Kind of Blue: A Short History of Tory Decline

With the Conservative Party having collapsed to an all-time low of just 121 seats in 2024’s general election, following fourteen years in which they were both in office and at each other’s throats, it is easy to forget that this is – by some distance – the world’s oldest and most successful example of an elite political project operating under the twin pressures of mass democracy and capitalist modernity. Each of these pressures were, from their inception, feared as existential threats to the Party’s survival. Yet, these threats were not merely navigated but provided the very grounds on which the Conservatives have flourished.

Indeed, the Party’s grip on power only tightened with the relative decline of its agrarian and aristocratic base. Between the 1832 and 1884 Reform Acts, marking the first period of modern parliamentary history under limited if gradually broadening franchise, the Conservatives were in power for just fifteen of fifty-two years, or around 28 per cent of the time. With the expansion of the electorate to include the majority of adult males, the Party subsequently held office for eighteen of the next thirty-two years, or 54 per cent of the time. Between the granting of universal male and partial female suffrage in 1918 and the progressive extension of voting rights to the present day, they governed for seventy-three of 105 years, fully 70 per cent of the time. While late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain saw the achievement of formal liberal democracy, the height of the welfare state, and the country’s only general strike, it was also undeniably a ‘long Conservative century’, to use the phrase of Tory historian and commentator Anthony Seldon. Such has been the Party’s hold on power that it can, with some plausibility, claim many of what are traditionally seen as Britain’s major achievements as its own: early industrial dominance, imperial grandeur, victory in two world wars, even the lion’s share of the post-war boom were all won under the guidance of the Conservatives, binding the identity of both nation and state to that of the party which ruled them.

How, then, has the ‘natural party of government’ fallen into an apparently permanent crisis? What has degraded a lineage of once consummate state managers and political operators into, to borrow Dominic Cummings’ description of the Johnson cabinet, a parade of ‘fuck pigs and morons’? In trying to explain why the Party finds itself in its current impasse, bereft of any real sense of collective purpose, ideologically exhausted, and electorally wounded, I will not offer a detailed account of their previous fourteen years in power, recount Westminster manoeuvrings or focus extensively on individual ministers and administrations. Similarly, given that this article was written in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 general election, whatever has happened to the Party in the months since will necessarily be absent from whatever analysis I can offer. Instead, I want to understand how the current state of the Conservatives reflects transformations in the foundations of their historic power.

Specifically, I contend that the Party’s disarray – witnessed since at least the Brexit referendum of 2016, but arguably dating back to the ousting of Thatcher in 1990 – results from three major dynamics that have seriously undermined their traditional modes of political practice: the recalibration of capital–state relations under contemporary capitalism; ruling class and elite recomposition; and changes in the broader class structure and everyday life.

There is an irony here, for the tendencies I sketch below were all largely instigated by the Conservatives, particularly the Thatcher governments, as a response to the crisis of post-war capitalism – although many elements naturally predated the 1980s and have since been enthusiastically developed and accelerated by Labour administrations as well as Tory ones. All can be broadly related to neoliberalism as a term encapsulating changes to the economy, society, and culture since the 1980s. While much of what I argue below is well known, these changes are generally seen as a problem for the left (in both its reformist and revolutionary variants) and a straightforward victory for the right. However, as I hope to show, a number of unintended consequences of the Thatcherite settlement have also undermined the Conservatives as a broad right force, to the point that the Party’s very survival is now commonly talked of as being under threat. While actual extinction is unlikely to materialise, the Party has been undeniably reshaped by its long period of crisis and recomposition, making it quite different to the organisation which has dominated British politics for most of the last two centuries.

State and capital in neoliberal Britain

As the post-war settlement unravelled amidst economic crisis and social unrest, Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 aiming to fundamentally transform British capitalism. While the tactics she employed were more contingent and improvised than often assumed, more than once bringing her close to defeat, there is no doubting either the fact or scale of her success. Disarming opponents and destroying organised labour as a significant political force, she set the agenda for every subsequent government, including the current Starmer administration. This success, however, came at a price, with shifting relations between capital and state undermining not only reformist social democracy, but the political autonomy upon which Tory statecraft itself has historically depended.

