party of government”.
It has held power in Britain for 69 of the past 100 years. The question mark hanging over this week’s gathering is not just whether it will ever govern again, but whether this party, once called “the most successful in the Western world”, will even exist after the next election in four years.
The Conservatives, in one poll, register just 16% national support. Forecasts of political oblivion do need to be taken with caution, though.
Easier to gauge though, is its current malaise: Britain today, like much of the world, faces geostrategic angst – from Trump tariffs (less harsh there than here, to be sure) and alarm about Russia to local disaffection caused by low growth, stagnant incomes, high (largely stealth) taxes and declining public services. Small boat illegal migrants are blamed by many for some of this malaise.
This “plague on all political houses” approach by fed-up voters has propelled the rise and rise of Reform UK’s Nigel Farage, the principal populist who led the Brexit campaign (a less spoken of cause of UK economic decline).
Under the first past-the-post parliamentary system that does not match popular votes to seats, he leads a party of just five MPs. But current polls place him in pole position to be the next Prime Minister. Though, of course, a lot will happen in the four years before the next election.
Last week, party insiders sought comfort in the statistics that add Reform and Tory poll numbers together, and the centre-right enjoys 50%+ support among voters.
Try the same exercise here with all three mutations of the original ANC (ANC+MK+EFF), and you get to more than 65%. But in both cases, here and the UK, the breakaway formations are far more invested in destroying the mother party than conciliating it.
Since, as the very unpopular Labour government reminds ceaselessly, many of the UK’s ailments happened under Tory rule for the past 15 years, public disaffection with the party is acute. Its current leader, Kemi Badenoch, elected just 11 months ago, is the sixth party head in this period, and increasing discontent suggests she might battle to see out her second anniversary in office.
If Conservatives are experts at wielding the knife against failing leaders, their talent for regicide is matched by their “messiah complex”, a complaint against them made by former leader Ian Duncan Smith. He, too, was ousted way back in 2003 as the Tories went in search, unavailingly initially, of an electoral saviour.
The ghost of Margaret Thatcher
The ghost haunting the conference, reflected in many exhibits at the event commemorating her, is the late Margaret Thatcher. She was the last party leader to win three consecutive elections. Beyond her vote-winning ways, Thatcher, whose 100th birthday is next week, offers copious examples of purposeful, bold and decisive leadership much craved by the world beyond Britain’s shores.
Of course, these attributes are to be found across the Atlantic in the White House right now, and indeed in a clutch of undemocratic regimes from Moscow to Beijing.
However, Thatcher was a parliamentary democrat to her fingertips. In 1990, when she lost her political grasp, via an increasingly imperious style and a vastly unpopular poll tax on local government residents, she was unceremoniously dumped by a party which had ridden to power in her slipstream.
Midst bitter tears, she accepted the verdict. But many in her declining party today, as its current leader grapples for a compass for renewed political relevance, still view Thatcher, who resigned office more than 35 years ago, as their true North Star.
“Thatcherism” – a term used even today, was first slapped on her governing philosophy by her ideological enemies in the journal Marxism Today. In essence – and on the rubble piling up in strike-torn Britain in 1979 – it was about “a new economic consensus, to liberate markets, and roll back the socialist state”.
At its core was tamping down inflation through tight control of the money supply and upending institutions from powerful unions to sclerotic trade practices. This description by commentator Jason Cowley still fits the governing parameters of many states and institutions, not least elements of practice at the National Treasury right here in Pretoria.
There were many striking aspects of “my style of government” as Thatcher branded her take-no-prisoners view of leadership that echo today, but perhaps the most lasting are that she was prepared, in the face of an economic emergency (her country was dubbed the “sick man of Europe” on her election in 1979), to change course radically.
Until her election, there was a settled consensus between the two major parties, dubbed “Butskellism” (named after a Tory Chancellor and his Labour shadow), that economic policy should muddle along in the middle, anchored by Keynesian ideas – from the welfare state to nationalised industries to promote social stability ahead of economic growth.
Thatcher had a decidedly different view and set out to dismantle the consensus.
The very concept of consensus-style politics was an anathema. In one typical robust speech, she said, “There are dangers in consensus… to me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all principles, beliefs, values, and policies. So, it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects. Do you think you would ever have heard of Christianity if the Apostles had gone out and said ‘I believe in consensus?‘ I am a conviction politician.“
Convictions in her case came from a careful study of the economy, her lower-middle-class childhood living above the family grocery store, and careers as both a chemist and a tax barrister before entering parliament.
Unlike many politicians today, both here and around the world, Thatcher did not begin her career as a professional politician. But more than this she had a joined-up theory of beliefs long before attaining power, and vast reservoirs of what her Labour opponent Denis Healey called “hinterland”.
Mbeki’s half-baked Thatcherism
In the 2000s, then President Thabo Mbeki, to spark the local economy, introduced (and then later abandoned key parts) his flagship Growth, Employment and Redistribution policy (GEAR) in place of ANC socialism. He was branded a “Thatcherite”.
He did not disavow the label but attempted a triangulated justification:
“Those who call me neoliberal or a Thatcherite don’t understand the historical necessity of transforming our economy. We are building an African Renaissance, not serving foreign capital.” he told an interviewer in 2004.
Even Mbeki’s half-baked Thatcherism (that led The Economist to dub him “South Africa’s reluctant Thatcherite”), ushered in what now seems a golden era of 5.6% GDP growth in 2005; and while much of this was due to commodity prices, the tight control of public spending (then just 27% of GDP) increased vastly investor appetites and saw a reduction of unemployment (then just 26.%). Our decline since then to today (0.6% growth, 33.2% unemployment and 77% GDP debt) has been an unending tale of attrition on all fronts, bar state borrowing that has increased more than threefold.
Applying strong beliefs and policies to troubled countries and governments has led, decades later, to all manner of hardline politicians (and she was the very first woman PM in Britain) to be called “Iron Lady”, a term first applied to her by her nemeses in the Soviet Union. Today, from the just announced DA mayoral candidate Helen Zille to the new prime minister of Japan, Sanae Takaichi, it has been universalised.
Political immortality
Thatcher, the original Iron Lady, achieved political immortality and sparks reverential mention beyond the Tory faithful, but many of her achievements came at a steep cost. As historian Peter Hennesy wrote after her death in 2013: “She left a Britain that was prouder, freer, and richer, but also harsher, colder and more unequal.”
Back home, on Monday, our consensus-seeking president (who always seeks the lowest common denominator of agreement among warring factions in his ailing party) unveiled his party’s latest economic reform package.
It will offend few in its reach and will tinker on the margins of our economic decline, rather than take an axe to its causes. Nor, heaven forbid, slaughter any ANC holy cows. The word “implementation” was referenced thrice in its introduction, though unless this government undergoes a miraculous shock therapy conversion to task execution, it will remain a paper promise.
Strong and divisive leadership carries one cost, but failure to act decisively at moments of national peril carries an even steeper price tag, especially on election day.
As unemployment surges, investment declines, and corruption metastasises, Cyril Ramaphosa’s party can consider the likely looming electoral impact. Both in Tory Britain and ANC South Africa, for once venerated organisations, 191 and 113 years old respectively, there is no such thing anymore as ‘the natural party of government”.
