The Class Politics of the Tory Collapse

While there is a tone of ambiguity about Labour's election triumph, there is no such doubt about what happened to the Conservative Party last Thursday. 230 Tory careers went up in smoke as its vote more than halved compared to Boris Johnson's 2019 triumph. This is their lowest seat count since the 1832 Reform Act, which gave birth to the modern Conservatives, and at 6.8m votes their lowest level of popular support since the advent of universal suffrage in 1928. Indeed, you'd have to go back to 1923 under Stanley Baldwin to find them polling lower. They suffered a calamity where anti-Tory voters of the left and right prised them apart, leaving behind a bewildered and rudderless rump. Perhaps some of this pain might have been avoided had they read my book.

There are plenty of conjunctural factors that had a role in the Tories' electoral collapse, but what how did the party's crisis of political reproduction impact its evisceration? Five years ago, Johnson's championing of Brexit allowed him to configure class politics to the Conservatives' advantage. To remind ourselves, the base of mass conservatism was based on the differences between class cohorts. Or, to be more precise, the Tories hegemonised older people and particularly the retired. This has two components. First, because social location has the biggest impact on how one views the world, formulates one's interests, and draws political conclusions about it, the experience of being a pensioner is analogous to the existence of the small business person. Overwhelmingly dependent on their own labour for an "independent" livelihood, the petit bourgeois fear being out-competed, particularly by bigger businesses that can use their clout to cartelise markets and drive out smaller competitors. They may also have employees, which bring with them wage demands, motivational issues, and varying degrees of reliability. Both present existential dangers that might drive them out of business and into poverty or, horror of horrors, having to work for someone else. Hence, as generations of Marxist activists and thinkers know, they are disproportionately attracted to authoritarian politics.

This is relevant to understanding mass conservatism in Britain because being a pensioner means having a relatively fixed income. One cannot simply re-enter the work force to make good a financial crisis, and so one is at the mercy of events. This location is close to petit bourgeois anxiety and predisposes one toward a politics of certainty and is mirrored by an antipathy toward most things that epitomise change - migration, shifts in popular culture, growing acceptance of (previously) stigmatised minorities. This is exacerbated even more if one owns property. Thatcher's Right to Buy plus the cheap credit of the 1970s and 1980s created a generation of homeowners, but one does not become conservative magically because your name is on a title deed. It individuates and disciplines: individuates because one has an individual material interest in the appreciation of an asset, and disciplined because servicing the mortgage/debt makes collective action that much more difficult. It's almost as if the Conservative Party promoted home ownership with these in mind. Therefore, fast forward to the last decade the Tories' policy platform have catered to these interests and dispositions. Protect pensioners from the immediate consequences of austerity, not building houses to protect asset price inflation (many home owning pensioners voted Tory so they would have a handsome nest egg to hand down to their children and grandchildren, who've bore the brunt of the last 14 years), cut taxes, pull at the nostalgic heart strings of an independent Britain bestriding the world stage, and lash out at trans people and immigrants who are perceived as harbingers of unwelcome, dangerous social change.

There will always be plenty of old people, but the problems the Tories had with making this the basis of their voter coalition was its time limited character. Again, for two reasons. The first is the conservatising effects of age are breaking down. The experience of being a pensioner is weaker as a right wing authoritarian disposition than owning property, and the story of Britain since the mid-1990s has been a contraction in housing supply. Fewer homes overall were built, and the diminishing of council housing has led to the huge growth of the private rented sector. With asset price inflation surging well ahead of real wages, millions were and are locked out of acquiring property until much later in the life course. It meant couples aren't starting their families until later, if at all. Therefore these props of reproducing the Conservative vote were kicked away, and this has only continued under the last five Prime Ministers. Related to this were the everyday class politics of the Tories in office. Holding down wages, defending landlords, encouraging precarity, attacking the public sector, despoiling the environment, victimising minorities, this has been the lot of working age people and young people for 14 years. Their record is unlikely to convert many of this layer into Tory voters, even if millions of them do get on the housing ladder.