The tendencies causing this erosion are well known, as the financialisation and internationalisation characteristic of neoliberalism globally have diminished the power of states everywhere to exercise political control over the economy. Such tendencies, however, are particularly pronounced within Britain, pointing to the vanguardist role the country played in the dismantling of mid-century Keynesianism. The Royal Economic Society estimates that when Thatcher came to power in 1979 manufacturing accounted for 28 per cent of GDP; today, the Office for National Statistics places it at just 9 per cent, far below that of most international competitors. Conversely, finance has exploded from just 2 per cent of GDP in the 1950s to around 30 per cent today when accounting for directly related services in accountancy, law, consultancy, and IT, making it the single biggest sector in terms of output. While triggered by Thatcher’s policies, this rebalancing – or at least, its scale – was never the goal of her governments. Rather, they hoped that opening industry to private capital and market competition would restore the country’s status as the ‘workshop of the world’ after two decades of pronounced underperformance. The de-industrialisation that occurred in place of this intended revival was driven not by ministerial intent but by the re-assertion of long-standing structural features of the British economy as the post-war interlude came to an end. Barring a short period in the mid-twentieth century, the low productivity which had vexed governments since the early 1960s – and continues to do so today – had been present since the late 1800s, as British industry traditionally relied on colonial super-exploitation and imperial monopolies rather than technological innovation to maintain its advantage in the face of rising international competition. This orientation towards the world market had likewise produced an oversized financial sector as far back as the 1600s, as new forms of incorporated capital, shareholdings, and investment spurred mercantile conquest, commodity exchange, and financialised models of popular slave ownership. As Britain’s industrial decline accelerated through the 1980s and with capital becoming increasingly mobile, the City of London came to represent the country’s most obvious source of comparative advantage. It was therefore logical that the Thatcher governments would come to embrace and promote the financial sector as a means of defending Britain’s international position within a rapidly changing global economy.

However, while emerging from the inheritance of an imperial past, the mode of Britain’s financially driven integration into global capitalism has shifted. At the height of empire, the City exported capital across the globe. Now, it largely attracts it from abroad: from under 4 per cent in 1981, foreign ownership of assets on the London stock exchange had risen to 40 per cent by 2010. By 2014, for the first time in history, the value of these assets outweighed that of the foreign investments made by British capitalists. Capital inflows, foreign direct investment (FDI), and international mergers and takeovers are all, similarly, far higher than in most other advanced economies. This pivot towards finance, particularly following the ‘Big Bang’ reforms of 1986, also had the unintended but significant effect of exposing uncompetitive national industries to foreign takeover. In 1979, overseas ownership of UK firms was just 3.6 per cent, an all-time low, but by the end of the century, as David Edgerton writes in The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, the country was unique among core capitalist economies in having ‘no approximation to a national major car firm, chemical firm, electrical engineering or electronic firm operating on its territory’. Not only has the state relinquished direct control of key strategic economic sectors to private capital, but ownership of those sectors themselves is now held disproportionately by international companies and investors who have little tying them to Britain per se. Similarly, while the City remains, as it always has been, a system for the appropriation of globally produced surplus value, the rise in foreign ownership of assets and the declining importance of Britain itself within international capital circuits means that, as finance capital has become increasingly dominant, its mode of accumulation has also been decoupled from any imperative towards broader national economic development.

This has serious implications for state managers. Some of these are well known, others less so. On the one hand, the dominance of finance over other sectors within the power bloc (to the degree that industrial capital itself is now heavily financialised), coupled with the transnational integration and mobility of capital, binds states ever closer to a mode of accumulation centred on asset trading, share-price valuation, and non-productive speculation. This encourages chronic short-termism, in which the immediate need for profit maximisation and other time-scales associated specifically with finance capital override any longer-term developmental strategy and divert investment from productive ends. Share valuation and investor confidence, which in reality express nothing more than a belief that financial assets can be traded for immediate profit, come to represent overall economic health. In Britain, this is partly expressed at the state level by measures such as the abandonment of capital controls, the delegation of interest-rates to an independent Bank of England, and the submission of spending plans to technocratic bodies such as the Office for Budgetary Responsibility, all of which depoliticise economic governance by placing it beyond the bounds of democratic debate or even rival elite strategies.

