Are the Tories in Terminal Decline?

Time to return to a recurring theme of this blog: that the Conservative Party is an organisation in long-term decline. On its weight among the British electorate, the demographic profile of its support - particularly along the lines of age, and its long slide from a membership in the couple of million to somewhere between 130k-150k today, the tendency is pronounced and obvious. How does this argument stand up in light of the general election results? Have the Conservatives managed to revive their fortunes and seen off the decline?

Ordinarily, Theresa May's "team" would have, should have done very well indeed. 42% and 13.6m votes is in the range that delivered Margaret Thatcher her 1983 and 1987 landslides. May too could have looked forward to one if it wasn't for those pesky kids. And the small matter of genius incompetence. Nevertheless, despite losing seats and falling into chaos, the result appears to challenge the declinist thesis: the vote is the highest any party has polled since John Major's post-war record of 14m in 1992. Yes, May managed to win more ballots than even His Blairness in 1997, and she presided over a vote increase of 5.5% on 2015's tally, well over anything Dave pulled off in his confrontations with Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband. On her watch, the Tories made aggressive inroads into SNP-held seats, pensioning off Angus Robertson, Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, and Alex Salmond: Scottish nationalist scalps don't come much bigger than these. And also UKIP completely melted away with large numbers of its voters switching to the Conservatives.

May's achievement, if it can be called that, is a recomposition of the Tory vote, a rebuilding of a coalition that fractured under the hammer blows of New Labour in the 1990s, and had gradually bled away to third parties. Talking tough on immigration and sabre rattling on Brexit directly appealed to socially conservative Conservative voters put off by Dave's flashy liberalism, metro-elitism, and commitment to things like sexual and gay equality. Cornering the market as the unionist party in Scotland given Scottish Labour's disarray (at least, before the election), Ruth Davidson and friends were boosted by Nicola Sturgeon's independence ambush. Here, the usually canny SNP leader miscalculated people's appetite for another referendum. She wasn't to know a general election was hatching in Theresa May's head, but for the sake of short-termist pressure she alienated soft SNP supporters and antagonised enough unionists to electorally damage her party, whenever the election was going to drop. To demonstrate the pain, the last time Scotland returned more Conservative MPs than Thursday was 1983.

Kippers on the one side, Scottish unionists on the other. But May also played big for disaffected sections of Labour's vote, not all of which came via UKIP. As folks know, around a third of Labour supporters voted to leave the European Union last year. These were the sections of the party's support that tend to be older, retired, and clustered in "traditional" (i.e. labour intensive) working class occupations. They too tended to be more socially conservative and were, if you believe the amount of polling and research done over the last few years, sceptical of the London leftyism of Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn - particularly the latter in regard to issues around the military and national security. Here, May's manifesto was designed to win these people over with its promises of more job security, doing something about housing, intervening in the economy, keeping "our" nukes and, yes, stopping those immigrants from nicking jobs. There was undoubtedly some success in this regard. Here in Stoke, we retreated in the north constituency and lost the south pretty much on this basis (aided in no small part by the collapse of UKIP too). Over in Ashfield the election saw it move from what seemed to be a solid Labour seat to a tight marginal with 460 votes separating the two parties. Undoubtedly the Tories would have done even better had Nick Timothy not secreted a grenade in the party's manifesto.

This then give us May's coalition: the traditional Tory base of anti-Labour workers, the petit bourgeois, the business and professional salariat, and the rich with unionist voters, former kippers, and a sizable chunk of anti-Corbyn ex-Labour voters. On this occasion it wasn't enough to win because Labour, at short notice, was able to mobilise a sizeable coalition and a movement not seen in British politics since 1945. But of that another time. Still, the question has to be asked. After cobbling together a new coalition of voters and turning the Tories around in Scotland, have the Conservatives escaped their decline?

