Could the Tories eventually cease to be a political force in the UK?
stonespring
Shipmate
in Purgatory
I've seen a lot of news coverage from before Sunak called the snap election that the Tories were "collapsing" and conjecture that maybe the party might not ever recover from a loss in the election to come. It wasn't clear what would replace them as a party for right-wing voters, but something like Reform or another right-wing force is mentioned as a possibility. Other possibilities are that the LibDems replace the Tories as the main opposition to Labour, either from the right or the left, or that Labour itself moves more to the right and its main opposition is a party more firmly on the left like the Greens or a new more explicitly social democratic or democratic socialist force. I’m not British but I find all these scenarios hard to believe.
I’m curious as an outsider to ask what people think about the Tory party’s history - does it make sense to talk about the Tory parties of the 17th to 19th centuries as the same party as the Conservative Party today? Is the UK Conservative Party different than conservative parties in other wealthy democracies because of the UK’s unique history (Civil War and Glorious Revolution, yes, but no revolution from the Age of Revolutions onward, no written constitution, no recent history of dictatorship or occupation by a foreign power (some Northern Irish Nationalist politicians might consider their country occupied though)). The UK seems to have kept at least symbolically more of the trappings of aristocracy than other European constitutional monarchies, the House of Lords even in its current form being a good example.
Could the Tory party be seen as a manifestation of the UK’s unique continued embrace of the formalization of entrenched privilege? Other countries, the US included, might have greater income inequality and greater domination of money over politics, but I can’t think of any institution in any other country quite like the Tory party.
The UK Conservatives, I imagine, will continue to recruit ambitious people from a variety of (at least ethnic) backgrounds from the same elite schools, and it will probably continue to be protean in its rhetoric, policies, and promises in order to keep or regain power.
I can’t imagine the Tory party being taken over by one demagogue like the US Republican Party. I also don’t imagine it being replaced by an upstart party like Reform UK, although it is likely to keep looking for what secret sauce will allow it to co-opt Reform’s voters. I’m not sure why I think this way. It just feels like the Party has been able to do what it has needed to to survive and seems to be motivated across the decades and centuries by the defense of capital-P Privilege and the capital-E Establishment itself, even as privilege and the establishment themselves evolve, rather than just by defense of wealth, the security establishment, or a dominant ethnic or religious group, as in other countries (not that those other interests don’t reflect themselves in Tory party actions).
I don’t want to make this OP any longer and I’m curious to see what people in the UK think about the Torys’ history and their future. Try to keep it Purgatorial - I’m sure there are a lot of choice things to say about the Tories that would be better posted on a Hell thread.
I’m curious as an outsider to ask what people think about the Tory party’s history - does it make sense to talk about the Tory parties of the 17th to 19th centuries as the same party as the Conservative Party today? Is the UK Conservative Party different than conservative parties in other wealthy democracies because of the UK’s unique history (Civil War and Glorious Revolution, yes, but no revolution from the Age of Revolutions onward, no written constitution, no recent history of dictatorship or occupation by a foreign power (some Northern Irish Nationalist politicians might consider their country occupied though)). The UK seems to have kept at least symbolically more of the trappings of aristocracy than other European constitutional monarchies, the House of Lords even in its current form being a good example.
Could the Tory party be seen as a manifestation of the UK’s unique continued embrace of the formalization of entrenched privilege? Other countries, the US included, might have greater income inequality and greater domination of money over politics, but I can’t think of any institution in any other country quite like the Tory party.
The UK Conservatives, I imagine, will continue to recruit ambitious people from a variety of (at least ethnic) backgrounds from the same elite schools, and it will probably continue to be protean in its rhetoric, policies, and promises in order to keep or regain power.
I can’t imagine the Tory party being taken over by one demagogue like the US Republican Party. I also don’t imagine it being replaced by an upstart party like Reform UK, although it is likely to keep looking for what secret sauce will allow it to co-opt Reform’s voters. I’m not sure why I think this way. It just feels like the Party has been able to do what it has needed to to survive and seems to be motivated across the decades and centuries by the defense of capital-P Privilege and the capital-E Establishment itself, even as privilege and the establishment themselves evolve, rather than just by defense of wealth, the security establishment, or a dominant ethnic or religious group, as in other countries (not that those other interests don’t reflect themselves in Tory party actions).