This tendency represents the strength of capital under neoliberalism via its power over the state. This, however, is not the only dynamic at play. Equally important is the contemporary weakness of capitalism as a regime of accumulation, which produces a parallel dependency on the state as a final and increasingly direct guarantor of private profit. For, whatever claims may be made, neoliberalism has not in fact seen the withdrawal of states from economic affairs, nor even a real reduction in public spending as a proportion of GDP. Rather, it has recalibrated the state’s mode of economic intervention in the context of what the Financial Times calls a global ‘secular stagnation’, now spanning several decades. Within Britain, this has seen persistently low growth, declining productivity, and chronic underinvestment from both the state and private capital. Searching for reliable and attractive profits in an overall depressed environment, the latter is increasingly drawn to risky speculative bubbles, cross-investment between enormous capital management firms now controlling many trillions of dollars in funds, warfare and its preparation, and the seizure of privatised state assets.

Only the state is able to bailout firms considered ‘too big to fail’, inject enormous qualities of liquidity into depressed financial markets via ‘quantitative easing’, or prosecute major international conflicts. It is only under the express direction of successive governments that welfare and public spending have become increasingly direct means of subsidising capital. For example, prior to Thatcher, around 80 per cent of state spending on housing was used to actually build houses. Now 85 per cent goes on housing benefit, a ‘welfare’ payment which serves to prop up private landlords, construction firms, and speculators by maintaining otherwise unsustainably inflated property prices. Crucial public infrastructure is now funded through eye-wateringly expensive Private Finance Initiatives, which the Institute for Government estimates will cost the public around three times the capital value of the schools, prisons, hospitals and other assets built under such contracts. Privatisation of critical natural monopolies in energy, communications, transport, and service provision offers lucrative and virtually (in some cases, contractually) guaranteed profit streams.

The general shift in state financing from public and corporate taxation to financialised debt, as detailed by Wolfgang Streeck in Buying Time, provides a vast and uniquely reliable source of value extraction for global capital. All of these avenues, and many more besides, are structural features of neoliberalism which express not only the relative weakness of the state vis-a-vis capital, but the chronic need of private capital for enormous, publicly backed income streams that are at least somewhat insulated from market turbulence. These fixes stave off collapse for both state expenditure and private profit, and yet all deepen tendencies towards capital’s productive decay. Quantitative easing, for example, did not encourage productive investment, but merely channeled huge economic resources into hoarding and speculative bubbles, while burdening the state with levels of debt that further mitigated against any change of course.

Often presented as a straightforward victory for capital, it is important to understand the resulting capital–state relations as expressing the contradictory but mutually reinforcing tendencies of the latter’s simultaneous power over and dependency on the former. Taken together, these dynamics have radically narrowed the strategic options available to state managers, reducing their ‘relative autonomy’ from capital and diminishing their ability to resist immediate, factional demands in the interests of the health of capitalism as a whole. This is not simply because states are dominated by capital, but because the ultimate imperative of sustaining accumulation in the context of neoliberalism’s failure to restore the profitability of productive investment pushes them towards short-term fixes and away from long-term strategic economic management.

For the Tories, this has undermined what Andrew Gamble, in The Conservative Nation, terms their historic ‘flexibility and political common sense derived from [the party’s]s relative independence from the dominant sections of property’, originating from its aristocratic constitution within an increasingly industrial society. Nigel Harris, in Competition and the Corporate Society, likewise saw the Conservative Party as possessing a ‘facility for disentangling itself from temporary association with any one group’ within changing economic circumstances. As the needs of financialised capital have become hegemonic, the strategic field and hence the Party’s flexibility has diminished. A sign of this eroded political independence is both the Party’s imposition of austerity as a response to the 2007-8 crash and its subsequent failure to change course, despite repeated proclamations that it intended to do so. From George Osborne’s vision for a ‘Northern Powerhouse’, to Theresa May’s pledge that ‘austerity is over’, to Boris Johnson’s post-Brexit agenda to ‘level up’ and rebalance the economy: disingenuousness and plain incompetence aside, the binding of government policy to a course of action rhetorically disavowed by a series of administrations speaks to an inability to move against factional interests within the ruling bloc, even if such a move may be a more likely road to both economic revival and renewed political support.

