Thoughts on the Tory Crisis

It's crunch time for Theresa May's government - and for the Conservative Party. As we await the full details of what the "technical agreement" on the Brexit deal looks like, let's pause for a moment. Not to reflect on the process - we've done that recently - but on the Tory party itself. As it faces a new round of intensive crisis, and one that could prove terminal with any luck, this is on top of slow burning, chronic difficulties. Take Survation's recent mega poll, for example. The headline figure of a single point lead for Labour is hardly earth-shattering. It's well within the toing and froing of all the polls out there. A slight lead here for the reds, an edging forward there for the blues. Yet under the surface, things are bad for our Conservative friends. Very bad indeed. Big Labour leads for the under 55s - the majority of working people - are common, but according to Survation it has moved upwards, to 75. For those older Labour is a fringe party, but for the under 75s the party has a nine-point lead.

As it happens, the crisis of the Conservative Party was my topic for the regular research seminars we do at work. There's no need to go over the thesis in depth because, well, there's an archive. What I concentrated on was the decrepitude of party organisation, the ageing character of their voter coalition, and the generational crisis the Tories barely knows exists. The break down of the conservatising effects of age on younger cohorts of voters has two aspects. The first is the values question. As innumerable polls show, socially liberal attitudes are more prevalent the further down the age profiles you go. This is because of the immaterial, relationship-based work younger cohorts are socialised into and do, and proliferation of one's networks thanks to social media - to put it crudely (more here). This straight away puts them at cross purposes to the Tory party, who thinks nothing of using divide and rule, racism, xenophobia, and all the rancid rest. The second drag on replacing the Conservative vote is economics. The Tories presided over policies that have shafted workers, be they the relatively privileged or the not at all. Not only have they been seen to do this, to relish it, their policies are preventing the acquisition of property, chiefly houses, therefore destroying what would be their future base. Compounding the problem is that fixing it, like building more homes, capping rents, making work more secure, raising wages, etc., goes against key interests of their present coalition. Rejuvenating themselves to appeal to the rising generation means undergoing a thoroughgoing detoxification, which the party may not survive, or staying as they are, also meaning they might not survive.

The presentation wasn't exhaustive, but its aim is to set out some of the basic arguments of a book on the Conservative Party I want to start writing in the new year. As such the questions received afterwards were about the gaps that weren't touched on on the spot. The first of these related to the variables impinging on Tory crisis. For example, while the party organisation has declined what has the pattern of donations been like, and where they have been declared (i.e. not going through one of the infamous dining clubs), which sections of capital are coughing up? Also, to what extent is Conservative decline coterminous with the wider declining salience of parties more generally, particularly with regards to labour movement organisation. For instance, while the Labour Party is on the up the number of trade unionists are still falling. This was a good point, but in my reply I suggested Labour under Corbyn is undergoing a process of recomposition, albeit one that isn't evenly spread (also, I tentatively suggested the Liberal Democrats are too, albeit from a very low base). The Tories undergoing this in the future can't definitively be ruled out, but presently they're in the grip of decomposition and haven't figured a way out beyond keeping their current coalition together and hoping it'll be enough to push them across the line at the next election.

Another questioner asked about context. I.e. what role does the conjuncture play in the Tory travails? The factional splintering of the parliamentary party, in my view, is suggestive of a certain decoupling of party elites from business elites. This is partly thanks to the recent breaking of automatic affiliation to the Tories of the majority of British capital by Tony Blair's New Labour, compounded by the extreme short-termism and class fractional approach of the Dave governments, and the fracturing of international capital itself, as covered by Aeron Davis's work. There's a wider decadent culture too, of a smug complacency that has got bred into the ruling class after the apparent death of socialism at home and abroad at the end of the 1980s. If you like the angry petit bourgeois Tories of the Thatcher years did the hard yards so their descendents didn't have to. And now, faced with class struggle of a different kind, don't know where to begin.

Related to this, another asked about the relationship of the Tory party to the state, and, of course, the party's role as part of the state. I haven't thought a great deal about this, at least until fairly recently. By way of an outline, and what the character of this relationship is yet and how it has fed into Tory crisis, there is the dual movement in the state of it becoming more authoritarian and simultaneously more dispersed. The UK state has a very centralised political system and, thanks to how Westminster governments are formed, if it has a majority a party can ride roughshod over the rest of civil society - within the checks and balances provided by law. Yet simultaneously, there is distance between government, different departments of the civil service, the military, police, and emergency services, NHS, local government and devolved administrations, quangos, and bits of the third sector and business who are pulled in to run services. These are in tension with one another, tend to be regulated/disciplined by markets and target cultures, and frequently come into conflict with government itself. The government is command, it remains sovereign in this bewildering mess of authority, but is constrained, pressured and beset by the cacophony it presides over. And this, of course, is in an international context in which the state is not only the agency of neoliberal global capital, the UK state has ceded sovereignty to the EU and other international institutions (Brexit doesn't change this), and the international order itself has no centre as such - as described in Hardt and Negri's Empire. The Tories can and do play on the national sovereignty/identity anxieties that partially stem from this certain diminishing of the state, but what are its wider effects on British capital's preferred party of government?

Lastly, another questioner recalled the Thatcher years. He said at the outset the left thought this was the last gasp of the Tories and that they were doomed. Instead they saw rejuvenation under an ideological and authoritarian leader - can this not happen again? My reply was that this was doubtful, because Theresa May had already tried it and failed. She had put together a very impressive coalition and got the largest vote received by the Tories since 1992, but the opposition was mostly unified behind Labour and was enough to weaken her position. The problem is an authoritarian populism mk II appeals to declining cross sections of the voting population - older people, older workers in declining occupations, the usual petit bourgeois mix of landlords, small business people, and pleased-with-themselves upwardly mobile middle class people. Being able to win younger people over to this project, which Thatcher was able to do in sufficient numbers in the 1980s, is a big ask now and cannot be achieved over night - even though a number of "soft" Thatcherite values are accepted by young people as their common sense. One should never say never, but on the balance of probabilities it isn't looking very likely.

Plenty then to chew on over the next couple of months before opening that new Word document with whatever the working title is going to be. If I'm feeling naughty I might chuck in a chapter or two on centrism, liberalism and the Labour right as species of conservatism too. The only thing that concerns me is the rate things are going, there might not even be a Tory party left as we now know it when the writing begins. Still, if Brexit has hastened their demise it will have all been worth it.

Image credit @guffers.