The inevitable transformation of the Conservative Party.

Best to ignore all of the speculation about how this election will work out in terms of seats, much too early to have any clear idea about that so anyone who tells you what they expect is simply projecting hopes or fears or 'they feel it in their water' or some such nonsense. Might as well look at an ox's liver. There are some things you can talk about, which are not dependent on the exact result in terms of seats. So a series of posts about those. Here's the first.

This election is, regardless of who wins it, going to transform the Conservative Party. This is something that has happened before, one of the reasons why the Party has survived for so long and been so successful compared to right wing parties elsewhere in Europe is this ability to change its nature. Happened in 1886 when it became a much more business influenced party after the Liberal Unionists joined it, again in the 1920s when the transformation that had started before World War I with the Tariff Reform League was completed and it stopped being a landed party and became definitively the party of business, the middle classes, and a significant part of the working class. Another one under Thatcher.

What we can say is that the old tradition of One Nation Conservatism going back through MacMillan to Baldwin, is finished. Most of its remaining leading lights have either left the party already or are not standing again. They have gone the way of the Whigs.

The other side of this is that the party is becoming less middle class and more plebeian, with an alliance between a section of the wealthy and a part of the working class, much more nationalist (and not in the way it was, along with labour, in the post-WWII period), much less friendly to a lot of business, with the start of a shift in its geographical base away from the South East towards the North and Midlands, and much more English as opposed to British (although doing pretty well in Wales as well).

This change will be bigger paradoxically if they don't win. These kinds of change are not completed until you've had a couple of elections but I think 2017 and this election are going to be the tipping point. So we will have a very different kind of right wing politics to what we became used to after Thatcher, it will still be called the Conservative Party but the One Nation Tories who dominated it between 1922 and 1976 will be only a memory and the Thatcherites who ruled the roost from 1976 until 2016 will slowly fade away.