This was not always the case: from the assault on its own aristocratic roots with the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws, to the imposition of Keynesian managerialism on private capital, to Thatcher’s own assault on the outdated ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ of traditional City finance, the Conservatives have historically known when particular sections of the elite need to be sacrificed in the interests of capital as a whole. Tellingly, the only real pushback against the policies pursued by the Tories between 2010 and 2024 did not come from state managers committed to long-term economic re-orientation, nor from non-financial sectors of the ruling bloc, nor even from oppositional social movements, but from the markets themselves in response to Liz Truss’ disastrous ‘fiscal event’. On paper a neoliberal dream (and effusively praised as such in the Tory press), her unfunded tax cuts and plans for even greater financial deregulation led to runs on the pound, soaring inflation, and spiralling government borrowing costs, as investors and bond-holders lost confidence in the British state’s ability to service its debt. Granted, this is not simply a political failing but speaks to a general problem for capitalism at its present stage of development: unlike previous eras of crisis or stagnation, there are no obviously ascendant dynamics ready to restructure the world economy along new lines as, for instance, neoliberalism did to post-war capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s with its global expansion of production and pivot towards finance. As previous instances of the Conservatives’ evolution have signalled transformations within the structure of capitalism itself, so too does their post-Thatcherite stasis reflect the lack of any truly paradigmatic change in the period since 2008.

This inability to change course also meant the state was ill-equipped to respond to the two defining events of the Conservatives’ time in power: Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic. While the former was suboptimal for capitalism as a whole, the gutting of technical and administrative expertise in the civil service since Thatcher also left the state unable to provide serious impact reports or strategic guidance to capital in the new environment. Habituated to the outsourcing of trade negotiations to Brussels, it also conspicuously lacked legal, diplomatic, financial, and economic competence vis-à-vis the European bloc. Meanwhile, the lack of both a national bourgeoisie and strong industrial sector, combined with the state’s inability to pivot towards radical strategic interventionism, meant that the structural conditions necessary for a ‘successful’ Brexit in capitalist terms were absent. The pandemic, similarly, demonstrated the path-dependency and critical failure of the British state model. While the scale of its economic intervention was huge, this did not mark ‘the end of neoliberalism’ as was claimed in some quarters. What we saw was not a return to Keynesian principles, but a doubling down on the existing model of capital–state relations. This was shown partly through the reliance on subcontracting to deliver critical services and infrastructure, guaranteeing profits to corporations in logistics, pharmaceuticals, construction, and other sectors – an inefficient and expensive mode of provision, even before accounting for the tens of billions of pounds lost to waste, fraud, misappropriation, and non-delivery. In similar terms, social provision was directed through channels that carefully preserved existing relations: furlough was not an individual grant, but a subsidy to business handled through corporate payroll; no restrictions to lay-offs were implemented and no union involvement required in job retention schemes; quantitative easing, low-interest loans, and direct grants provided liquidity to financial and corporate sectors; and strictly temporary rent protections and mortgage holidays maintained the value of housing assets without fundamentally changing the status of tenants or making home ownership more accessible. Overall, as Robert Knox and David Whyte observe in Vaccinating Capitalism, the response to Covid-19 was ‘a system of life support for profit-making corporations … Crucially, the effect was to keep the corporate sector intact without the state infringing on its economic decision-making power’. The death toll and broader social impact aptly demonstrate the inability of this approach to actually deliver policy and preserve life.

In more discrete areas, too, the post-Thatcherite state now infringes upon the Conservatives’ ability to make good on their promises. Not just social provision, but the repressive apparatus central to the traditional party of ‘law and order’ is now feeling the squeeze of diminished funding and capacity. Nearly 450,000 people await trial in an overwhelmed court system; prisons are running at up to 170 per cent capacity, with fewer than 100 empty cells across the whole of England and Wales at the time of writing. Meanwhile, £10 billion was committed to the theatre of Rwanda deportations, but an administrative backlog means that 166,000 asylum applications cannot be processed and, consequently, those making them cannot be removed from the UK. While increasingly reliant upon authoritarian, racist, and chauvinistic rhetorics, and ostensibly passing legislation to put this into force, at the institutional level the Conservatives presided over a sprawling dysfunction which damaged the state’s capacity to enact the will of the executive across a number of policy areas traditionally central to the Tory agenda. Besides ministerial incompetence, bureaucratic lethargy, or the need to focus resources on Brexit and the pandemic, these issues are partly due to finances being increasingly diverted to the subsidy of private capital in ways previously outlined, as well as expensive and inefficient models of outsourced service provision undermining the state’s capacity to perform a variety of basic tasks.

