The Party’s Over
Phil Burton-Cartledge, Verso, £11.99
 

THIS is an updated version of a rarity on the left, a book that takes the Tory Party seriously as a political actor.

Socialists endlessly pore over the entrails of the Labour Party, yet the Conservatives are routinely dismissed in the most sweeping terms as simply the pliable governing instrument of the class enemy.

The Tories deserve more scrutiny of the sort this book attempts. After all, it is not only the concentrated expression of the British bourgeoisie, it also from time to time gets more working-class votes at elections than the Labour Party.

And, given that the ruling class never actually convenes in congress to determine its strategy, the Tory Party is by-and-large charged with expressing that tricky function, while at the same time securing a sufficient mass base for the implementation of whatever the plan is.

The first mystery about the Tory Party is why it exists at all.  

Given the first-past-the-post system, the rise of the Labour Party early in the 20th century meant that the existence of two major parties championing bourgeois social relations was a luxury too far for the establishment. But why the Tories, the expression of the declining landed interest for much of the 19th century, survived rather than a Liberal Party tied to the ascendant industrial interest is an interesting tale in itself.

That goes beyond the time frame of this book, which keeps its focus on the last 50 years or so. Its underlying premise is a contestable one, which is that the Tory Party is in decline.

There is something to be said for declinist theory nevertheless. In the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s the Tory Party, like Labour, polled more than 40 per cent of the vote in general elections every time out, including when coming second.

Since 1970, the Tories have only achieved that six times out of 13. But Labour has managed the same just thrice. And the Conservatives have been in government for 35 of those years. Likewise, Tory Party membership has plummeted, but so has Labour’s, even if slightly less so.

I remember hearing John Ross, then of the International Marxist Group, expounding this theory of inexorable decline in the early 1980s. The Conservatives won the next three elections, including in 1992 securing the highest total vote ever.  

They hit a nadir in 1997, but since then their share of the vote has expanded for six elections in a row. As far as I know that is a record.  
So there are declines one can live with. Burton-Cartledge rightly draws attention to the extreme Tory weakness among voters under 40 at present, allied to evidence that voters are no longer getting more conservative as they age.

Perhaps that way lies doom, but I doubt it, even though some sort of denouement at the next election looks unavoidable. Capitalism needs the Conservative Party – organically, and not as an elite conspiracy club – and the maintenance of a bourgeois society will likely produce some form of political regeneration.

Indeed, the Tories have regenerated more often than Dr Who. This book trundles through the last few actual and attempted reincarnations in some detail, from Thatcher’s class struggle neo-liberalism to Cameron’s austerity-plus-social-liberalism and Johnson’s neo-populism.

The narrative rightly highlights the increasing recourse to authoritarianism and centralism on the part of Tory governments, and its unyielding commitment to privilege and hierarchy, as well as its success in doing down the poorer at the expense of the rich.

However, the weight of the narrative also obscures what might actually be going on. Every by-election, every local authority poll, every cabinet reshuffle is detailed, whether or not they proved to be of the slightest significance.

As a cuttings-based record of politics over the last half century, this is valuable.  As an analysis of what has changed and why in the Tory Party, less so.

How has the social composition of the Tory Party in Parliament shifted? What of the links between Toryism and the City, briefly ruptured by the Brexit referendum? Has the role of the Tory press and its influence on the party altered? 

Above all, how has Conservatism retained mass support when the middle class, the traditional Tory electoral base, has undergone transformations scarcely less wrenching, in terms of security and expectations, than the better-recorded and better-understood changes in the working class?

Unfortunately, these issues are not really teased out, although that is where the story lies. For example, the rather interesting “red Toryism” of Theresa May’s adviser Nick Timothy, drawing on a Conservative tradition going back to Joseph Chamberlain, is mentioned but not explored. 

Resistance to it by the Thatcherites, plus May’s own political weakness, closed off what could have been a promising avenue for Tory renewal.

So we are left to guess as to what the next Tory regeneration may look like. It surely cannot rest on being “anti-woke” alone.

The 2008 crisis set in motion an as-yet unabated backlash against the economics and politics of globalisation and a concomitant revival of support for the nation-state, which the right globally has articulated more successfully than the left. The Tories are enthusiasts for the nation-state, but very reluctant to deploy its powers for social amelioration, as the Johnson years established.

So they will be left straddling the two main ideological blocs in capitalist politics today – the centrist-liberal and the national-populist, while Labour doubles down on the former alone.  I wouldn’t count them out.