The crisis of the Tory Party revisited
Much of the media in the UK is right-wing or very right-wing so much news focus is on what is happening in the Labour Party, and why it can’t resolve the problems of British capitalism and whether Reform might do better.
With Andy Burnham as Prime Minister Labour now has a capable politician in charge, but as even he seems to realise doing much to sort out anything is a struggle which will require a lot more than votes in Parliament.
This should, but often does not, raise the question of whether the historic party of British capital, the Tories, can help the bosses to achieve their agenda.
Kemi Badenoch recently reshuffled her Shadow Cabinet. With just over 100 MPs choices are limited but she did manage to appoint as Shadow Chancellor someone who was one of the main architects of Liz Truss’s 2022 mini-Budget.
Amongst those on the right who do think about these things, this has raised some history questions.
The Tory Party often claims to be the most successful electorally focused party in modern history. It has achieved that primarily by shapeshifting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reconfiguring membership with the Liberals over Ireland and Free Trade. A little more recently, from 1931, it was able to draw in sections of Labour and Liberal support for a pro-bosses agenda in the wake of the 1929 financial crash and from 2010-15 it allied with the Liberal Democrats to force through an austerity agenda.
Badenoch has been attempting her own shapeshifting by excluding those who back net zero and the European Convention of Human Rights from being Tory candidates. The problem here is that this narrows rather than increases Tory support
As right wing commentators have grasped this is a history of the present. Allistair Heath the Editor of the Sunday Telegraph is usually given to hyperbolic ‘end of the world’ headlines. However he did analyse recent local election results in a more restrained manner.
He noted that after a Reform Councillor had resigned in Merseyside, Labour regained the seat. It also held one in Wandsworth despite Tory front bench door knocking including Kemi Badenoch. In Dover a three way split between the Tories, Reform and Restore saw the Greens win a seat.
Heath argued ‘While not all of the Right’s woes can be attributed to division, a three-way split of the conservative electorate in the present moment would guarantee a Left-wing victory at an early general election. A lot more unity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a Right-wing victory’.
In this history of the present, it is often the context that in Canada the right split in a similar way to the UK but reunited with the harder right forces dominant that is quoted. It did not however win them the 2025 election.
Another figure on the political right Anthony Seldon has just published the latest in his series of books on recent Prime Ministers, this one covering Rishi Sunak’s 2022-24 Premiership.
He frames the study on the question of whether the Tory Party is finished. Noting that the 2024 General Election result was the worst in the Tories 190 year history he writes ‘talk of the replacement of the party would have seemed delusional ten years ago but is now a credible possibility. He continues ‘had things become so desperate by 2024 that the keys back to power had rusted away’.
He concludes that this is not inevitable, and rightly so, but in terms of media fixation on Nigel Farage and Labour, it’s an important history of the present. The split on the British right gives the left a chance to promote an alternative beyond Westminster politics.
This post originally appeared in the Morning Star
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