Tory Nation: The Dark Legacy of the World's Most Successful Political Party

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Harris, John (8 August 2009). "Phillip Blond: The man who wrote Cameron's mood music". The Guardian. London . Retrieved 10 August 2012. Those charming electric maps that illuminated the route from Sèvres-Lecourbe to the rue Saint-Maur have gone the way of the petit bleu and the vespasienne, and in any case no such figure of speech would do for the story of Thatcher’s party since her departure, unless it were some kinetic artifact flashing on and off at random. Like Lord Salisbury, Stanley Baldwin, and Winston Churchill before her, Thatcher led the Conservative Party for roughly fifteen years. In the thirty-two years since her fall, there have been nine Conservative leaders, including five prime ministers in the past seven years. If 1936 was the year of three kings (George V, Edward VIII, and George VI), 2022 will be remembered as the year of two monarchs and three prime ministers, not to mention four chancellors of the exchequer, five education secretaries, and more than thirty resignations from the government. Axford, Barrie; Browning, Gary; Huggins, Richard (2002). Politics: An Introduction. Routledge. ISBN 978-0415251815. A senior member of the One Nation Group says unless there is a “smoking lover” or a “smoking love child”, Johnson will become the next UK prime minister. “Boris is cometh the hour, cometh the man. He is the SAS stun grenade of British politics. He could distract people while the painful surgery is carried out.” Brogan, Benedict (29 April 2010). "Boris Johnson interview: My advice to David Cameron? I've made savings, so can you". The Daily Telegraph. London. Archived from the original on 22 December 2016 . Retrieved 26 May 2019.

A former minister says it would be “almost impossible” for them to act in a way that “facilitated” a Jeremy Corbyn-led government. “I would be very unlikely to vote against my own government in a no-confidence motion,” they say. “There are some highly principled people who would vote against the Government on a no-confidence motion, but it would be a massive thing for somebody to do and it would be the end of their political career in this party. There are some people who would be prepared to pay that price, and there are others for whom that is not a sacrifice they could make.”One predictable political consequence of the Tories’ antics is that Labour, under the decidedly uncharismatic leadership of Sir Keir Starmer, has been leading in the polls by 20 to 30 percent or more. As Johnson’s government disintegrated last July amid a flood of ministerial resignations, Starmer made by his standards quite a good joke about “the sinking ships fleeing the rat,” but now comes a different group of deserters: the swelling numbers of Tory MPs who have said they will leave Parliament at the next election. Some are veterans like Sajid Javid, who will doubtless return to banking; others only arrived in Parliament at the last election but guess they would lose their seats if they stood again. Daponte-Smith, Noah (2 June 2015). "Is David Cameron Really A One-Nation Conservative?". Forbes . Retrieved 29 February 2016. According to a calculation by Oxford University’s Prof Ben Ansell, the South West Surrey seat would now fall into Lib Dem hands on national polling averages. To make matters more perilous for Hunt, the constituency is being redrawn, which could make it more marginal. But for some involved with the group, the move by the party’s centrists is “quite little” and “quite late”. “In my view, we sort of stopped fighting. We became complacent in the years when Cameron was in No 10 and it seemed just like we’ve won now so we don’t need to keep having this fight. Guess what, you do,” says one.

I just think that kind of puts us in a slightly awkward position, because Damian is clearly signalling one way and Amber another,” says one member. One-nation conservatism has its origins in the repercussions of the Industrial Revolution, which had caused widespread inequality, poverty and social discontent in Britain. [16] Tory politicians such as Richard Oastler, Michael Thomas Sadler and Lord Shaftesbury combined their elitist responsibility and a strong humanitarian element with their involvement in the Factory Acts. [2] They were critical of individualism and classical economics, [2] they also disliked the 1834 New Poor Law and believed in the role of the state in guaranteeing decent housing, working conditions, wages and treatment of the poor. [2]Take the key issue of immigration for example. Immigration to Britain is not a right that we owe to the world and the dispossessed, as cosmopolitan internationalists such as Diane Abbott seem to think. Nor is it just an economic transaction, a correction of a deficit in the labour market, as dry-as-dust Liberal-Conservatives view it. Instead it is an application to join the nation. As such, it has a heavy price and a supreme value, which is to become one of us — though the best immigrants, like Disraeli, contrive by being bicultural to remain themselves also. By the end of the 19th century, the Conservatives had moved away from their one-nation ideology and were increasingly supportive of unrestricted capitalism and free enterprise. [23] During the interwar period between 1919 and 1939, public fear of Bolshevism restored the Conservative Party to one-nationism. It defined itself as the party of national unity and began to support moderate reform. As the effects of the Great Depression were felt in Britain, the party was drawn to even greater levels of state intervention. [24] Conservative prime ministers Neville Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin pursued an interventionist, one-nation approach which won support because of its wide electoral appeal. [20] Throughout the post-war consensus of the 1950s and 1960s, the Conservative Party continued to be dominated by one-nation conservatives whose ideas were inspired by Disraeli. [25] The philosophy was updated and developed by the new conservatism movement led by Rab Butler. [24] New conservatism attempted to distinguish itself from the socialism of Anthony Crosland by concentrating welfare on those in need and encouraging people to help themselves, rather than foster dependency on the state. [26] The ERG, certainly for a period of time, felt like a party within a party. They appeared to have from the outside a whipping structure and were highly organised and everything else. We would say that we are not a party within a party, but we absolutely want there to be a space for like-minded Conservatives to meet and to discuss and to potentially discuss approaches to government business, issues of the day,” says Morgan. Liberal Democrat candidate Paul Follows, second right, talks with residents in Godalming. Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer Instead, brazen Boris, now prime minister as well as leader, launches his general election campaign by proclaiming, more or less in the same breath, that he leads both a Brexit government and a One Nation Tory one.

