18 - Conclusions

Summary

Introduction

This chapter draws together the arguments presented throughout this book and relates them to the framework introduced in Chapter 1. In particular, it considers the main approaches underpinning the Conservatives’ social policies since 2015, covering five prime ministers, albeit that is particularly complicated given the impacts of Brexit (Chapter 4), the COVID-19 pandemic (Chapter 5) and the period of high inflation from 2022. It is also important to recognise that in many areas of social policy, the remit of the Conservative governments was limited to England, although the main driver of levels of public expenditure across the UK remains the decisions of central government as it largely determines the funding available to the devolved administrations.

Locating the Conservative governments, 2015– 23

As discussed in Chapter 1, this section draws on Powell's (1999) analysis of New Labour and Bochel and Powell's (2016) consideration of the Coalition government to examine social policies by setting them against the framework of alternative political approaches and drawing on the analyses provided by the contributors of each chapter for this book. It expands on Table 1.1 to look at the governments as led by David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss (briefly) and Rishi Sunak, and it summarises their approaches to social policy in Table 18.1.

While there are, perhaps inevitably, some differences, our assessment is largely in line with the views of the other contributors to this book, with the Conservative governments being largely seen as having significant similarities with New Right thinking, but nevertheless having been greatly affected by ‘events’, meaning that successive prime ministers and their cabinets found it hard to clearly set out, let alone achieve, their social policy goals.

As discussed earlier, the ‘Coalition’ years cover the period with Cameron as Prime Minister in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, while the ‘Conservative’ years cover the period following the general elections of 2015, 2017 and 2019, under the leadership of Cameron (2015– 16), May (2016– 19), Johnson (2019– 22), Truss (2022) and Sunak (2022– ).