In this context, Thatcher’s famous refrain of ‘there is no alternative’ takes on new salience. Once a victory cry over vanquished opponents, it now encapsulates the self-inflicted dead-end of Tory statecraft. With the increasing entanglement of capital and state, driven by the former’s simultaneous power over and dependency on the latter, the Party has lost a critical degree of strategic independence which has historically made it ideally suited to the role of state manager. As the institutions of state have become more directly involved with supporting profits in a degenerate mode of accumulation, their capacity to balance between factions of the ruling bloc and set long-term strategic pathways for development has become attenuated. This is a problem for all parties, but perhaps particularly for one whose identity and modes of political practice are so closely bound to the history of the state itself within capitalist development.

Elite recomposition and the reproduction of the ruling class

Within these macro-trends, the post-Thatcherite period has also seen significant sociological change among the upper layers of British society. Historically, the role of the Party has been to identify ascendant elite factions and metabolise them into the power structure in such a way as to preserve the whole by gradually changing the nature of its constituent parts. This has been the case since at least the mid-1800s, when the Party first cast off its original and specific identification with landed property to become, by the end of the century, the preferred political representatives of a unified aristocratic and bourgeois bloc in a way unimaginable across much of continental Europe. From that time on, whatever other changes may have occurred and whatever internal divisions may have existed, the Conservatives have generally stood for the whole of elite society. From this perspective, the Thatcherite leap from small and large national businesses to international capital followed the traditional Tory pattern, as existing alignments with declining sectors were set aside to reorient the Party towards those on the rise. However, just as the internationalisation and financialisation of capital have degraded state autonomy at the level of political economy, similar dynamics at the level of sociology have eroded the collective identity and corporate solidarity of the British ruling class itself. With this development, the Party has lost its traditional anchorage within a nationally specific class faction and, as a result, its character has changed in a number of important and historically novel ways.

In his 1991 study Who Rules Britain?, John Scott documented how the British elite had evolved over time while maintaining its internal cohesion. Up to the 1980s, dense patterns of mutually interlocking directorships and corporate shareholdings produced a high degree of national economic coordination, overseen by a distinct and closely connected social group. In the time since, this has given way to more disarticulated and internally fragmented structures at the national level, driven by the larger economic developments sketched in the previous section. The impact of this shift has not just been economic, but social, as layers of provincial capitalists who once provided a countrywide bedrock of Tory support have been all but destroyed. Ferdinand Mount, surveying local Conservative Associations in the mid-1960s, hailed

the support of every local business owner worth his salt. There they were … with waistcoats and watch chains: wool merchants in Bradford, steel men in Swansea, carpet makers in Kidderminster, fireworks manufacturers in Halifax.

This local bourgeoisie has now been replaced in regional economies by large, international employers, upon whom entire towns and their surrounding areas are now often totally dependent. Nissan, Ford, Airbus, Amazon, Tata Steel, and many more: heavily subsidised by the state, but with a purely instrumental and contingent relationship to both the Conservatives and Britain as a whole – poor substitutes for the organic, multi-generational connections of their waistcoat-clad predecessors. While small and medium capital still constitutes a significant social layer and makes up the clear majority of all businesses, they are no longer as tightly bound to the Tories as they once were, with significant proportions switching allegiances to the series of Eurosceptic Faragist parties or, indeed, to Starmer’s aggressively pro-business Labour Party. The supply chains into which contemporary SMEs are most likely to be inserted are, similarly, themselves articulated by global economic patterns and are ultimately dependent on large international capital – a different economic, cultural, and ideological arrangement from when a national bourgeoisie was sustained by an Empire managed by the state and its habitual Tory rulers.

