My friend Piotr kindly sent along an article by Matthew Parris that might be of interest, written in 2006. Parris begins by suggesting that David Cameron’s rejection of “Margaret Thatcher’s essentially Marxist analysis of modern Britain” is misguided.

I hope you will not disagree with me that Margaret Thatcher was essentially a Marxist. Or perhaps I should say Marxian, because she joined the opposing army yet agreed on the battleground. Like Karl Marx, she saw contemporary politics as driven by the clash of interests, and the role of politicians as being to represent one interest — often against another. Her habitual use of the phrase ‘our people’ to describe the section of the electorate whose side she was on, and whose support she thought worth seeking, was neither whimsical nor coincidental: I often heard her speak like this and it was perfectly clear what she meant. She meant homeowners and would-be homeowners. She meant people with aspirations, ready to work hard in order to enjoy the fruits of hard work. She didn’t quite mean the middle classes — the term ‘Essex Man’ was coined to describe the aspirational plebeians whose support did so much to tip general elections her way — but she undoubtedly did not include ‘working class’ people, in the sense in which that term used to be used, as ‘ours’.
People who were council-house tenants and happy to remain so were not Our People. Trade unionists were not Our People. The workshy, benefit-junkies, the radical chic who worked as lecturers, teachers, administrators — but almost never (she noted) as wealth-creators — were not Our People. Mrs Thatcher (as she then was) would have resisted fiercely the idea that she was a class warrior, and in her own person and origins she did much to distance the Conservative party from its association with toffs and their interests. Like Ted Heath she was a Tory moderniser in recognising that the old class divisions were breaking down, and that to win elections a party had to appeal right across class. But in one important respect she was more a traditional than a radical politician: her instinctive analysis of many of the great political questions of the day was like Lenin’s: ‘kto, kogo?’ — who, whom? In other words, who is screwing whom here, and which side are my supporters and I on?
It followed that Thatcher was never really a persuader. She did not believe that reason or logic alone was what really swung people one way or another. She believed they followed their own interests and that the interests of different groups would often and inevitably clash. ‘Argument’ was, for her, a matter of raising the banner so that Our People would see it and rally round. This is why you will find her most memorable speeches and remarks more declaratory than persuasive. She rallied as a bus-stop rallies: here I am; this is where you will find your bus.
That is not to say that Thatcherism was in some sense unpatriotic: a political movement on behalf of a section of the nation rather than the whole nation. Challenged with that accusation, she would reply that she and her ‘natural’ supporters saw more clearly than most that in the long term the interests of the whole of Britain were best served by the wealth-creators, the ‘tall trees’, the achievers, etc; and that if we let ‘their’ people (Labour’s) pull Our People down, even Their People would be the losers in the end. But she was not so naive as to believe that Their People could for the moment be persuaded to see it like that. She led one side in a civil war whose outcome she believed would one day benefit both sides — but not before the other side had been beaten.

As Parris goes on to argue, Cameron and Tony Blair take a markedly different view.

Turning back to Disraeli’s slogan (more slogan than reality) of ‘One Nation’, both men see 21st-century Britannia — cool or otherwise — as a place where the interests of all can be reconciled with the interests of each. The language of Our People and Their People is anathema to the way both Blair and Cameron see us, and want us to see ourselves. They do not think a modern European country like ours can be analysed or governed, or electoral support sought, in this way.
I want to believe that they are right. But are they? Are there no longer many important zero-sum games in modern policy-making: decisions where one group’s loss is another’s gain? Do all citizens now have so deep an interest in the quality of public provision that the question of who is to pay for it, and how much, is relegated for almost everyone? Has the clash of interests now been permanently banished from its old, spinal relationship with the body politic?

On one level, I’m sympathetic to what Parris describes as a Marxian analysis. The struggle in Wisconsin, for example, is easy to understand once we consider the many ways in which the public sector collective bargaining process benefits incumbent public workers. There is no mystery as to why public workers would be outraged, and the mistake was on the part of reformers who believed that their efforts wouldn’t be met with massive, determined, well-financed resistance.

Yet one cynical response to Parris is that those more inclined to embrace Thatcher’s substantive views, bracketing for the moment her Our People-Their People thesis, must now appeal to the public-spiritedness of some minority of Their People, as Their People have arguably grown in number and influence.

The language of “achievers” and “tall trees” has never appealed to me, in part because I believe that many of Their People are profoundly frustrated by the barriers Their System puts in Their Way. Large numbers of public workers want more autonomy, for example. We’ve seen that new DCPS teachers will embrace higher wages in exchange for giving up tenure. This is the kind of slow and steady progress that could give us a public sector that meets our shared interests.

Basically, the right is at a serious disadvantage, because the beneficiaries of public services have been steeped with the message that their interests are aligned with the incumbent providers of public services. Nothing could be further from the truth. Offering an effective counter-message is exceptionally difficult, particularly when the right embraces an Our People-Their People framework.

Or rather the Our People-Their People framework needs to be structured differently: Our People are (net) taxpayers, the “53 Percent,” but also the people who depend on good public services, including schools, roads, and big-ticket medical care, who want these services at a price they can afford. Their People are the people who profit from making good public services as expensive and inefficient as possible.

Think about this through the lens of lifetime net tax rates. It is possible that a person born into a poor family will pay a negative lifetime net tax rate, as she or he has had to depend on a panoply of tax-financed public services. So in this sense, the person is a “net beneficiary” of public services — by virtue of a lifetime of poverty, which doesn’t sound like a fair trade. Yet were those tax-financed public services of higher quality, she or he might have achieved much greater earnings over the lifecourse. And here we get into the debate over how to deliver services of higher quality: give more resources to the institutions that have consistently delivered services of low quality, or encourage experimentation, specialization, and new entrants, and create a mechanism for failed institutions to close up shop?