Tory Party Conference: Last Orders have been called
The Tory Party Conference starts in Manchester on Sunday when it is reported that Johnson will speak after he failed to persuade MPs that they should prorogue Parliament for three working days so he could address the Conference on Wednesday.
The Peoples Assembly have called a protest
The conference is mainly, unlike Labour (or indeed on a much smaller scale the Liberal Democrats) a chance for lobbyists to have access to senior Tories, currently also Ministers. Not that many members attend and they do so as individuals not delegates
How many of these members are there actually?
We do know that in the early 1950s the Tory membership was 2.7m. These were the days before many had a TV let alone the internet and it was often a social and networking thing. That said it was also a very powerful network to spread Tory ideas informally. In some areas the ‘Conservative Club’ remains a social centre although usually only very vaguely at best connected to the Party.
As recently as March 2018 the Tory membership was reported to be 120,000 and even that was believed to be optimistic.
It was these people of an average age of somewhere between their mid-50s and early 70s (again the precise detail is unknown) overwhelmingly white and rural who voted for Johnson to replace May as Tory leader and hence become Prime Minister.
The declining number did however spur Tory chair Brandon Lewis into action. He wrote an article in the Sunday Telegraph. He is responsible for Tory organisation. As he made clear he is not actually responsible for doing it, or little would have happened. Rather he employed some people to do it.
Writing in the Telegraph on 26th May 2019 Lewis claimed that the membership had increased from 124,000 in last year to 160,000 now. Lewis suggested the growth rate has been much higher in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland than England. In England the bigger increases have been in the East Midlands and the North East. One suspects these are mainly former UKIP members seeking to make sure the Tories pursue a No Deal Brexit. The cost of joining the Tories is only £25 a year which equates to around 8 pints of lager in Brexit friendly pub chain Wetherspoons so only a little amount of drinking has to be sacrificed to pay for it.
Brandon Lewis also said that the Tories youth membership has increased by 64% with one hundred new Young Conservative Associations. I take it that previously the numbers of Young Tories must have been very low indeed and if the average age if the membership is around 70 then perhaps anyone below 60 qualifies as a Young Tory.
These are just statistics and reality provides a more useful perspective.
I’ve been a trade union activist for 40 years and up to around 20 years ago one would run across workplace representatives and activists who certainly voted Tory and in some cases were members. They invariably went on about tax cuts allowing them more freedom to spend their own money.
Such people don’t seem to exist anymore, or if they do keep very quiet about it. Likewise the Party’s elected representation on local Councils in urban Britain, which is the bedrock of mainstream party organisation in the UK, has gone.
The 2019 Tory Conference may turn out to reveal that the Party is almost over
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