The evolving composition of the Sunday Times Rich List (STRL) further highlights shifts in the make-up of the ruling class proper. The first edition, in 1989, was dominated by aristocratic families and established British business owners; top spot, fittingly, was held by Queen Elizabeth II. By the early twenty-first century, it was populated largely by international capitalists; and, by 2015, the Queen was no longer in the top 300. A 2022 STRL survey carried out by the University of Warwick found that over a quarter of billionaires with significant British interests were foreign nationals, another quarter were ‘non-doms’, one in seven lived abroad in tax havens, and around half of those resident here had equally important foreign investments. Speaking to the BBC to mark the List’s twenty-fifth anniversary, the compiler, Philip Beresford, attributed its transformation explicitly to Thatcher, commenting on how her economic policies had shifted the balance away from inherited wealth towards the ‘self-made’ international nouveau riche.

Alongside this recomposition ‘from above’ has run a similar process of erosion ‘from below’, as significant upwardly mobile sections of the petit bourgeoisie and lower middle-classes have gained new power, wealth, and status, particularly through the expansion and diversification of finance. While boosting the power of the City, Thatcher also recognised that its stuffiness, traditional structures, and ‘old boys’ elite networks were ill suited to capturing market share in a new financial landscape characterised by digital information flows, accelerated trading, and innovation in forms of assets, securities, and credit provision. As Alexander Gallas documents in The Thatcherite Offensive, this entailed the dismantling of the ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ of the old City, with historic family firms and personal networks replaced by more cut-throat international (particularly American) companies and traders, along with an influx of British professionals from more modest class backgrounds. The impression made by this new blood on London’s traditional elite is captured by Stephen Hoare’s memoir and history of the city’s exclusive club scene, Palaces of Power, which recounts how many hallowed membership institutions were morally scandalised yet saved from financial ruin by the coarse manners and new money of the venture capitalists, hedge fund managers, and floor traders brought into the sector after the ‘Big Bang’ of 1986. Among this new generation was one Nigel Farage, who assumed his future lay at university or in the military until he heard of free-wheeling young traders making good in the City. Resolving to become one of them as quickly as possible, he joined the London Metal Exchange as a broker; his subsequent career neatly illustrates how disruptive sections of this new elite, embodying the aggressive and cavalier tendencies of finance in their attempts to reorient Britain’s geopolitical stance, have since become for the Conservative establishment.

A further marker of elite transformation is the declining importance of private education. In Classes and Cultures, Ross McKibbin recounts that in the 1950s 95 per cent of male children from families earning over £1000 were privately educated. In Tory Nation, Samuel Earl estimates that today ‘only’ 60 per cent of children from families earning over £300,000 follow the same route – a stark educational divide and continuing marker of privilege, to be sure, but significantly below historic levels. Scott’s study similarly shows that over three quarters of the post-war business elite attended fee-paying schools and that the same was true for a significant majority of directors of financial firms up until the 1980s. Now, this applies to just 34 per cent of FTSE 350 CEOs, with 43 per cent of these and 51 per cent of the STRL educated abroad. Similar dynamics are observable across state institutions, as shown by studies carried out by the Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission. In 1971, nine tenths of top generals and admirals were privately schooled; in 2019, the proportion was less than half. The rates of top civil servants likewise fell from 90 per cent after the Second World War to 59 per cent in 2019; ambassadors and diplomats from over 80 per cent in the 1980s to 52 per cent by recent estimates. Overall, these reports estimate that just 39 per cent of the British elite across politics, business, law, the media, and other key sectors are privately educated, although the distribution and pace of the decline is uneven and somewhat accentuated by the rise of Premier League footballers, largely from working-class backgrounds, into the ranks of extreme wealth. While still hugely disproportionate to the 7 per cent of the general population enjoying such educational privilege, the trajectory is clearly and significantly downwards. Simultaneously, private schools themselves are drawing from more diverse layers, with even Eton no longer such a family affair. Whereas 60 per cent of students had alumni parents in 1960, this is now true for just 20 per cent. Similarly, around a third of pupils at top fee-paying schools are foreign nationals, leading the headmaster of King’s College to warn that they were becoming ‘finishing schools for the children of oligarchs’ in an interview with the Guardian.