No is the answer. Sociologically speaking, the Tories have recuperated their declining base by bringing in new voters but they haven't escaped the track they're on. The problem is these new additions are strata who are in decline too, and come with more than a degree of volatility. Their 2017 "borrowed" voters are disproportionately older than the general voting population, so while they're still more likely to vote than the young they're not getting replaced like-for-like as they shuffle off this mortal coil. Yes, age is a dynamic thing and the commonsense view that people become more conservative as they get older is true enough (or, to be more specific, people become more concerned with security). The problem the Tories have is their policies have, for the last seven years, relentlessly attacked people in work, and younger people in particular. With their indifference regarding wages, security at work, job quality, house building, and their continued application of zombie austerity, they are bedding down a reflex hostility to their party that will last for longer, which is going to negatively impact their chances among these age groups, while their present support continues to die off. Second, thanks to the UK-wide pro-Corbyn surge Scottish Labour are in contention again as a unionist left alternative that some who went Tory this time could find attractive in the future. This poses an issue for the SNP as well, as a good chunk of the support for Scottish independence is left wing and consciously anti-Tory. As the possibility of IndyRef2 recedes into the distance, Labour in Scotland become the best bet again of keeping the Tories out of power, undermining the SNP pitch. The kipper vote is also highly excitable - having broken once from mainstream parties, they could disappear again if the Brexit negotiations go down a softer (sensible) path, and Nigel Farage makes good his threatened comeback. And lastly, the ex-Labour leave voters are clustered in occupations simultaneously vulnerable to social, cultural, and political consequences that don't bode well for any kind of Conservative political project. In sum, there is a strong case for regarding Thursday's result the high tide of the Conservative vote. It is now set to go out, never to come in for a long time indeed.

The Conservatives have accomplished a temporary reprieve. While they wriggle and agonise over the predicament May's hubris has landed them in, its support is stronger (but not necessarily as stable) vis a vis the Tories were under Dave. Yet events, my boy, events could very quickly ramp up the declinist tendency. The consequences of Brexit and the toxic partnership with the Democratic Unionists look all set to do this. Therefore, that begs the question: can they get out of this pickle long-term? Having posed this question before, the answer was pretty much along the same lines Theresa May attempted. The Canadian Tories won office in 2011 on the basis of one-nationism and pitching an inclusive national identity that reached out to aboriginal peoples and the recently migrated. And they were defeated by liberal hero Justin Trudeau in 2015 because they governed just like any other bunch of toxic Tories. Pitching themselves as one-nationists has, as we've seen, helped build up a wider coalition of voters that appealed mostly to declining constituencies. The problem is this cannot possibly work again. The second option is to try and scare voters silly. While the social density and interconnected character of the electorate at large is growing, this proceeds alongside a profound atomisation inculcated through work and institutions. This reinforces a message and outlook of individual responsibility, and individualises angst and insecurity. Over the past seven years the Tories have deepened the processes driving this by introducing more marketisation and further locking down collective rights, and whipped up convenient scapegoats as means of mass distraction. Therefore cynically posing as the bearers of security while being responsible for the reproduction of insecurity is possible. However, as this election has shown the scares don't work anymore, partly because the old media pparatus used to deliver it is much diminished and the networked worker draws on other resources to help make up their mind. Nostalgia and abuse are broken as a means of winning elections and improving a Conservative party's fortunes.

Labour, as I have argued has and still is undergoing a recomposition process of its own, except it represents the rising class of networked workers who are poised to become the overwhelming majority of people-in-general. And not just here, but everywhere. The Tories if they are to comeback have to do the impossible and contest Labour for the political leadership of the networked workers, or at least persuade enough of them to keep their chances going. Looking at the state of them now it seems a massive ask, especially as more and more consciously anti-Tory young people come of age, enter the electoral rolls and get involved in wider politics. Yet that is the only way to future victories, as a party that maintains the social order - as a strong and stable institution, if you like - but does not seek to dynamite it for narrow advantage, be it party political or as favours for one section of capital over another. If the Tories are to win again, their model is the boring, plodding but dependable and uncontroversial small c conservatism of an Angela Merkel married to the seductive a-place-for-everybody inclusivity of one nation Toryism. There are Tories who see their Conservatism in this way, but getting there would require the party undergo a full body transplant, of it becoming something else. That said, no one should underestimate the British Conservative Party's capacity to do whatever it take to grab power, even when it is seemingly boxed into an impossible political situation.