An election-winning machine of legendary efficiency, the Conservative Party dominated British politics for much of the 20th century. The belief of the great Tory leaders, Stanley Baldwin and Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan and Margaret Thatcher, was that British Conservatism was the one true faith — a belief shared by a sizable proportion of the British electorate.
A self-proclaimed conviction politician, Mrs. Thatcher was perhaps the most fervent and successful British Conservative of them all. Thumpingly victorious successive general elections during the 1980s, she stamped her personality on British society with indelible force. Both at home and abroad, it became commonplace to speak of “Thatcher’s Britain”. When she announced that she intended to go “on and on”, nobody doubted it. Indeed, so boundless was her political zeal — and so chronic the inadequacies of her opponents — that she began to seem invincible, an unstoppable juggernaut. Not for nothing was she nicknamed the Iron Lady.
Even after she fell from power in 1990, much of what Mrs. Thatcher stood for — her belief in the tree market and the virtue of privatization — went on shaping the British political and social landscape. Save that he made more effort to get on with Britain’s partners in the European Union, Mrs. Thatcher’s successor, John Major, was her willing protégé. For seven years, this unglamorous British leader dutifully kept up the momentum of her privatizing program.
All this is history now. Since they finally crashed to defeat in 1997, the Conservatives have been staggering from crisis to crisis. And now, under the lackluster leadership of Iain Duncan Smith, their very credibility as a great political party seems in danger of disintegrating altogether. Handicapped by an aging and shrinking membership and making little appeal to younger voters, the Tories are turning into the dinosaurs of British politics.
Not that it is hard to understand why they are in such a fix. For in Tony Blair, Britain acquired a leader who was just as committed to the market economy as the Tories but who recognized that a great deal else about the Conservative Party had ceased to appeal to the British people. Accordingly, Blair fashioned a new pro-business Labour Party while at the same time championing public services and embracing the “liberal” values of the 1960s. Shrewdly marketing himself as a child of the rock n’ roll years, a regular guy with a taste for youth culture, the electioneering Tony Blair of 1997 made much of the fact that he had once belonged to a student pop group.
In the aftermath of the Cold War, it has often been observed that although the Right won the economic argument, the Left nevertheless prevailed in the “culture war”. In other words, if people all over the world increasingly accept the inevitability of free market capitalism, they are also demanding (within reason) to pursue whatever lifestyle they choose. Tony Blair’s readiness to acknowledge the triumph of moral as well as economic individualism (among his political colleagues are a number of avowed gays) goes far toward explaining his political success.
Hopelessly upstaged by Blair and New Labour, the Tories are belatedly struggling to re-invent themselves. Inside the Conservative Party a bloody civil war is raging between “traditionalists” and “modernizers”. Iain Duncan Smith is projecting himself as a “compassionate conservative” anxious to preside over a thoroughly contemporary Tory party hospitable to gays and members of racial minorities. The trouble is that memories of the days when the Conservative Party positively paraded its intolerance are still fresh. Moreover, Duncan Smith himself, a former soldier with a stiff military bearing, seems not quite to believe in his own modernizing agenda. The other day he tried to coerce colleagues into voting against legislation designed to enable unmarried couples to adopt children.
True modernizing Tories like his rival Michael Portillo were outraged. Far from re-launching the Conservative Party, Duncan Smith has only succeeded in precipitating a damaging crisis over his fitness to be the Party’s leader.
What just a few years ago would have seemed unthinkable seems unthinkable no longer: The possibility that the once great Conservative Party may have no long-term future.
Meanwhile, British democracy can hardly be said to be flourishing. Thanks to the Tories’ disarray (Britain’s third Party, the Liberal Democrats, are numerically insignificant), Tony Blair is presiding over what increasingly seems like an elective dictatorship. It is a state of affairs over which he is clearly losing little sleep.
Arab News Opinion 18 November 2002
