The new Conservatism and the old 1957

The disorderly thrust of political events disturbs the symmetry of political analysis. Before Suez, one would have been tempted to speak of contemporary British Conservatism as a brand-new thing. Fashioned by tough-minded political savants and intellectuals for the new world that is post-welfare Britain – thriving, lively, realistic, with its feet firmly planted in the political middle ground, its fingers on the pulse of the expanding middle classes, its winning smile on the faces of the 'new men of power' and future safe behind the glass doors of the giant oligopolies – the 'new Conservatism' offered itself as a going concern with a gilt-edged future, a safe investment for the politically uncommitted. Forced to re-examine the 'new' Conservatism in the light of recent events, most socialists would be tempted to say that it is merely the 'old Toryism' writ large. They could certainly muster an impressive case. One would have to go back to the heyday of imperialism – to plunge back several decades, behind two world wars – to discover the sources of the assumptions which appear to have governed the Conservative government's policy in the Middle East. If this is the 'new Conservatism' in action, it is not merely 'old' – it is prehistoric, dislocated from and insensitive to its environment, ranging abroad like a mastodon in Kensington Park.

But it seems closer to the truth to say that contemporary Conservatism is an unstable blend of the new and the old. The process by which it remained in business – the process of public theft and private accommodation by which the new Tories snatched up the welfare state and roped in the middle classes – is an unfinished process, and precisely because it is unfinished, it has had a disastrous effect on the party and its public philosophy. The scope of the party has expanded, but its character has not radically altered. Within its structure, conflicting tendencies are held together in a state of comparative disequilibrium.

The left and the right of the party are not two distinct groups. Each assuages its prejudices by selecting symbols in the other's camp. The new middle-class recruits to the party are the most aggressively nationalist: the defenders of capital punishment promote defence cuts; the advocates of bipartisanship, turn out, under pressure, to be militantly anti-American. Mr Angus Maude, whose The English Middle Classes (with Roy Lewis) is one of the classic defences of 'enlightened' Toryism, is discovered as one of the ordering minds behind the Suez Group. The party is held together, not by a coherent social philosophy, but by an unquestioning allegiance to the most rootless archetypal images. It subscribes to a confused rhetoric: 'Britain's prestige abroad' is a phrase which covers the Suez debacle; 'the incentives of free enterprise' appear compatible with a widening dollar-gap and shrinking markets; a 'property-owning democracy' supports the plea for 'realistic rents'; our 'responsibilities to the Commonwealth' covers our wilful disregard for the imperatives of Commonwealth opinion. Party policy is consequently the pawn of irrational forces and the prey to disguised and muted pressures. Behind the facade of Butskellism and bipartisanship, the old prejudices wax, the old interests play, the old neuroses govern.

'Liberal conservatives', who distrust Mr Butler's ambivalences, like to think that he was not necessary to them. This view is factually incorrect. Between 1945 and 1954, it was the rhetoric and the persona of Mr Butler which worked such wonders for the party. His success was due in large measure to the skill with which he assessed the electoral consequences of Labour's 'peaceful revolution'. But the party has, for the moment at least, taken his measure: his 'philosophy' still provides the party with its public front, but in a moment of crisis, it seeks its leadership elsewhere.

It is necessary to summarise briefly the main trends in that 'peaceful revolution', in order to comprehend the altering shape of latter-day Conservatism, and the shifts in popular opinion which sustain it.

The period 1945 to 1951 can be regarded as the focal point in a challenging new-style middle-class revolution. It was a revolution with two distinct phases, and the Labour Party was responsible for only one of these, and even there it could not or did not wholly assess its social and political implications.

The limited revolution

The welfare state – with its three main planks, social security, income redistribution and nationalisation – had valid but limited objectives. It sought to redistribute wealth towards the middle, and buttress the structure of 'opportunity' from below. It tried to redress the balance of social forces in the community – but not to alter the relationship of one group to another, within the still hierarchical structure of British society. The social pivot of the revolution of 'welfare' was consequently located somewhere about the middle of the social scale. The consequences of increased assistance were to swell the ranks of the middle classes, and to validate what may be called 'middle' virtues in British society. As Angus Maude and Roy Lewis put it:

A great part of the strength and of the value of the middle classes in English political life has been their ability to set off, within themselves, intellect against money, common sense against intellect, and a tradition of gentility against all three (p72).

And later, perhaps more revealingly:

They are what they are by virtue not of trade but of organization, not of property but of independence; not by virtue of government; not solely because they wanted to have but because of what they wanted to be ... 'What shall we do to be received?' the new middle classes have cried, and in every generation the retort has come – from above and below – 'Learn to behave like gentlemen! (p69)

As Alistair Cook observed, at the time of the 1955 general election, the result would...