"We live in a time of crisis. In such times humans retreat to safety, and build bulwarks against the future. The financial emergency is having this effect on Britain's governing class. Labour has withdrawn to the safety of the sheltering state, and the comforts of its first income tax rise since the mid–1970s. Meanwhile, the Conservatives appear to be proposing a repeat of Thatcherite austerity in the face of economic catastrophe. But this crisis is more than an ordinary recession. It represents a disintegration of the idea of the 'market state' and makes obsolete the political consensus of the last 30 years. A fresh analysis of the ruling ideological orthodoxy is required.
...
On a deeper level, the present moment is a challenge to conservatism itself. The Conservatives are still viewed as the party of the free market, an idea that has collapsed into monopoly finance, big business and deregulated global capitalism. Tory social thinking has genuinely evolved, but the party's economic thinking is still poised between repetition and renewal. As late as August 2008 David Cameron said: 'I'm going to be as radical a social reformer as Margaret Thatcher was an economic reformer,' and that 'radical social reform is what this country needs right now.' He is right about society, but against the backdrop of collapsing markets and without a macro–economic alternative, Thatcherite economics has been wrongfooted by events."
(Phillip Blond, Prospect Magazine February 2009 issue 155)