Toynbee Polly - Camerons Coup: How the Tories Took Britain to the Brink

Asked why he wanted to be prime minister, David Cameron said, Because I thought Id be good at it. He wasnt. He bears direct and personal responsibility for (nearly) breaking up the UK, because of who he is and the policies he pursued as prime minister. With chillaxed nonchalance, what his government did on tax, spend and benefits, and housing, health and education, prised further apart region, class, generation, gender and race, driving deeper wedges between town and country, old and young, deserving and undeserving, lucky and unlucky, left and right. And, as it turned out, between the nations that make up the UK.

Cameron was in a coalition, but for most purposes the Liberal Democrats were a sideshow. Besides, this book is not about the Westminster charivari, the stuff that excites Nick Robinson on the News at Ten, the ins and outs or the mini-dramas that engross political journalists. Those arent always insignificant but as with our book The Verdict, on the Labour years we want to audit what they did as a government, what effect their actions had on peoples lives and paint a picture of the country under their rule.

We arent naive. Many increasing numbers doubt the efficacy of politicians and policymakers, if they pay them any attention at all. People get on with their lives, talk about the weather, and fail to see connections between services, tax, job or wages and the decisions made by MPs and ministers. However, the Scottish referendum showed brilliantly how engagement might be electrically charged, albeit over a direct and straightforward question. By contrast, citizens everyday experience of politics is rarely going to be as exciting, but it matters. One purpose of this book is to show how much.

We focus primarily on what the Conservatives did, yet its hard not to query the personality at the top. One puzzle is that, unlike Margaret Thatcher, what you saw was not what you got: Camerons strong ideological impulses were usually kept from view. He breathed an effortless trajectory from Eton to Oxford, to public relations and a safe seat in Witney. Harold Macmillan is supposed once to have been his role model; a picture of SuperMac hung in his office. For a while, Cameron tried to paint himself as a modern version of that other old Etonian, who had been a Keynesian, a builder of council houses and a prime minister deeply committed to the integrity of the country, from Scottish castles to Stockton-on-Tees to deepest Sussex.

There is no resemblance. Cameron sees the world through the narrowing prism of a social set and sectional interest. He trod the world stage as prime ministers do, but without any identifiable strategy, sense of history or grasp of long-run national interest; the idea of his turning to the classics or even Jane Austen for inspiration and proportion, as Macmillan did, is unlikely. At home, it was government by and from a coterie, half-barricaded in its southern English fastness, half-floating across the yacht-filled sea of globalised money.

The Tories came to power during what his partisans called a national crisis, claiming it demanded ruthless austerity. With admens fluency, they produced sound-bite phrases, notably were all in it together, but never tried to imagine the nation, let alone seek to strengthen unity in adversity. Deep and disturbing trends in capitalism left them indifferent. The fundamental promise of modern liberal economies to make the broad majority of people gradually better off over time is being called into question, says Clive Cowdery, chair of the Resolution Foundation, an independent thinktank that works to improve the lives of people on low incomes. Such adverse dynamics demand understanding and political response.

Labour had taken a million children out of poverty. That progress has now gone into reverse. The great recession would have taken its toll across regions and classes but a good government would have looked to protect the weakest. Instead, they are the ones who have borne the brunt of deficit reduction, ministers bent on turning public opinion against the poor. The character of a government shows in the choices it makes about the distribution of pain. Whatever the balance of arguments about austerity, concerted assault on the bottom third of society is what must brand Camerons reputation.

Writing about modern Britain, you have to rely on certain institutions, whose worth and reliability counterbalance the temptation to say everything is going to hell in a handcart, strong though that remains. We have used their work copiously, not always with full acknowledgement. Of course they include the Guardian, but also the Financial Times and its first-rate columnists such as John Kay, Martin Wolf and Janan Ganesh. Initials that crop up frequently include ONS (Office for National Statistics), PAC (House of Commons public accounts committee) and NAO (National Audit Office), and an organisation that has become de facto part of the constitution, so irreproachable its data and so incisive its analysis, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). Other indispensable sources are the pollsters, notably Ipsos MORI and one of the greatest of charities, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF).

Other initials include DWP (Department for Work and Pensions); FTSE (Financial Times Stock Exchange) 100, the list of companies on the London Stock Exchange with the highest capitalisation; NIESR (National Institute of Economic and Social Research); OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development); OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility) and BIS (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills).