Phil Burton-Cartledge - Falling Down: The Conservative Party and the Decline of Tory Britain

Falling Down

Falling Down

The Conservative Party and
the Decline of Tory Britain

Phil Burton-Cartledge

First published by Verso 2021

Phil Burton-Cartledge 2021

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-036-5

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-039-6 (US EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-038-9 (UK EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Sabon by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed by CPI Mackays, Ltd, UK

For Simon Speck

Smiling for the cameras, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak served up orders for unsuspecting customers at a central London Wagamama. This was 8 July 2020. Earlier in the day, Sunak rose in the House of Commons to present his mini-budget: a package of measures designed to rescue Britains beleaguered economy from the assault mounted on it by COVID-19. To try and accelerate the recovery, the most eye-catching of his measures was Eat Out to Help Out. Between 3 and 31 August, this scheme allowed for a 50 per cent discount to a maximum of ten pounds per diner at all participating restaurants, pubs and cafes. In its own terms, it was a success. Some 849 million was claimed by businesses from the Treasury, having served over 160 million meals. Just the tonic the UKs suffering hospitality industry needed.

It also proved a boon for the community transmission of coronavirus. On the day Sunak announced his policy, the cumulative total of UK COVID-19 fatalities stood at 40,916. The government ignored this advice.

During autumn and winter cases built up to the point where the government had to introduce two new national lockdowns, neither of which was as stringent as the first. It also turned out that Rishi Sunak had helped lay the groundwork for the second wave by boosting infections when community transmission was very low. As such, thanks to utter complacency, not only has the number of deaths more than doubled since Eat Out to Help Outs announcement to over 126,000 at the time of writing and the NHS been overwhelmed like never before, but also the UK had to stay in lock-down until millions of (mainly older) Britons had received their first vaccine injection.

This book is not about coronavirus. It is about the party that has overseen this disaster, a party whose history is littered with a few harmful mutations of its own. It is a book about the Conservative Party and tells the story of how the worlds most successful liberal-democratic party and the acknowledged preferred party of British business has come to a place where, it would seem, its policy prescriptions, strategic objectives and day-to-day decision making not only are harmful, but seemingly work against the interests of British capitalism and, at times, appear at odds with its own political interests. Many of these features were visible when the party returned to government (with the Liberal Democrats) in 2010, and yet it has gone on to win three further elections in the meantime. A case of adroit politicking, voter masochism or something else?

As a veritable (for some, a venerable) institution occupying an enviable status as the natural party of government in the United Kingdom, it has been also a trailblazer that has pioneered privatisation and deregulation in an advanced economy. It has survived, evolved and thrived for the better part of two centuries. The Conservatives therefore not only are a model case study in the longevity of parties in competitive party systems, but also are fundamental to our understanding of Britains politics, its class structure and the character of its state. These alone are reasons enough for a serious attempt to understand the state of the Conservative Party in the twenty-first century.

Studying and analysing the Tories can, but should not, be an academic exercise. Labour needs to understand its electoral nemesis, which it has the tendency to underestimate despite its opponents winning ways. Trade unions must grasp why the Tories hold them down. Workers need to know why the Tories happily enforce low pay, short-term contracts and dead-end jobs that leave their time and talents squandered and why the Tories are content to lock millions out of the acquisition of property. Campaigners against deportations, against racism, against the scapegoating of whole communities have an interest in how and why they are used as a political football by the Conservatives. On issues from equality for women, trans acceptance, racism, the environment and the climate crisis, to anything and everything that might make life better or more tolerable all these concerns and causes can reliably find the Tories standing in their way.

The role the Conservatives play as self-appointed defenders of privilege, of the establishment, as the custodians of British capitalism and their preparedness to use state power to enforce these ends mean that any and all projects of a liberal, nationalist, Labourist or socialist hue have to know their enemy. Or they can, and will, get beaten. Arguably, a factor contributing to the repeated victories of the Conservatives is the lack of attention paid to this task by the partys many opponents.

Apart from day-to-day politics, what role does the Conservative Party play as an institution of British capitalism? How and why is it so important to the custodians of capital, and how is it consistently successful in presenting the minority interest of the monied and well-heeled as the general interest? Where does the Tory Party sit in the Westminster system, in the web of class relations and in the UKs political economy, and to what extent are the Tories both symptom and cause of British exceptionalism, most recently expressed in the vote to leave the European Union and the disastrous management of the coronavirus crisis?

This brings into sharp relief contemporary writing about the party. Most political commentary appearing in the British press reads embarrassingly like fandom, full of praise for the visionary qualities and overdone patriotism of the partys leading lights. Instead of seeking to explain whats happening in the party and providing snippets of information to help their readers piece together the whys and wherefores of policy, strategic decision making and blunders in office, the voluminous press coverage the party attracts instead obscures its workings, rendering the Tory party a mysterious and charmed entity that just happens to win elections a lot. Structural relationships are only hinted at, with the occasional exposure of a tie between X politician and Y business. Good or bad policy is a mark of personal qualities or the right/wrong ideas. To suggest that considerations of interest and class have some bearing is determinist.

This book makes no apologies for breaking with this stunted and inadequate tradition, as any work of materialist analysis must. It is inconceivable to consider the Tories as anything other than the institutionalisation of moneyed interests, a network and permanent mobilisation of elites fed by commercial relationships and buttressed by privileged access to and patterns of control and influence over state power. If, however, that was all the Tories were, this would be an excavation of the bones of an extinct political animal, not the means of understanding the anatomy of a thriving apex predator that has devoured any and all challenges (and not a few challengers). It is therefore not enough to say that the Tories are a ruling-class party, the political articulation of capital or simply a reflection of the political preferences of a privileged section of the electorate. Its accomplishments, its trajectories and, strange as it might sound at the time of writing, its long-term decline demand analysis and consideration.