A long time ago, I wrote a piece for Management Today about the Conservative Party. One of my interviewees was Reginald Maudling (yes, that long ago), erstwhile chancellor of the exchequer and home secretary, a large, slow-moving man equally known for his intellect and fondness for fine claret. At the end of the interview, I asked a slightly drowsy Maudling about his political philosophy. After a long pause, he replied: ‘Well, I think of it like this. First, you know, one side has a go … and then it’s the other side’s turn.’ 

I used to dine out on this story, which seemed to me the height of UK political anti-intellectualism. But it recently received support from an unexpected quarter. Writing in the FT, Ruchir Sharma, chairman of Rockefeller International, noted that from an economic viewpoint it seemed to make surprisingly little difference which kind of party was in power. The US economy has done just as well if not better under the Democrats as Republicans, for instance. What does seem to give a kick to economic performance is a changing of the guard – electing a new government with fresh faces. In other words, giving the other side a turn. In a government’s second and subsequent terms, economic growth almost invariably slows.

One of the things this reminds you of is that there is no such thing as a fixed, once-for-all political destination. As the philosopher Michael Oakeshott famously put it, ‘In political activity . . . men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel’ until the next crew takes over – a process that with a few intermissions and bumps on the way has been taking place in the UK since the 13th century. And that indeed describes what Conservatives, particularly, generally did. They prided themselves on their lack of an ideology, at least an explicit one. Instead, to quote Oakeshott again, their disposition ‘to prefer the tried to the untried … [and] the actual to the possible,’ meant that keeping an even keel was the party’s natural bent.

The chaos of the last few years is eloquent testimony to the distance today’s Tories have travelled from the pragmatic ambition of the past. Maudling, canvassed for the governorship of the Bank of England, and his contemporaries would have been astonished and then appalled. So far from keeping an even keel, during its most recent tenure the supposed party of the status quo almost sent the ship to the bottom in its pursuit of ideological purity, leaving for its successors a situation of staggering political and economic dysfunction – not just a barely twitching economy but a myopic and depleted state, poverty-stricken local government and a society fractured from top to bottom.

How did we get to this point? In her intriguingly-titled Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias fail, LSE’s Prof Abby Innes argues that the Conservatives’ increasingly dogmatic commitment to extreme neoliberalism uncannily mirrors the trajectory of the Soviet economy under Stalin and his successors. Soviet communism and British capitalism look like opposites. But as Innes expertly unpacks, ‘both Soviet and neoliberal doctrines are utopian political philosophies dressed up as science.’ Soviet central planning and an ever freer market were each held to be the one true means to strikingly similar ends: a perfectly efficient economy, which would lead to the shrinking or withering away, take your pick, of the now unnecessary bureaucratic state. (Those looking for the origins of ‘deep state’ theorising, start here.) 

‘Turn to any major [UK] policy reform of the last 40 years’, says Innes, ‘and you will find the steady development of Soviet pathologies in capitalist form’. Take privatisation and outsourcing, both part of the 1980s and 1990s attempt to bring neoliberal ‘efficiency’ to the public sector through the dreaded New Public Management. The result has been the worst of all worlds: privatised and outsourced services that work so poorly that an emasculated state is constantly forced to intervene (water, anyone?), hapless planning (dentists, doctors, social care), repressive regimes of ‘targets and terror’, an utter failure to nurture the national infrastructure, arbitrary and illogical service and grant cuts, and a mounting culture of cronyism, all familiar from Soviet Russia. 

Or Brexit, which with hindsight only makes political sense as a quixotic last throw by the economic libertarians running the Leave campaign to throw off the constraints perceived as stymying previous government attempts to achieve economic nirvana, and whose final form – quite unecessarily, the hardest and most destructive exit possible – led indirectly to the political chaos that has followed. The ultimate irony: far from market efficiencies allowing for a progressive withdrawal of the state from economic affairs, the UK government’s tax take is now the highest it has been for 70 years, and it micro-manages to about the 10th decimal place. Less with more, in fact.

Unfortunately, following a well-trodden dynamic, true believers always attribute failure of their project to insufficient radicalism or rigour of execution rather than wrong-headedness, so their only answer is to double down on what they were doing already. This only makes things worse and distances the perpetrators still further from the lived reality of their constituents. As we know to our cost, the ultimate casualty of this dynamic is democracy itself. If democratic institutions, or even the facts of life, bar the way to the ideological ideal of an untrammeled free market or perfect central planning, then it’s the former not the latter that have to give – witness Johnson’s proroguing of parliament, assaults on judges as ‘the enemy of the people’ and the progressive criminalising of public protest in the UK, not to mention Donald Trump’s antics in the US. The more the neoliberal project fails, the more its fanatical adherents fall back on populist and authoritarian means to try to force it to work. 

Given the circumstances, the most encouraging aspect of the recent elections, at least in the UK, is that Sir Keir Starmer might have been nicknamed ‘Mr Even Keel’. Of course, profound change will be needed to roll back the deep and lasting damage inflicted by neoliberal economics on the body politic and economic since the days of Margaret Thatcher, with precious little fiscal margin to do it with. (This is nothing new. When Maudling quit the Treasury after the Labour election victory of 1964, he left a note for successor Jim Cameron, saying, ‘Good luck, old cock. Sorry to leave such a mess’ – which Cameron apparently took to refer to the state of his office until he took a hard look at the books. That’s not a joke anyone would think to make today.) 

But the first essential must be to reestablish a measure of trust in state and government among understandably mutinous voters. That can only be done by plotting a political course that directly connects with lives lived by ordinary people rather than the rational utility maximisers of economic theory. The UK’s long parliamentary history has something to teach us here. Reflecting on the origins of the European state in the middle ages, one FT reviewer warned that without a foundational consensus on the role and effectiveness of the state binding together politics, law, economics and the place of religion, our future could all too easily descend into what Thomas Hobbes, the founder of modern political philosophy, bleakly described as ‘the war of all against all’. Steer well, Cap’n Starmer.