As the locus of ruling class integration has increasingly shifted to the transnational level, the role of Britain’s elite schools has likewise evolved: they are no longer an exclusive mechanism for the specific reproduction of the British elite per se, but more of a networking opportunity for the global rich. This has diminished their centrality in providing successive generations of the British ruling class with an almost universally shared experience of formative socialisation, important not just for instilling cultural assumptions of their own inherited superiority over the masses, but for maintaining social cohesion and class continuity at the elite level. While the ruling class obviously still exists and pursues its interests with considerable force both in Britain and globally, it is questionable now the degree to which it retains its traditional sociological cohesion at the national level. The exceptional historical continuity of the British ruling class, which provided the Conservatives with an enviable social foundation and recruitment ground across the transition to capitalist modernity, has thus been significantly attenuated. While direct and specific conclusions are difficult to draw, it seems reasonable to infer that elite groups in Britain today may be less likely than their forebears to perceive themselves as a unified social body possessing distinctive, collective, and cross-generational aims, embodied in a national state, to which individual interests and ambitions can be subordinated.

As with all previous periods of elite recomposition, these tendencies are closely reflected within the Conservative Party. Between 1925 and 1955, 94 per cent of Tory ministers were privately educated; Thatcher’s first cabinet, at 91 per cent, showed no great departure, and neither did the wider parliamentary Party at 73 per cent. As with the broader elite, the Conservatives were also characterised by exceptionally close familial ties, leading to them being popularly known as ‘the cousinhood’ until the mid-twentieth century. From the first modern Conservative leader, Robert Peel, in 1830, to Alec Douglas-Home in 1965, three quarters of all Conservative leaders were either the sons or sons-in-law of prominent Tory politicians; since then, none have been. More broadly, according to Earl, up to the 1930s around a third of their MPs could be placed on the same family tree, and even by 1960 there were still 19 different members of the Cecil family (or, to give them their noble title, the Salisburies) in parliament. In this way, the Tory Party embodied and guaranteed a core tenet of conservatism as a political creed: the need for and desirability of the preservation of a specific ruling caste, the socio-genetic reproduction of which passed the qualities and skills for leadership from generation to generation. The durability of this ethos is shown by the cognitive dissonance experienced by members of the traditional elite at Thatcher’s assent: the daughter of a shopkeeper, she was widely (and, apparently, falsely) rumoured to be the illegitimate granddaughter of the aristocrat Harry Cust, who allegedly had an affair with her grandmother when she worked as his maid. Only by ascribing blue blood to the Iron Lady could the upper circles of the Party make sense of Thatcher’s obvious leadership qualities – although this did not stop her foreign secretary, Lord Carrington, from describing her as a ‘fucking stupid, petit-bourgeois woman’ to cabinet colleagues.

However, while the modest backgrounds of Thatcher, Major, and Heath before made them outliers at the time, their rise foreshadowed genuine party transformation. David Cameron and Boris Johnson may have recently returned the Party to Old Etonian leadership, but, overall, this tendency has been greatly diluted. Tim Bale’s recent study, The Conservative Party after Brexit, shows that, among recent cabinets, the proportion of ministers with private school backgrounds has ranged from around 65 per cent under Sunak and Truss – still very high, but well below any other period – to as low as 30 per cent under Theresa May. At one point, there were only ten Etonians in the whole of parliament; following the 2024 election, according to a Sutton Trust survey of the backgrounds of parliamentarians, under half of all Tory MPs were privately educated. This relative decline of the privately educated is also seen in the comparative rarity of large landowners (such as Lord Salisbury) and major industrialists (such as Andrew Bonar Law) rising to positions of prominence, with this decline mirrored by the rise of the lower-middle classes. According to Erzsébet Bukodi’s The Changing Class and Educational Composition of the UK Political Elite Since 1945, individuals from families of small employers and the self-employed made up a fifth of the Party leadership between 2010 and 2021 – a significant over-representation of the middle classes and petit bourgeoisie compared to the population as a whole. The ascent of Thatcher thereby accelerated dynamics initiated by post-war efforts to provide routes for intra-Party mobility, producing what dissident Tory Geoffrey Wheatcroft describes in Bloody Panico! as a ‘class war’ between patrician aristocrats and a politically active lower-middle class, who first took over the constituency associations before moving into the parliamentary Party itself. The displacement of the more conciliatory post-war generation of Butler and MacMillan (whose family press, fittingly, had published the works of Keynes and who embodied the Party’s reconciliation with post-war capitalism) over the course of Thatcher’s time in power by these newer, lower-middle-class layers without experience of managing large national firms or negotiating with union leadership itself arguably contributed to the Party’s pivot to a more aggressive, confrontational stance towards organised labour during the 1980s.

