Is the British Conservative Party Going the Way of the Liberal Party?

Britain's current party system is about a hundred years old now--born of the eclipse of the Liberal Party by the newly formed Labour Party in the early twentieth century. As related by George Dangerfield in his classic The Strange Death of Liberal England, in a Britain beset by multiple crises in the years before World War I--the fiscal stress of increasing foreign and domestic pressures to spend more on both "guns and butter" and the political battles to which it led, rising labor and feminist militancy, the Irish struggle for independence that convulsed Britain as the Algerian struggle for independence convulsed France in the post-war period--the Liberals satisfied neither as the preference of elites, nor the party of progress, and after the General Election of 1924 they fell to a third-place position in the two party-dominated system prevailing ever since.

In that resulting system the Conservatives have tended to predominate. Of just under eighty-seven years in which one party or the other was in government, the Conservatives were the party of government for 54 years--62 percent of the time. During the nearly fourteen years of National and wartime governments in 1931-1945, the country had Conservative Prime Ministers, which works out to about 74 percent of the time. All of this worked out to Conservative Prime Ministers being in office for almost 64 years--about 63 percent of the time. One may add that the averages obscure periods of even greater conservative preponderance. Whereas in the exceptional 1945-1979 period there was a rough parity between the Conservatives and Labour where office-holding was concerned, when this period is removed from the picture there was a Conservative government for 69 percent of the non-National government periods when taking these as a whole, while a Conservative was Prime Minister 70 percent of the time. This is not least due to the Conservative predominance since the watershed election of 1979, which to date has seen Conservatives in office for 32 of 45 years--or 71 percent of the time.

Thus does the conventional commentary term the Conservatives, who as this reflects have been the preferred choice of the country's "elite," the "natural" party of government. However, a hundred years on Esther Webber suggests that the British party system may be headed for another such "shake-up"--with the Conservatives rather than their principal opposition the ones to fall as the Conservative Party not only flounders in its competition with Labour, but is challenged from the right by Nigel Farage's Reform UK.

The prospect can seem the easier to imagine amid the shake-up of party systems across the Western world since the financial crisis of 2007, and amid the disasters, and disastrous management of those disasters, seen across the globe, from the continued economic hardship of "the Great Recession," to the resurgence of great power war, to a global pandemic. (Most obviously the case in France and Italy, both countries are governed by parties that did not even exist before the Great Recession, in both countries the older parties have been marginalized, or even ceased to exist under their old names.) Still, at the moment I think any such a thing at the very least a ways off--more than one election off, frankly, in even the direst scenario for the Tories. A rather more likely outcome is Reform UK drawing the Conservative Party further rightward than they already are--and given the kind of leadership it now has, this in turn drawing the most right-wing leadership in the Labour Party's history rightward yet again.