The modern British Conservative Party is the product of several different historical strands of ideology and party organization. In an important sense the Conservatives have never had an ideology in the sense of a programmatic theory of governance—indeed they have often campaigned on a stand of sheer pragmatism. It is a descendant of the land-owning Tory party which was in competition with the party of the rising middle class, the Whigs (later the Liberal Party). The Tory party had received support from the Liberal Unionists, a group which had split from the Liberal Party as it opposed home rule for Ireland, since 1886, and the two formally merged in 1912 becoming the Conservative and Unionist Party, which remains the official title. Despite its aristocratic and rich industrialist background, the Conservative Party was in fact the first to organize on a mass basis to attract those newly-enfranchised by the parliamentary reform acts of the last third of the 19th century, and has always managed to attract a sizeable share of the working-class vote.
It has combined a patriotic outlook and support for the status quo with an acceptance of an extended welfare state. It has always placed a strong value on the ownership of property, while accepting since 1945 the existence of a mixed economy. After 1945 the party became, in turns, imperialist under Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden, ‘high’ Tory with considerable leanings towards practical social-welfare provision under Harold Macmillan and Sir Alec Douglas-Home, and technocratically Keynesian and Europeanist under Edward Heath. However, two distinct factions emerged in the party from the early 1970s. One of them, which dominated the Conservative Party under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, from 1975–90, advocated, and to a large extent carried out, a reversal of many of the initiatives undertaken by governments since 1945 and the introduction of a more vigorous (monetarist) form of market economy (see Thatcherism).
To that extent it had much in common with classical 19th-century Liberalism. The other faction invokeds the Disraelian tradition of one nation and sought to preserve the Conservative Party’s tradition of social concern and pragmatic solutions to political issues. Briefly at the beginning of the 1990s, under John Major, it seemed that this other, and earlier, tradition of conservatism (see managerial capitalism) might become dominant once more. However, the electoral defeats of 1997 and 2001 were each followed by the election of a leader who adhered much more closely to the Thatcherite legacy. Sympathizers of the two schools of thought were sometimes labelled ‘dry’ and ‘wet’.
By any standards the party has been enormously successful electorally. Between the end of the Second World War and 1997 it was out of office for only 17 years and won four consecutive general elections between 1979 and 1992. While this record was a result as much of the distorting effect of Britain’s simple plurality voting system and the inability of the left to cohere, it also suggests there is something in the pragmatism of the Conservatives that appeals to the British electorate. Whether this electoral dominance can ever be reborn after the crushing defeats by New Labour in 1997 and 2001 must be in doubt. The Conservatives found themselves in opposition to an equally pragmatic party, and one, furthermore, which had clearly captured the middle ground of politics—in part because of right-wing dominance of the Conservatives since John Major’s resignation as leader. The election in 2001 as Conservative leader of a little known right-wing anti-Europeanist, Iain Duncan Smith, rather than the highly experienced and nationally popular moderate candidate, Kenneth Clarke, did not suggest that the party would be recapturing the centre ground of British politics in the near future.
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