By way of emphasising this continuity, Earle – who has had his work published in such outlets as the New York Times and New Statesman, and is studying for a PhD at Columbia University in New York – mixes up Tory history, in chapters that are about such broad themes as the British ruling class, our rightwing press, and how Tories have always portrayed the righteous, nostalgic country they claim to protect from radicals and leftists. Conservatism, he says, is always about “maintaining power, resisting the redistribution of wealth, and safeguarding the legitimacy of the nation’s elites”. Whenever it seems to go somewhere new, moreover, it tells itself stories that smooth over any sense of rupture, some of which have been truly mind-boggling. Even without the demographic changes and the cost of living issues, the government would be struggling. Lib Dem canvassers also report finding more Labour-voting young couples in Godalming who have moved out of London. They can then be targeted as potential tactical voters.Disraeli was unambiguous about both. “The Tory party, unless it is a national party, is nothing,” he stated repeatedly. And he was an unashamed populist too: “The Tory party is only in its proper position when it represents popular principles,” he declared in 1863. “Then it is truly irresistible.”

Bochel, Hugh (2010). "One Nation Conservatism and social policy, 1951–64" (PDF). Journal of Poverty and Social Justice. 18 (2): 123–134. doi: 10.1332/175982710X513795. He doubts that Johnson would call a general election in such an eventuality, arguing it could precipitate a Labour government. “That is a very difficult choice, particularly if your language has been so strong about we will definitely – do or die – have left the European Union on 31 st of October,” he says. There is a tussle going to define Boris. We are reconciled to Brexit because of the democratic mandate from the election. But there is still a fight to be had about what sort of party we are – over agriculture and trade, over the economy and coronavirus support. Is this an attempt to bring out the liberal, one nation Boris? Yes, it is.”He gloomily describes British failure to engage with continental Europe in the decades after 1945; then the change of heart in the 1960s with Macmillan’s and Harold Wilson’s unsuccessful attempts to join what was then the European Economic Community, both vetoed by French president Charles de Gaulle; then Britain’s successful entry in 1973, followed by increasingly sour relations under Thatcher and the rise of Europhobic parties of the right, culminating in 2016 in the Brexit referendum. Tugendhat is honest enough to concede that British advocates of “joining Europe” were evasive about the loss of sovereignty involved, which created “a not-unjustified suspicion in the minds of the electorate that, on European matters, successive governments could not be trusted to speak frankly about their intentions.” Samuel Earle explores the roots of the current crisis and the real reasons for the Conservatives’ historic success, from their ruling class origins in the eighteenth century and their disproportionate influence on the British press to their stranglehold over national identity. He sheds light on the Conservatives’ historic appeal among the working classes and why the Labour Party so often disappoints. Amid the “ war on woke” and the rank nastiness of Priti Patel’s Home Office, David Cameron and George Osborne’s brief attempt to “modernise” their party and acquaint it with liberal social attitudes seems like ancient history. Meanwhile, many of the supposed big new ideas brought to post-Brexit Conservatism seem to have already withered away, as evidenced by the great anticlimax of “levelling up”: a bit of spending here and there, but nowhere near the great economic reformation voters were promised. Nonetheless, Tory Nation capably explains two innate Conservative traits that are beyond doubt: an unquenchable lust for power, and a deep belief in stooping to conquer. When the party hits trouble, they become even more pronounced - which explains why, even after endless disgrace and its recent seismic loss of councillors in many of its old Middle English redoubts, the possibility of this amazingly successful political institution winning an unprecedented fifth term in power has not quite been snuffed out. The talk among some Tories in parliament has become apocalyptic. “I’m more worried about the blue wall than anything,” one former cabinet minister said in the Observer recently. “I really think there’s a chance that what happened to Labour in Scotland in 2015 could happen to us in the blue wall at the next election. What are we offering these voters now?”