In June 2013 the Conservative Parliamentary party was divided over two competing Europe Bills. Both Bills essentially fought for exactly the same thing, and due to the lack of Conservative majority neither was going to become law. That really is two bald men fighting over a comb.
This example seem to crystallise the current problems of the Conservative party: a lack of-discipline, ideological division, dwindling membership and uncertain popular support. Sitting above all of these issues is failure on the one criteria that matters – winning. The Conservative party has not won an election in over 20 years.
This is sometimes taken as a mark of terminal decline. In reality though this is the third such crisis in the, approximately, 230 year history of the Conservative party. It is worth looking at each of these crises in terms of numbers:
Mid nineteenth century crisis (1841—1874)
- Gap between outright election victories: 22 years (1852-1874)
- Gap between election of full-term majority Conservative governments: 33 years (1841-1874)
- Gap between initial election defeat and full recovery: 28 years (1846-1874)
- Time spent entirely out of office in that period: 25 years
Early twentieth century crisis (1900-1924)
- Gap between outright election victories: 22 years (1900-1922)
- Gap between election of full-term Conservative governments: 24 years (1900-1924)
- Total time out of office between initial defeat and full recovery: 18 years
- Time spent entirely out of office in that period: 10 years
Late twentieth/early twenty-first century crisis (1992- ?)
- Gap between outright election victories to date (1992-?): at least 23 years
- Gap between election of full-term Conservative governments (1992-?): at least 23 years
- Time between initial defeat and full recovery: at least 18 years (1997-?)
- Total time out of office during that period: At least 13 years
All these figures are selective of course, but they suggest that the current Conservative crisis is more severe than the one at the beginning of the twentieth century but not yet as severe as the mid-nineteenth century crisis. During this latter period there was sustained Liberal electoral hegemony. Brief Conservative minority governments were largely incidental outcomes of Parliamentary process and manoeuvre. The current crisis may be ending, or it may be due to worsen, and that will be considered in a later blog.
If we were to delve into each period we can find similar problems: in the mid-nineteenth century the Conservatives were a laughing stock in Scotland for example, and they often lacked support and organisation in cities. These are symptoms though. The really interesting part is the cause of each crisis.
Each great Conservative crisis began with division – and each time essentially over the issue of free trade. In 1846 the Conservative party fell out over the issue of the Corn Laws – duties on imported food; between 1900 and 1906 the party fell out over Joseph Chamberlain’s Imperial Preferences scheme, a plan to turn the Empire into a trading bloc. In the 1990s there was the European Union…
Each time division led to electoral defeat, and not in a small way, in 1846, 1906 and 1997 the Conservative party suffered truly crushing defeat. Together with the 1945 election these are the greatest defeats in Conservative history.
In each case free trade masked deeper issues. The Corn Laws were not just about the price of bread. Marxist historians have read the dispute in class terms – the landed interest against new manufacturing money. But in many ways the issue was more about the shape of British society – supporting the landed estates was about supporting a social institution as much as an economic interest.
Similarly in the 1900s Imperial Preference was about more than protecting manufacturing jobs at the price of dearer bread – it was about binding the British Empire together as a bloc and making it a more cohesive and enduring entity. In our own day Europe has long ceased to be purely about the economic trade-offs, but about national sovereignty.
Each debate was the fulcrum of difficult questions about the future of Britain. The answer to these questions was not always clear, hence the agony caused in the Conservative party.
In part 2 I shall ask who “won” each of these debates and what that tells us about the current situation.