And then there are values. The Tories' coalition tends toward social conservatism, whereas the younger one is the more socially liberal one is likely to be. This is not the result of lefty teachers or liberal institutions, but is itself a consequence of class cohorts. As explained on many occasions here and elsewhere, what has become increasingly dominant in advanced capitalist societies since the war has been immaterial labour and the advent of the socialised workers. Displacing the industrial worker as the hegemonic working class figure, its object is the production of care, knowledge, services, subjectivities. I.e. The production of the social relations capitalism needs to reproduce itself as a social system. Therefore, as the generations have passed through the changed character of work, the traits selected by it - tolerance, sociability, networking, care - have come to the fore of popular consciousness. It has now become the spontaneous disposition for the majority of working age people, hence not only is the Conservative party's base in long-term decline, so is the basis for social conservatism. It follows that when the Tories victimise people, make draconian pledges, play divide and rule, and seek to cultivate the prejudices of their base this only serves to drive a wedge between themselves and the bulk of the population.

Bearing these processes in mind, in the book - the bulk of which was written when Johnson was at the height of his powers - suggested that if nothing went wrong, the Tories would be competitive in the 2024 election but that afterwards, from the late 2020s onwards, unless they underwent root and branch change winning an election would only get more difficult. Party Gate was not an inevitably, nor was the Liz Truss debacle, nor for that matter was the complacent negligence of Rishi Sunaks year-and-a-half at the helm. But what they did was solidify support for the broad left of centre among working age people, driving Tory numbers there to historic lows, and alienated a swathe of its softer support among the coalition built by Theresa May and Johnson. Who knew that cuts to public provision the elderly are disproportionately dependent on and continued attacks on their younger family members would undo the fealty of millions of them? Tory accelerationism ensured the consequences of their party's decline bit earlier than it had to.

Does the rise of Reform bother this picture much? Standing against them everywhere it could was always going to cause the Tories trouble, but Nigel Farage's entry into the election fray made them much more potent than would have been the case. Of the 230 seats gone, the Reform's was greater than the difference between the Tory vote and that of their victorious opponent in 170 of them. It wasn't Morgan McSweeney that won Labour its famous victory. Arguably it was Messrs Farage, Tice, and Anderson. Ditto for the Liberal Democrats' triumphant comeback and for the Greens taking the two Tory-held seats they targeted. Finally winning his place in the Commons, Farage has vowed that he's "coming for Labour next". In reality, while one should not be complacent about the poisoning effect their breakthrough could have on political discourse, especially considering they came second in 98 Labour seats and provide a handy excuse for Keir Starmer to go with "socially conservative" authoritarian politics on immigration. But electorally, Reform has probably maxed out their reach and is only capable of making inroads into Labour held seats in a smattering of places. Their vote is less than what UKIP polled in 2015, despite all the advantages of tacit press backing. And you can forget the ridiculous hype about Farage finding an echo among young people. Their numbers here show the same incredibly low levels of support as per the Tories, and like the Tories their voter coalition is of broadly the same sociological character and are on a declinist trajectory.

This is the problem the Conservatives have got. The recriminations and excuses have started to come forward, but it's not the case the cataclysm has hit and now is the moment to rebuild. The dynamics of long-term Tory decline have not abated. The antipathy of rising generations is not vanishing, nor will it. The Tories and Reform rest on a set of values opposed to the majority of the population, and articulate interests seriously at odds with it. On the basis of the politics both are proffering there are no new people to be won over. If they decide to stick with their current platforms, which Reform are bound to, then some sort of alliance between the two might make them competitive at the next election. Especially as Labour aren't likely to put on support after four or five years of government, and whose campaign will probably have to take on the appearance of 412 by-elections. But time is against both parties. If the Tories want to recover and become a party of government again, they're going to have to completely renovate their politics and reforge a mass conservatism that intersects with the socially liberal default that is already here and is only getting stronger. But also this conservatism cannot be as brutally and as sectionally divisive as it has been these last 45 years. The basis for a two-nation Toryism is receding with the generation that voted for it.

At the end of the first edition of the book, I laid out the challenge facing the party and observed that no matter their difficulties, "no one got rich betting against the Tories." Fewer then five years on from a victory that was supposed to see the Tories dominate this decade, their party is broken, their coalition eviscerated and split, and the way back is not obvious to anyone in their ranks. There hasn't been a worse time to be a Conservative, and long may it remain so.

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