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A Land Fit for Tories to Live In: The Political Ecology of the British Conservative Party, 1944–94

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2008

John Turner
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Extract

Although the industrialised West has seen since the 1970s a very marked leaning to the right both in government and in popular politics, the experience of the British Conservative Party has been unique. The party can trace a continuous existence to the reconstruction of the King's government by William Pitt the Younger in 1784, and is probably the oldest political organisation in the world: far older, indeed, than most sovereign states. In two centuries of life it has transformed itself from the party of monarchy, aristocracy and the Established Church into a highly successful practitioner of mass politics. It has been in government, either as the sole party of government or as the dominant partner in coalition, for seventy years in the last hundred, and thirty-two years in the last fifty. This remarkable political achievement can be explained at many levels; the purpose of this article is to explore just one of them. By bringing together the explanatory insights of political scientists working on electoral sociology with the records of the party in government and opposition, it is possible to discern how the Conservatives used the opportunities of government to cultivate the society which tended, and increasingly tends, to give them victory at the ballot box. This cultivation of the political environment was not exactly social engineering – a project which contemporary Conservatives emphatically reject – but in tune with the biological metaphor of the title of this paper it could be called ‘social gardening’. The first part of the article examines very briefly how political scientists have come to understand the functioning of the British electoral process since the Second World War. The second part explores the process of adaptation which has enabled the Conservative Party to dominate British politics since the war.

Type
Articles
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , July 1995 , pp. 189 - 208
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

1 This view, also known as the ‘Michigan School’ because that university housed many of its luminaries, is represented in Lipset, S. M., Political Man (New York: Doubleday, 1960)Google Scholar, and was taken into British political science by Butler, David and Stokes, Donald, Political Change in Britain (London: Macmillan, 1968).Google Scholar

2 The locus classicus is Downs, Anthony, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957).Google Scholar

3 See the discussions cited and summarised in Heath, Jowell, Curtice, Witherspoon and Evans, Understanding Political Change (Oxford: Pergamon, 1991).

4 The most authoritative account of the party's policy-making processes is in Ramsden, John, The Making of Conservative Party Policy (London: Longman, 1980).Google Scholar

5 Cockett, Richard, Thinking the Unthinkable: Think Tanks and the Economic Counter-revolution (London: Harper Collins, 1994), 93–5.Google Scholar

6 D. Clarke, untitled, undated notes on policy (summer 1948). Bodleian Library, Oxford Conservative Research Department Papers, CRD 2/50/10.

7 Oliver Poole to Butler, R. A. 28 Feb. 1949, Trinity College, Cambridge, R. A. Butler Papers, RAB H33/184. I am obliged to the Librarian of Trinity College for permission to consult and cite the Butler Papers.

8 Poole to Butler, 28 Feb. 1949, RAB H33/184–5.

9 Macmillan to Butler, 19 Jan. 1949, RAB H33/159.

10 Memorandum by Otto Clarke, 2 Feb. 1954, Public Record Office, London, PRO T227/258. Quoted by Jones, Harriet, ‘The Conservative Party and the Welfare State 1942–1955’ (London University PhD thesis, 1992), 359.Google Scholar

11 The Robert Hall Diaries, 1954–1961, ed. Alec Cairncross (London: Unwin Hyman1, 1991), 56.Google Scholar

12 Butler, D. E., The British General Election of 1955 (London: Macmillan, 1955), 9.Google Scholar

13 Borrowed from Noel Skelton, The Spectator, 28 April 1924. See Ramsden, John, 'A Party for Owners or a Party for Earners, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Ser., Vol. 37 (1987), 49–63.Google Scholar

14 This is widely quoted, but see most conveniently Robert Rhodes James, Anthony Eden (London: Weidenfeld, 1986), 328. It is difficult to sympathise with Rhodes James's lament (p. 325) that Eden's role in policy-making ‘has tended to be underestimated’: in the Butler Papers and the Conservative Research Department Papers, which hold the bulk of the material relating to the party's policy-making in opposition, many front-benchers are prominent, but Eden is not one of them.

15 ‘Property Owning Democracy II’ (before 27 Aug. 1947); Butler to Eccles, 27 Aug. 1947; Eccles to Butler, 8 Sept. 1947, RAB H33/81–7.

16 Fraser to Butler, 1 Feb. 1953, RAB G25/44–7.

17 Eden to Butler, 8 April 1954, RAB G27/25.,

18 Research Study Group, 13 Oct. 1954, CRD 2/49/30.

19 Hansard, , Parliamentary Debates (thereafter H.C. Deb), 1957, 25 July, col. 627.Google Scholar

20 ‘The People's League for the Defence of Freedom and the Middle Class Alliance. Report of the Committee of Investigation’, Nov. 1956, RAB H38/153–85.

21 Cabinet Conclusions CC(57), 21 Jan. 1957, PRO, CAB 128/31/pt. 1.

22 ‘Memorandum by the Minister of Pensions’, C(57)20, 30 Jan. 1957, CAB 129; Macleod ‘Social Services Expenditure’, 31 Jan. 1957, PREM 11/1805.

23 Harold Macmillan, ‘Economies vs. Expenditure’, 5 Feb. 1957, PREM 11/1805.

24 Macmillan to Fraser, 17 Feb. 1957, PREM 11/1816.

25 Eccles to Macmillan, 19 July 1957, PREM 11/2306.

26 ‘Memorandum by the Prime Minister’ (described as ‘some thoughts which occurred to me during my short holiday’), C(57)194, 1 Sept. 1957, PREM 11/1824.

27 Conservative Research Department, ‘An Analysis of Political Support in mid-1958’, 2 Sept. 1958, RAB H39/43.

28 Patrick Dunleavy, ‘The Urban Basis of Political Alignment: Social Class, Domestic Property Ownership, and State Intervention in the Consumption Process’, British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 9 (1979), 409–43.

29 Reginald Bevins (Parliamentary Secretary, Ministry of Housing), H.C. Deb 1958–59, 15 December 1958, col. 892.

30 Michael Fraser, Aug. 1961, RAB H46/53.

31 ‘Transcript of the Prime Minister's Remarks to the Cabinet on May 28th 1962’, PREM 11/3930.

32 Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Education, ‘Thoughts on Meals and Means’. Cabinet Papers C(61)219, PREM 11/4484.

33 See the articles in Heath, Anthony, Jowell, Richard and Curtice, John, eds, Labour's Last Chance?: The 1992 Election and Beyond (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1994).Google Scholar

34 Geoff Garrett, ‘Popular Capitalism: The Electoral Legacy of Thatcherism’, in Ibid., 120.

35 Ron Johnston, Charles Pattie and Ed Fieldhouse, ‘The Geography of Voting and Representation: Regions and the Declining Importance of the Cube Law’, in Ibid., 255–74.

36 Guardian, 18 Nov. 1994.