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. 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. In one respect Johnson decidedly set the tone for a contemporary Tory Party that has been plagued by sexual and financial scandal. Sexual impropriety among politicians is nothing new or necessarily important. The pious William Gladstone supposedly said that he had known eleven prime ministers, seven of whom he knew to have been adulterers, by which he didn’t mean that only the other four were fit for office. And at the time of the Profumo affair in 1963, Evelyn Waugh wrote to a friend deriding the factitious indignation: “To my knowledge in my life time three Prime Ministers have been adulterers and almost every cabinet has had an addict of almost every sexual vice.”

Arnold, Dana (2004). Cultural Identities and the Aesthetics of Britishness. Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-0719067693. 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. Brogan, Benedict (29 April 2010), "Boris Johnson interview", The Daily Telegraph, My advice to David Cameron: I have made savings, so can you . Disraeli adopted one-nation conservatism for both ethical and electoral reasons. Before he became leader of the Conservative Party, the Reform Act 1867 had enfranchised the male working-class. As a result, Disraeli argued that the party needed to pursue social reforms if it were to have electoral success. He felt that one-nationism would both improve the conditions of the poor and portray the Liberal Party as selfish individualists. [19] Much of this is where Boris has been, evidenced in the second half of his mayoralty in London. We want to present practical solutions to problems presenting us in the post-Covid world.”Given that degree-level education now seems to tilt people away from the Tories, the fact that 50% of young people in England now go to university is a big driver of that shift. It is also worth noting deep changes in the culture and politics of many places that once gave the Tories their most loyal support: as highlighted by the party’s declining fortunes in everywhere from suburban Greater Manchester to the south-east commuter belt, an increasingly large chunk of the English middle class is now socially liberal, eco-minded and repulsed by the Tories’ increasingly reactionary instincts. All the Tory MPs I spoke to agree that the new leader should be given enough time to try and cobble together a new Brexit agreement. But four MPs refuseto rule out voting against Johnson in a vote of no confidence if, as PM, he planned to take the UK out of the EU with no deal. “Never say never,” says one former minister. Sandbach says: “I’m not going to speculate. My decisions will have to be made at the time.” Which is to say that between them globalism — which is only a bigger re-run of the crisis of the 1840s — Brexit and Corbyn’s leftish internationalism have delivered the Tories (with almost no effort on their part, it should be said) the One Nation electoral coalition that Disraeli devoted his whole life to constructing.

Despite their sense of political decay, a mixture of factors – age, demographics, Brexit, our creaking electoral system and the failures of the Labour party – has kept the Tories in power. But many of these things will not last. The relevant numbers are stark: almost half of Tory voters are now over 65, and 83% are over 45. For younger people, the economic model created by Thatcher and her heirs has entailed the impossibility of home ownership, and there is fading interest in what the Tories have to offer, surely accelerated by Brexity nostalgia and nastiness: in 1983, the Conservatives won the support of 42% of those aged 18 to 24, but by 2019, that figure had halved. One-nation conservatism, also known as one-nationism or Tory democracy, is a paternalistic form of British political conservatism. It advocates the preservation of established institutions and traditional principles within a political democracy, in combination with social and economic programmes designed to benefit the ordinary person. [1] According to this political philosophy, society should be allowed to develop in an organic way, rather than being engineered. It argues that members of society have obligations towards each other and particularly emphasises paternalism, meaning that those who are privileged and wealthy should pass on their benefits. [2] It argues that this elite should work to reconcile the interests of all social classes, including labour and management, rather than identifying the good of society solely with the interests of the business class. [3]Kelly, Richard (February 2008), "Conservatism under Cameron: The new 'third way' ", Politics Review The crisis of industrialisation opened a gaping gulf between the “Two Nations” of the rich and the poor, which Disraeli identified in his novelSybil, or the Two Nations (1845). It created an unstoppable campaign for Free Trade. And it led to the rise of a new, educated, urban elite that was liberal in its political sympathies, international in outlook and indifferent if not hostile to history and the traditional way of doing things. Until the mid-1970s, the Conservative Party was mostly controlled by one-nation conservatives. [27] The rise of the New Right in conservative politics led to a critique of one-nation conservatism. The New Right thinkers contended that Keynesianism and the welfare state had damaged the economy and society. The Winter of Discontent of 1978–1979 in which trades unions took industrial action with a wide impact on daily life was portrayed by the New Right as illustrative of the over-extension of the state. Figures such as Margaret Thatcher believed that to reverse the national decline it was necessary to revive old values of individualism and challenge the dependency culture which they felt had been created by the welfare state. [28] One-nation conservatives such as Edward Heath continued to criticise Thatcher's premiership during the early 1980s recession, but they lost influence after the party won the 1983 general election. [29] Invitation to Join the Government of Great Britain" (PDF). The Conservative Party. 2010 . Retrieved 20 July 2012. McEnhill, Libby. "David Cameron and welfare: a change of rhetoric should not be mistaken for a change of ideology" (PDF). LSE Blogs . Retrieved 20 March 2015.

Bridgen, P. (2000) "The One Nation Idea and State Welfare: The Conservatives and Pensions in the 1950s‟, Contemporary British History 14#3: 83–104. An issue the caucus is less publicly forthright about, but is equally pertinent as the Conservatives continue to flail behind Labour in the polls, is what sort of direction the party takes if it loses the next general election. Who will replace Sunak as leader with the party in opposition is an urgent question for One Nationers whosee it as their job to resist any efforts to pull the party further to the right in the event of defeat. One Nation circles regard Cameron's 2013 legalisation of same-sex marriage in the face of fierce resistance from much ofthe partyas one the Conservatives' greatest achievements, and believe they must continue to promote socially progressive values if they are to appeal to younger voters. Currently the party is losing support among every age group other than the over-65s.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.