How did the Conservatives change?
| Author | Saunders, Robert |
The Conservatives Since 1945: The Drivers of Party Change
Tim Bale
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2012
How do parties change? It is almost a truism that parties stand or fall on their capacity for reinvention, and politicians now routinely campaign on platforms of 'hope' and 'change'. For much of the twentieth century, the supreme practitioner of political adaptation was the British Conservative Party. Ted Heath memorably promised to 'change the course and the history of this nation', while Margaret Thatcher vowed to 'change the heart and soul' of the people. Running for the leadership in 2007, David Cameron urged his supporters to 'change to win'. To be electable, he warned, the party must 'change its language, change its approach, start with a blank sheet of paper'.
Yet the nature, scope and drivers of party change remain under-theorised, an insight that forms the basis of Tim Bale's new book. As in his previous study, The Conservative Party From Thatcher to Cameron, Bale operates in the terrain between history and politics, testing models drawn from political science against thickly descriptive historical examples. This refreshingly interdisciplinary approach has established him as one of the leading scholars of modern Conservatism, whose work can be read with profit by general readers and scholars from both disciplines.
Bookended by the landslide defeats of 1945 and 1997, each chapter covers a single period of government or opposition (1945-51; 1951-64; 1964-70; 1970-74; 1974-79; 1979-97). For each case-study, Bale assesses the extent of change in three areas: the public face of the party; its internal organisation; and the policies it sought to enact. These are tested against three main 'drivers' of change: election defeat; the role of the leader; and the existence of a 'dominant faction'; supplemented by such 'additional drivers' as think tanks, interest groups or the pressure of events.
The first of his indicators proved most resistant to change. Candidates, MPs and ministers remained largely white, male and middle class, drawn disproportionately from Oxford, Cambridge and the public schools. Constituency parties proved deaf to the charms of working class and ethnic minority candidates, in the belief that 'working-class candidates' were 'inadequate in ... campaigns and often of doubtful use in parliament'. Safe seats, in particular, 'expect to be represented by people of distinction' (pp. 89-90). Leaders rarely involved themselves in such...
To continue reading
Request your trialCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
