The Conservative Party’s Crisis of Political Reproduction

'The Conservative Party’s Crisis of Political Reproduction' a talk by Phil Burton-Cartledge

Are the difficulties facing the Tories simply a matter of exhaustion, of the public getting fed up with them as they did in 1997 and 1964-66? Without peering beneath the surface, that appears to be the case. The antics of Johnson, Truss, and the do-nothing politics of Sunak are enough to give the most loyal Conservative voter pause. But, as my book – The Party’s Over: The Rise and Fall of the Conservatives from Thatcher to Sunak – argues, the Tories have a far more serious problem: a crisis of political reproduction. The mass base the Tories have built is overly dependent on older people generally and retirees in particular, and is a coalition premised on high property values, home ownership, rising pensions, and (to an extent) shielding the elderly while attacking the living standards of working age people and gutting the state of its capacity to do anything. Voting Conservative is not a consequence of getting old, but of the tendency of acquiring property throughout one’s life – however meagre that might be. If a Tory government is a block on this process of acquisition, it’s not going to generate future Conservative voters. And that makes the job of winning elections progressively more difficult. Unfortunately for the Conservatives, their policy preferences and rhetoric, especially their emphasis on “anti-woke” politics is wedded to cohering this coalition, which rules out the possibility of their reaching out to younger layers. In short, it is very difficult to see how the party can forge a new coalition of voters that can win them the next two general elections.

Bio: Dr Phil Burton-Cartledge is a course director at the University of Derby where he has led the Sociology programme for the last eight years. He blogs regularly about current affairs at his blog, All That Is Solid, and has written widely for Tribune, Jacobin, the New Statesman, and The Independent among others. The Party’s Over is the second paperback edition of Falling Down: The Conservative Party and the Decline of Tory Britain. It is his first book.