In 1992 the pollsters got their election predictions badly wrong. Most polls put Labour and Conservatives neck and neck, or Labour with a small lead. Of course, the Conservatives took an outright majority on 336 seats on 42% of the national vote, with the highest number of actual votes cast for any party in British political history.
In the post-mortem, pollsters theorised that many of those that had stated that they didn’t know who they were going to vote for had in fact been ‘shy Tories’. These voted Conservative in 1987 and did so again in 1992, but were unwilling to admit to it when asked. Why? Because the Conservatives were perceived as harsh and uncaring, indifferent and out of touch. These voters saw the Conservatives as competent (or at least they did until 16 September of that year), and were happy enough to lend them their support in the privacy of the election booth, but they did not want to associate themselves with them in public. If the Conservatives emerge from the election with a strong lead tomorrow, we’ll need to look in part to shy Tories to explain the difference between the polls and the results.
The 'shy Tories' are a problem not just for polling agencies, but also for the Conservative Party. Theresa May tried to address it way back in 2002, urging the Conservative conference to recognise that they were still seen as the 'nasty party'. It’s this self-same perception which has led nearly all political parties to define themselves in large part as ‘not the Tories’, and too many voters begin their political reasoning by subtracting the Conservatives from the equation and starting from there. Of course, if you begin with the premise that Conservative members, leaders, and supporters are, ipso facto, moneyed, misogynistic and misanthropic, then that’s all perfectly reasonable. If, like me, your instincts are from the political left but you have known and worked with enough Conservatives to realise that such caricatures are wide of the mark, then you will mourn the complete absence of thoughtful engagement with Conservative claims about government, society and human nature.
This is not just about the philosophical plumbing. Unless something surprising happens, this ‘natural party of government’ will have failed to muster an outright majority from any of the last five elections. The Conservative membership base is shrinking year on year, the party is absent from much of Northern England and it holds hardly any seats in major urban centres (two out of 27 in Greater Manchester). The nation is fracturing across a series of cleavages: the English and the Celts, the state versus business and enterprise, the rich and poor, the south and north, the rural and urban, the private and public sectors, the individualist and the communitarian, the old and the young. It is a matter of regret that the Conservative Party has simply failed to positively and meaningfully address the second half of all these pairs.
There would be two different ways for Conservatives to think about these problems, and two different kinds of solutions. Is the strange death of Conservative Britain a reputational and presentational problem, amenable to resolution through better political marketing, or is it deeply to do with the underlying philosophical positions and dispositions – and hence policies? Hitherto, I think that a large part of the Conservative Party has assumed it is mainly the former, which has made the all repositioning seem cynical and try-hard (e.g., the (oxy)moronic politics of ‘progressive conservativism’, built on the strange premise that the only way for conservativisim to become attractive is to no longer be conservative). Too often it seems that the party has ironically remained more or less where it was with a few random ‘progressive’ policies (cf. same-sex marriage), or even worse progressive gestures (hug a hoodie/husky) bolted on. Less progressive conservativism, more Thatcherism-plus.
And therein, for me, lies the problem. Thatcher was popular enough to win three elections, but divisive enough to have come to represent a turn towards values that we don't espouse (in reality, nor did she). Conservativism is not the same as 'Thatcherism', nor 'neo-liberalism'; these ideas colonised the Conservative Party – they aren’t native to it. As Joshua Horden points out here, figures like Friedrich Hayek were often quite antagonistic towards conservativism, seeing it as being naturally unable to "offer an alternative to the direction in which [a society is] moving". Yet it is clearly the perception of the public at large, and perhaps swathes of the Conservative Party itself, that conservativism and neo-liberal economic thought are somehow the same thing.
‘Modernisation’ – the name often attached to attempts at Conservative Party repositioning – is precisely the wrong description of the present political imperative. Of course, finding the right presentation and the right people is an important part of politics. But what is now needed is a recovery of older conservative values which appeal across social divides and a disavowal of the distortions of the last forty years. Self-reliance and resiliance – yes; individualism and social Darwinism – no. Enterprise, industry and wealth creation – yes; capture by big business interests, no. Limited and purposeful government – yes; public services gleefully cut back to a night-watchman role – no.
It’s true, Cameron’s genuinely reformist instincts have been much constrained by the difficult economic context. Attempts to recover a civic conservativism in the form of the Big Society suffered the death of a thousand cuts, and welfare reforms rooted deeply in a conservative (though I would say, paternalistic) social conscience have been tainted by serious failings in administration rather than conception. Yet there is a sense that the influence of the better angels of the Conservative nature have waned and the voices advocating most strongly for a renewal of this kind – The Good Right, ResPublica, and Bright Blue (mentions aren't endorsements) are politely listened to but largely ignored.
If, by the skin of Lynton Crosby's teeth, this campaign gets David Cameron back into Downing Street, he would do well not to treat it as approval. Rather, it should prompt a fundamental reconsideration of just what the Conservative Party is for.
Paul Bickley
Image by Seamus McCauley from flickr.com under the Creative Commons Licence
