Cameron and Big Society. May and Shared Society. Same Party : Two Visions ?

The second female Prime Minister in the history of Britain, Theresa May, from the outset, seemed eager to distance herself from her famous female predecessor and thus avoid easy parallels. She also seemed just as eager to distance herself from her direct predecessor, David Cameron (2010-16). Was this distance the result of Theresa May incarnating an altogether new type of Conservatism or simply an electoral tool to win over the voters who had expressed their discontent in the June 2016 referendum ? For the purpose of this article, the focus will not be on general Conservative ideology but rather on the specific ideas which influenced the social and welfare policies of the recent Conservative governments. We shall do this through a comparative study of Cameron’s Big Society and May’s Shared Society. We shall also consider whether they are both influenced by Thatcherism. Our hypothesis is that whilst Mayism is different from Thatcherism in many respects, it is not different in its attitude to the poor, in spite of a very different rhetoric about society. For this same reason, there is a definite ideological proximity with Cameron’s Conservatism and his social vision, which were also influenced by Thatcherism.