100 days that shook the world

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With the first 100 days of the Coalition marked by a blitzkrieg approach to tax and spend policies, David Cameron must rank as one of history's more unlikely revolutionaries. Cameron was elected as Tory leader in the mould of a Blairite reformer. He certainly gave the jaded Conservative brand a makeover, returning the party to electability. Of course, after a decade of Blair, many asked, do we need another snake oil salesman offering us sunshine and apple pie? The last time we went along with such promises, we got Iraq and government by spin doctor.

Leaving aside whether or not one approves of the Coalition government's policy agenda, the contrast with the early Blair years is remarkable. Blair had a thumping majority and could, if he had been so inclined to, have used his massive majority to usher in a new socialist dawn. Instead the party, steeled through 18 years of opposition and four election defeats, spent the first two years sticking tightly to the previous government's spending policies, and declaring loudly its economic prudence and orthodoxy. Of course 2010 is not 1997, and the global economic crisis presents a very different backdrop for a new government. But it is very difficult to argue that the government has a mandate for a massive shrinking of the welfare state. The Tories went into bed with the Liberals, and one might have expected a cautious centrism and a gradualist approach to deficit reduction. Instead we have Osborne's fire and brimstone warnings over deficit disaster - which are more by way of assertion than any proof of a Greek style crisis - and a full frontal assault on Gordon Brown's expanded welfare state.

Cameron and Osborne have taken their approach out of the Lenin and Trotsky school of turning a crisis into an opportunity for revolutionary change. It will be recalled by historians that the Bolsheviks were the minority party in the 1917 constituency assembly, with the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries winning the majority of seats. In the end, though, Lenin's agenda was the one that triumphed. The parallel may seem crazy, and one has to hope that Britain won't descend into its own civil war when the cuts begin to bite.

Turning the clock forward to the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008, and the contrast between Cameron-Osborne and Gordon Brown is clear. Brown, the man who penned the Red Book of Socialism in the early 1970s, saw his primary role in the biggest crisis of the system in 80 years, to save it. The nationalisations that took place were not the kind advocated by his younger self. The state-owned banks were not turned into people's cooperatives, rather, they were left to their own devices, with some mild exhortations to lend to small businesses, but now saved from collapse through a massive injection of taxpayers' money. Brown did not want to shake up the system, he did not see an opportunity for a once in a lifetime makeover of capitalism into a new model of tamed finance. No, he saw to it that the status quo survived. This cautious, conservative approach was lauded by markets and the IMF. However, it did not save him. Neither the electorate nor the Tory press thanked him for his efforts, and he was history.

A lot of people on the left saw the financial crisis as a clear sign that the 'neoliberal' era that started with Margaret Thatcher had come to an end. But something was missing. There was no plan or will to seize the opportunity to overhaul the system in a radical way. That task has now been handed to the Conservatives, and they have seized it with gusto. Except their version of revolution is very different. They aim to break up most of what remained of the welfare state that has grown steadily since 1945 and, from a certain pro-market perspective, has become so bloated that it is undermining the foundations of an entrepreneurial society. They aim to do nothing less than restore Britain to its entrepreneurial roots by finishing the work begun by Margaret Thatcher and taking an axe to welfarism. Thatcher was too busy fighting the trade unions and privatising state-owned industries to get round to that.

Cameron has made it abundantly clear, in the pages of The Sun and elsewhere, that he understands how limited the opportunity is to remake Britain. Political goodwill is a time-limited commodity. Labour doesn't have a new leader until September. Unless the Coalition splits, Labour will not have a crack at taking power again until 2015. And the record shows that Labour is fundamentally unwilling to reverse the structural changes brought in by successive Conservative governments. Cameron and Osborne must be betting on that, and that once the forces of entrepreneurship are unleashed, there will be no going back.