I don’t want to make this OP any longer and I’m curious to see what people in the UK think about the Torys’ history and their future. Try to keep it Purgatorial - I’m sure there are a lot of choice things to say about the Tories that would be better posted on a Hell thread.
Comments
It’s not going to be pretty for them for a few years, but they’ll be back. As usual.
Wikipedia says the old Tories ceased to be a political force in the middle to late eighteenth century. After the French Revolution the conservative faction of the Whigs under Pitt the Younger was called the Tories as an insult by their opponents. When that faction was ousted from power and badly lost an election the remnant turned themselves into the Conservative Party under Peel in 1834.
The then Conservative Party split apart after the repeal of the Corn Laws: the faction that kept the name is the modern Conservative Party.
What I mean is, how quickly could the narrative become that Brexit killed the party therefore everyone must become a rejoin movement to avoid the same fate?
I'm not staying that I think this will happen but if the Tory party does have a massive wipeout and the inference is drawn that Bexit was a key cause, that would change the political environment.
Just a thought...
AFZ
Over the next 5-10 years the Conservative Party will reinvent itself, much as it has several times in the past. Some grouping of factions will continue under the name of the Conservative Party, though I'm not able to predict what that will look like.
The only thing that will actually result in the Conservative Party losing position in the political system of the UK would be a radical shift in the political system. A change in voting system to a proportional Parliament with government by agreement between several parties with no individual majority. The big tent parties are a feature of non-proportional parliaments , if systems give near proportional representation then larger factions of parties that are removed from the centre of the party tend to be separate parties, that then from arrangements post election to form a goverment that might otherwise be a big tent party.
I don't think there's much to be gained by comparing contemporary Conservatives (or liberals for that matter) with their political forebears.
I once read an interesting article that argued that Thatcher's views would have been seen as quite Whiggish and radical/liberal back in the 18th century.
All mainstream political parties are more liberal on some 'Dead Horse' issues than they would have been back in the 1980s, for instance.
Neither the US Republicans or Democrats are the same as they were in the 19th century.
I also think we shouldn't underestimate the resilience of the Conservatives. I wouldn't be surprised if they poll better than expected in some constituencies on 4th July, but I certainly think they'll lose.
I'm sure Reform will dent their vote but if UKIP were anything to go by, they can't - as yet - organise the proverbial.
The Conservatives will be in the shadows and the shallows for a while but they'll be back.
My advice to Conservative supporters would be to accept the Election result and to support anyone who has personally done a good job for them.
So if the Tories did collapse, a party or parties in this area of the political spectrum would sooner or later emerge. This would probably happen quite quickly, perhaps immediately. On current form it would either be Reform or some sort of Reform/Conservative merger/takeover.
Although Farage's baleful influence has been significant despite that.
Edmund Burke, generally regarded as the father of conservativism as we know it, was a Whig who had supported the 13 colonies in America against Britain. But he saw the French Revolution as a qualitatively different affair, and quickly turned against it.
But I don't think very many of those old-school tories ever came out and told people not to vote for Thatcherism, and in fact, guys like Enoch Powell and Norman St. John Stevas were happy to serve as MPs under Thatcher, with the latter in the cabinet for awhile.
Basically, with the old order dead, the choice was between heartless, bean-counting whiggery, and whatever brand of socialism Labour was offering at any given moment, the grand old gentry fully understood which one was the lesser threat to their position.
In turn this turns up the dial on the rhetoric, igniting further tensions and possibly pushing us closer towards a truly fascist state than we've been since Mosley.
The antidote to this is a big centre-left win followed by radical policies which actually make a substantial difference to the problems we face. Whether Starmer could actually do this is an open question.
The difficulty is that if Labour embarks on a costly transformative programme that doesn't quickly give results, this could be an open goal at the next-but-one GE.
