Building Conservative Parliamentary Majorities in the 21st Century is going to be a lot harder. Alan Riley discusses why the Tories may need electoral reform to prosper.
The Conservative and Unionist Party is one of the last victims of the Cold War. Conservative dominance of 20th Century politics revolved around the internal threats from socialism and trade union power and external threats from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. With the collapse of the USSR that great dominating political majority has come apart. There is a strong argument for the Conservative Party to consider whether in fact an Alternative Vote system may permit the Party to revive part of that great political majority via second preferences on an AV list. In any event, Conservatives should recognise the true scale of the difficulty in delivering an overall Parliamentary majority in the 21st Century.
David Cameron achieved a stunning election result on May 6th by gaining an additional 80 parliamentary seats. No Conservative leader has gained so many seats in a single election since the landslide of 1931. However, the gainsayers will respond that no overall Parliamentary majority resulted and that the Conservative Party only obtained 36% of the votes cast. By contrast the more optimistic recognise the scale of David Cameron's achievement and they now assume that the in the next election its just one more heave to an overall majority.
Both are wrong. The scale of the task of delivering a Conservative overall Parliamentary majority, and repeated Conservative majorities in the 21st Century is enormous. As such the current coalition masks the strategic weakness of the position of the Conservative Party.
Too many Conservative commentators look back to the glory days of Baroness Thatcher and assume that all is required is a return to the eternal Thatcherite verities of sound money, low taxes, a strong defence, tough on Europe and tough on immigration to deliver a substantial Parliamentary majority. This recipe did not work in 1997, 2001 and 2005, and only the more progressive message of David Cameron in 2010 delivered substantial gains, which despite being considerable left the Conservatives still short of an overall majority.
Why though will it be so difficult to obtain substantial Conservative majorities in 21st Century Britain, when it appeared relatively easy to do so in the 20th Century? Last century only Austen Chamberlain was leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party without becoming Prime Minister. In the 21st Century so far the Conservatives have gone through three leaders, none of whom ended up Prime Minister - William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard.
Why is it so difficult for the Conservatives? Part of the answer is familiar. The Labour Party, particularly in the 1980s became very left wing, handing the right and a large part of the centre of British politics to the Conservatives. However, to focus on Michael Foot and his 1983 Manifesto, ‘the longest suicide note in history' is to miss the broader point. To fully understand the Conservatives strategic weakness it is necessary to understand why they were so dominant in the 20th Century. It is not just the last 18 year period of Conservative rule when the Party was dominant but the whole century. In the 20th Century the Conservatives were either in office on their own or dominant in a coalition for 70 years.
Conservative dominance in the 20th Century stemmed from the upheavals of the First World War and the forging by Baldwin of a powerful coalition of interests in response to those upheavals. Faced with the rise of a powerful and seemingly leftist Labour Party at home, increasing trade union power and the potential for internal subversion (extensively documented in Professor Christopher Andrew's recent history of MI5,
The Defence of the Realm) the Conservative leadership set about pulling a great political coalition together. The prospect of grave threats to property rights, public order, liberal capitalist democratic values as well as to both Established and dissenting Churches permitted the Conservatives to pull together most of the upper and middle class and a significant proportion of the working class.
Having seen the Edwardian social order collapse at home; almost all the thrones of Europe pulled down on the continent and revolution in Russia, a large part of the British people were ready to support Conservative Party in defence of what they saw as their common historic values, to maintain liberty under the law, fend off socialism and maintain our ancient institutions. The increasing external threats first from Nazi Germany and later from the Soviet Union significantly reinforced that political coalition. Internally Labour leftism, nationalisation, high taxation and gross state interference in the economy, together with overbearing trade union power reinforced support for the Conservative Party post war.
At different times and in different ways the Conservative Party benefited from superb political leadership which permitted it maximise the substantial degree of support available to it. Baldwin, Butler and Thatcher, all three very different politicians, but all three superbly adept for their time at shaping the available support into a dominating political force. However, the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the collapse of the USSR two years later in December 1991 fatally undermined that great 20th Century Conservative political coalition.
With socialism and communism losing all relevance as political ideology and the apparent triumph of the market the threat to property rights, democratic values and capitalism from the Labour Party drained away. This process was reinforced by the Labour Party's increasing willingness to treat with capitalism. Externally, as the Iron Curtain lifted and the Soviet tank armies returned home for the first time since the 1860s there was no significant military European threat to the independence of the United Kingdom as a sovereign state.
In this new world the great Conservative political coalition of the 20th Century was extremely difficult to keep together. It is noticeable that the last Conservative majority government that was elected in April 1992, was elected only four months after the fall of the USSR, when the historic memory of those internal and external threats helped keep a large part of that coalition together.
Since 1992 that coalition has continued to unravel as parts of the old coalition have felt the country is secure enough to go off and vote for the Greens, the Liberal Democrats or UKIP. One way to underline this point is to ask the question: Would UKIP really have obtained 1 million votes on May 6th if there were 2000 Soviet tanks within 450 miles of the Channel ports?
If this thesis is correct, the forces that provided the basis for the great Conservative leaders of the 20th to forge a dominant political coalition no longer exist.
This is not to say new powerful Conservative majority cannot be built. But it has to be recognised that obtaining a parliamentary majority for the Conservative Party in the 21st Century is a much more difficult task under the first past the post system than it was in the 20th Century.
If the Conservatives are to dominate the political landscape of the 21st Century, new coalitions will have to be forged but also serious consideration should also be given to whether first past the post is the best electoral system for the Conservatives to build the new political majorities they need.
As Phillip Blond pointed out in his detailed and careful analysis of the
Alternative Vote system and AV plus on this site in May, AV systems provide a basis for the Conservatives to win back a significant number of those lost post cold war voters. For instance under AV the Conservatives would be likely to win the second preference votes of most UKIP voters, a large slice of the Liberal Democrat vote and a surprisingly large number of green voters.
AV may well be one of the pillars of 21st Century Conservative political success.
By contrast without the unique and threatening 20th Century forces which could corral such a large part of the electorate direct into Tory ranks it is open to question whether first past the post does the Conservatives much favour in the 21st Century.
This is not to say that the Conservative Party can never win a majority, but under First past the post it is much, much more difficult to deliver it was in the 20th Century.