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Conservatism is one of the major intellectual and political strains of thought in Western culture over the last two centuries. Originating as something of a ‘reaction’ to the radical, liberal and, later, socialist movements during the early period of industrialisation in Britain and Europe, conservatism remains a powerful ideological force in Western societies today. We explore
Why did it take the Conservative Party so long to recover power? After a landslide defeat in 1997, why was it so slow to adapt, reposition itself and rebuild its support? How did the party leadership seek to reconstruct conservatism and modernise its electoral appeal?
This highly readable book addresses these questions through a contextualised assessment of Conservative Party politics between 1997 and 2010. By tracing the debates over strategy amongst the party elite, and scrutinising the actions of the leadership, it situates David Cameron and his ‘modernising’ approach in relation to that of his three immediate predecessors: Michael Howard, Iain Duncan Smith and William Hague. This holistic view, encompassing this period of opposition in its entirety, aids the identification of strategic trends and conflicts and a comprehension of the evolving Conservative response to New Labour’s statecraft.
Secondly, the book considers in depth four particular dilemmas for contemporary Conservatism: European integration; national identity and the ‘English Question’; social liberalism versus social authoritarianism; and the problems posed by a neo-liberal political economy. The book argues that the ideological legacy of Thatcherism played a central role in framing and shaping these intraparty debates, and that an appreciation of this is vital for explaining the nature and limits of the Conservatives’ renewal under Cameron.
Students of British politics, party politics and ideologies will find this volume essential reading, and it will also be of great interest to anyone concerned with furthering their understanding of contemporary British political history.
4 Conservatism: class and nation In an interview with the Daily Telegraph (Wallop 2015) shortly before the 2015 general election, the eminent psephologist Sir David Butler was asked who would win. For the first time in seventy years he was unwilling to make a prediction because, he conceded, there were too many possible outcomes. This admission of doubt captured well a moment when previous assumptions about British politics no longer appeared adequate to explain either motivations or events. Butler, along with his co-author Donald Stokes, had written one of the
8 Reconstructed conservatism? ‘Cameronism’ in context This book has focused on the Conservative Party leadership in opposition, between 1997 and 2010. The aim was to comprehend and explain the strategies employed by elite party actors in this period, in order to develop a better understanding of the Conservatives’ electoral performance. The question underlying this study was a simple one: why did it take the Conservatives so long to recover power? The answer is rather more complex, but the book has argued that the ideological legacy of Thatcherism played a
2 Constructing a new conservatism? Ideology and values Richard Hayton Introduction Following three severe election defeats, the Conservatives elected David Cameron as leader on an explicitly modernising platform. His agenda for change encompassed revitalising the Party image through a concerted effort to rebrand the Party, an extensive review of policy and ideological repositioning towards the centre ground. While these three strands are of course intertwined, this chapter will focus on the last, namely the attempt to distance the Conservatives from the legacy
1 Conservatism and the party When he reflected on the rights of men, Edmund Burke (1969: 153) observed that they are in a sort of middle ground, ‘incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned’. Something similar can be said about the word ‘Conservative’. That judgement does not invest the Conservative Party with a mystical character; it is merely to observe that any simplistic formulation of its politics or of its identity would not do justice to its institutional and historical complexity. The word Conservative contains wide varieties of
4 Conservatism and mourning the nation It will seem odd that a survey of nationalism’s ideological presentation has not yet engaged its more formal conservative legacies. After all, contemporary nationalism is commonly reduced in popular analysis to being merely an unreconstructed conservatism, one that is nestled in the crusty recesses of boorish, right-wing politics. As has hopefully been made apparent in the preceding chapters, the reality is very different. Nationalism necessarily sources the entire political spectrum when assembling its ideological language
2 Conservatism and the nation In his speech at Manchester Trade Hall in 1872, Disraeli had declared the Tory Party to be nothing if it is not a ‘national party’. Though this is often taken to be the origin of that Conservative insistence on its unique custodianship of the national interest – which still astonished McKenzie and Silver (1968) almost a century later – Disraeli was actually consistent in this contention. In his one work of political theory, Vindication of the English Constitution, published in 1835, he had labelled the Whigs the ‘anti
7 The political economy of twenty-first-century conservatism Introduction This chapter argues that the political economy of twenty-first-century conservatism has remained firmly within neo-liberal parameters. The endurance of neo-liberalism in the Conservative Party was illustrated by the response offered to the financial crisis of 2007–8 and the subsequent recession, which was characterised by an overriding concern about the size of the fiscal deficit. However, the ideological hold of Thatcherism on Conservative economic thinking can be traced throughout the
Devolution, party politics and conservatism This book began with the puzzle of the contrasting fortunes of the Welsh and Scottish Conservative parties. Through a comparative examination of party change it sought to find out how but also, crucially, why both parties changed in the way they did after devolution. Using an analytical framework derived from the literature on party change and multi-level party politics, it explored the reactions of both parties on a series of common drivers and indicators of change. This conclusion draws together the two strands of