Enoch Powell never served under Margaret Thatcher. He left the Conservatives just before the 1974 election
Right now it looks like Starmer has his eyes on that space.
Braverman, meanwhile, has been courting Farage. I suspect that, as after 1997, we'll have at least a couple of tory leaders from the swivel-eyed end of the party before we get one that can feign giving a shit about people.
Indeed.
Also, @stetson you missed the point I was making. Which was that Thatcher's policies would have been seen as dangerously Whiggish and radical back in the 18th century. The point is that political positions morph over the years.
Besides, Thatcher represented a more 'mercantile' form of Conservativism rather than the 'old gentry' style.
Sure, there are echoes of the old 'Church and King' ethos that formed the backbone of what became the Conservative Party as we know it, but there have been evolutionary shifts. Not all Tories are Rees-Mogg.
My grandad grew up dirt poor and voted Conservative all his life - apart from once, in a local election when he voted for a Communist candidate he admired for his work ethic.
'Tory' a pejorative term dates from the 'Sucession Crisis' and events leading up to the so-called 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688 not the French Revolution of 1789.
Disraeli was probably the architect of the Conservative Party as it is today, with some evolutionary shifts associated with Thatcher and others.
That's not been without tension and internecine strife over the EU led to Brexit and the turmoil we see around us today.
Labour is also very different from the Party that first formed a government a century ago.
The CofE is very different to how it was a century ago. Barnados the same. Any institution we can think of, whether political, cultural, social or religious is bound to differ from earlier versions of itself whilst retaining elements of its original DNA.
Thanks for the correction.
They may spend a few years with only a handful of MPs, but that's not the same thing.
Heh!
There could have been a worse one. Think of the origin of the name of 'The Pogues'.
Or the Gaelic epithet for the deposed James II after he fled following his defeat at the Battle of The Boyne ...
Although it was the English Whigs who applied the Gaelic term of course.
The Glorious Revolution only looked 'glorious' if you were a Protestant not a Scottish or Irish Catholic or an English recusant.
I'm reminded of The Guardian headline though when some Conservatives were objecting to the epithet.
'Don't call us Tories say Tories.'
The sticking point will be that Farage wants to be leader, but doesn't want to do the hard work of leading an actual political party.
Disraeli and Lord Randolph Churchill MP (as distinct from Randolph Churchill MP) between them yes. ‘Tory Democracy’ was always pretty nebulous, if not actually Johnsonian in its cakeism, but those two changed the party for a broader franchise.
Well, I think my point was that there is, in fact, a certain continuity between the toryism of the 19th century and the whiggishness of thatcherism, in that in both eras, the party was implementing the policies most favored by the ruling class. IOW, thatcherism wasn't quite the betrayal of old-style conservatism that Macmillan implied with his criticism of "selling off the family silver". (Macmillan along with Heath being examples of supposed critics of Thatcher who nevertheless had no problem serving under her in parliament.)
FWIW, the Rees-Mogg style is basically a schtick, and stuff like that is not the reason I posit a continuity between toryism and present-day conservatism. What Rees-Mogg is doing, I think, would be like a Liberal Democrat politician adopting the faint trappings of a Non-Conformist evangelical tub-thumper from the days of Gladstone, to appeal to whatever nostalgia exists for that culture among contemporary LibDems. (Which is probably not much, since puritanism tends not to have the same hold on the collective imagination as aristocracy does.)
Right, but someone had mentioned conservative Whigs who opposed the French Revolution, and I was giving Burke as a famous example of that, and pointing out that his opposition to radicalism led him to conservatism.
Yes, as a coronation in an already significant party as opposed to spending years as leader of the opposition.
I'd agree that there's very little residual Puritanism within the Lib Dems.
Puritanism is alive and well though and its secular equivalent is very apparent in both The Greens and on the left of the Labour Party. 😉
You can see it there in its good, bad and indifferent aspects.
But it is there in a more secularised form.
Wasn't that glorious if you were Episcopalian either.
He continued as an MP but it would be a stretch to say he had "no problem" with it! He was famously characterised as the "Incredible Sulk" and rejected all Thatcher's attempts to reconcile with him. Sometimes it appeared that his primary motivations were to make life as difficult as possible for Mrs Thatcher and to remain in the Commons to see her downfall, which of course he did.
