Tuesday 13 November 2018

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.

7 comments:

Speedy said...

"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."

Be careful what you wish for.

"Still, if Brexit has hastened their demise it will have all been worth it."

No, it won't.

"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."

Older people are not declining, they are increasing.

"The growth in population size is partly because the population is ageing. The percentage of the population that is 65 years or older is growing. It increased between 1975 and 2015, from 14.1% of the population to 17.8%. It is projected to continue to grow to nearly a quarter of the population by 2045. This is an important consideration for the provision of health and social care services and pensions."

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/articles/overviewoftheukpopulation/mar2017

"We therefore conclude that the differences we see in the electorate are due to ageing, and not
due to generational effects. The question of whether future Conservative support is threatened by generational replacement can therefore be answered with some confidence in the negative. Moreover the ageing effects that we see do not appear to result from compositional differences between the old and the young. Holding constant levels of income, employment status and so on makes no difference to our findings."

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/56280/1/democraticaudit.com-Age_significantly_impacts_on_the_choices_that_voters_make_at_elections.pdf

Small business declining?

"There were a record 5.7 million private sector businesses at the start of 2017.
This is an increase of 197,000 since 2016, and 2.2 million more than in 2000.
The number of employing businesses increased by 41,000 (+3%) since 2016, and the number of non-employing businesses by 155,000 (+4%)."

https://www.fsb.org.uk/media-centre/small-business-statistics

"Authoritarian populism" is only half of the story, too. Selling off council homes wasn't just populism, Thatcher restructured the very meaning of the right. Her recalibration of the UK economy away from heavy industry toward services was visionary. You don't have to like it to respect it, as Owen Jones recently pointed out.

"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"

Which introduced gay marriage.

You have rehearsed these arguments, which plainly have some merit, here before. I recall an interesting point you made about home ownership. But it is worth recalling that the Tories even managed to stay in power during the Depression, which featured mass organised industrial labour and hunger marches. Talk of their demise may be somewhat premature.

Boffy said...

How long before someone has a go at you for your violent image of May with a dagger stuck in her chest, suggesting that you are encouraging acts of violence against her? After all, the sensibilities of politicians and others are such nowadays that metaphors about "killing zones", "bringing nooses to meetings", "the knives being out", and so on are just too upsetting, aren't they?

Phil said...

Good grief. Older people are increasing but the conservatising effects of age *are declining*.

George Carty said...

Surely the Tory voters of the future will be the people who inherited the expensive houses currently owned by the baby boomer generation?

Anonymous said...

This seems exceptionally complacent to me. International finance is mobile and will move abroad as Brexit progresses, taking their tax payments elsewhere, so they don't care what happens to the UK or the Tories. The Tories are in the process of losing the business vote, but do they still need it? Largely in thrall (or perhaps even financed by) shady billionaires and multinational interests, their only interest is profiting from international capital and not paying any tax. The don't need support from small and medium sized enterprises, car factories, farmers, builders or any of the traditional Tory voting sectors any more. They've sold nearly every part of the UK public sector and appear to have every intention of handing over the NHS to US investors. All sorts of Brexit will make workers poorer and dissent will be pointless. The media largely represents foreign/multinational interests, either directly or via the 9 "think tanks" who appear to have taken over BBC News and current affairs. The UK and its people are no longer of any interest to them.

GW said...

"Still, if Brexit has hastened their demise it will have all been worth it."

Not if you happen to live on the island of Ireland. Corbyn's insistence on Britland's right to unilaterally withdraw from a backstop designed to protect the Good Friday Agreement and an open border makes me nervous.

This deal seems to be designed by the EU and Oliver Robbins to appeal to the Lexiteers in Corbyn, MacDonnell & Milne. Customs union, protection of workers and environmental rights.

If the PLP was to fall into this trap it would be a double victory for the EPP - effective continuance of the UK in the EU's economic orbit without political input and the melting away of remainer support from British Labour.

The PLP need to go hard to vote this down, followed by going hard for a three-way people’s vote. That’s the wedge that will finally split the Tories and bring about a general election.

And a British government sympathetic to the majority in the North of Ireland rather than representing a diminishing minority of hard-line unionists would be good for Ireland.

Howard Fuller said...

Well I agree with Phil on one thing. Those of us growing older are not getting "less conservative". Most of my peers have moved to the right over the years as have I.