There might be just enough *moderate* tories - Conservatives as we knew them pre-Thatcher - to still form an Opposition, though.
@TurquoiseTastic - yes. I did enjoy the schadenfreude of the the famous TV interview in which Heath was asked whether he'd said, 'Rejoice!' when told of Maggie's resignation.
'No, I said it twice. "Rejoice! Rejoice!"'
Lift up your hearts, lift up your voice,
Rejoice again, I say, rejoice!
Ha ha! There's mean, mind.
All that aside, though, I do think we need to beware of anachronising political positions from the past.
Burke's 'conservatism' when it came to the French Revolution has to be seen in context.
As with the Russian Revolution a century and a bit later, the British Establishment was either welcoming of cautiously optimistic at first. The French Monarchy was seen as the priest-ridden epitome of autocracy and backwardness. We all knew our system was better than theirs ...
Likewise with Tsarist Russia.
What tilted Burke and young 'radicals' like William Wordsworth away from a favourable attitude towards the French Revolution was The Terror and the massacres in The Vendee.
And sure, many people become more 'conservative' as they get older. Wordsworth did in spades.
Likewise, many British observers welcomed the more 'liberal' 1905 Revolution in Russia and weren't sorry to see the Tsar toppled, until the Bolsheviks took over.
But that's another issue ...
The Lib-Dems aren't the same as Gladstone's Liberals.
Labour isn't the same as Keir Hardie's party.
The Conservatives aren't the same as they were before the Reform Bill or before Thatcher.
That doesn't mean we can't see elements of their ancestry in their DNA.
Thank you
BroJames, Purgatory Host
Not quite. The Reflections were published in November of 1790, but the Vendee Massacre and the start of the Terror weren't until 1793, which is also the year the king and queen were executed.
I think that's one of the reasons that Burke's book is considered so remarkable, because he seemed to predict the exact course the revolution would take when very few saw it coming.
The Canadian Tories have suffered any number of wipeouts and have gone extinct in provincial politics in two provinces.
In 1993 they went from the largest majority at the federal level in Canadian history to just two MP's, a single breeding pair.
There have been mergers with any number of parties. The Red Tory subspecies, a genteel and grandfatherly strain has gone extinct.
So yes, it can happen.
The end result, which we are still living with 20 years on, is a "Conservative Party of Canada" substantially to the right of the old PC party.
So thanks for that.
If I have to see it so do you.
Assuming by "Tories" you mean the party most recently known as the Progressive Conservative Party, I count three zones of extinction...
In Alberta, the United Conservative Party absorbed the old PCs, but are a separate party.
Ditto for the Saskatchewan Party next door.
The Conservatives in Quebec ceased to be a significant force after the rise of the Union Nationale in the 1930s. (Though do they still exist?)
From what I can tell, the recently resurgent Conservative Party Of BC is continuous with the old PC party, just under a slightly different name. And, of course, Ontario and the maritimes still have active PC parties.
Quite what happens then is not sure. If the Conservatives become a "hard right" party, that leaves a space for a "soft right" party. The Lib Dems could, in theory, move in that direction. I think it unlikely that a completely new party would be formed. I wouldn't be surprised if, after the election, Ed Davey made some cooing overtures to soft right conservatives, along the lines of "there are some things we already actually agree on." We shouldn't forget that there were plenty of conservatives who voted Remain and would prefer closer ties with the EU.
The issue the Tories will have is that post election (Braverman aside) they’re likely to be the mirror of Labour in about 2017, with a membership far to the right of the remaining MPs.
That doesn’t mean the elected MPs are going to be soft cuddly types, but it does mean they’re (mostly) not Faragists either.
Until that circle is squared there’s a problem.
and Kimi Badenhoch, Danny Krueger, Laura Trott etc. the bench of right wing MPs is more than one deep.
You are also missing the supply side of the equation; a large reason the Tory membership is so far to the right is the influence of the outer reaches of the 'respectable' press (Spectator et al).