Simultaneously, the centre of gravity in the Party has shifted increasingly towards finance, which as a highly internationalised sector has also heavily contributed to increasing the remarkable and very possibly unparalleled ethnic diversity of recent Tory frontbenches. David Cameron, Theresa May and Rishi Sunak all had backgrounds in the sector, with the newly elected Kemi Badenoch linked by her financier husband, along with all but one of the Tory chancellors since 2010 – with the single exception, George Osborne, joining Blackrock soon after leaving office. This lop-sided integration is also evident in MPs’ post- or para-parliamentary careers; as destruction loomed in the 2024 election, a swathe of high-profile Conservative MPs announced their resignations, with many moving onto extremely lucrative positions in finance, investment capital, hedge funds, and corporate lobbying – precisely those sectors most likely to prioritise short-term profit maximisation over long-term developmental strategy. While Tory parliamentarians have always been intimately connected to private business, this is no longer generally as ‘captains of industry’ or through experience in any particular productive sector. While John Ross’ Thatcher and Friends shows that 70 per cent of Thatcher’s first cabinet served as directors and executives, collectively holding positions on the boards of 473 companies, MPs now largely hold such posts in an honorary capacity, presumably granted in return for the connections they can offer to state institutions rather than their professional experience or technical competence.

The cumulative effect of these changes has been to gradually alter the nature and role of the Conservative Party. It now functions less as a collective means for defending the historic power of a specific national class and more as a vehicle for individuals to secure their own advancement within a more fluid elite class structure. Together with the economic changes outlined previously, this further mitigates against strategic thinking and long-term statecraft because, increasingly, there is no all-encompassing, collective goal. Instead, in a party famed (albeit only partially deservedly) for its outward shows of unity, the tendency is towards open factionalism and high-level churn: while, in the post-war period, ministers commonly served for three to five years, between 1974 and 2023, the average tenure was 2.1 years, far lower than most other major democracies, with the longest periods in office occurring under New Labour. Between 2019 and the end of the last Conservative government, it had fallen to just eight months, although this number is somewhat skewed by the Truss interlude. At one point, medics reportedly stopped asking concussion victims who the Prime Minister was, as such knowledge had ceased to be a reliable indicator of mental capacity. While a multitude of factors lie behind this degradation, it nonetheless speaks to a party that has lost its collective purpose, commands little visible loyalty from its most prominent members, and serves largely as a kind of high-level internship on the pathway to vast personal riches in the private sector or even a personal place within the ruling class proper, no matter how undistinguished one’s performance in government has been.

As the corporate solidarity of the British ruling class has waned, so the Conservative Party has become estranged from its historic purpose and, therefore, from its distinctive modes of political practice that lent it an unparallelled sense of permanency and continuity both in material terms and within the national imagination. Thatcherism, and neoliberalism more broadly, have been highly successful class offensives in terms of the upward redistribution of wealth and insulation of economic power from democratic pressures. However, it has also seen the erosion of the British ruling class as a distinctive social body and, with it, the loss of an elite ethos in which state service carried significant prestige and essential purpose. By monopolising state institutions, primarily through the vehicle of the Conservative Party, the British aristocracy was able to defend its social position even as it ceased to be the most important economic faction. Careful management of the state and even personal sacrifice in its service – for example, through the once common front-line military service – were therefore central to ruling class reproduction. As that sociological basis has dissolved, the Conservative Party has come to embody another set of moral values, more traditionally associated with the middle classes, not only in its outward ideological pronouncements but in its internal constitution and character: individualism, personal advancement, and fratricidal competition. Conservative commentators are aware of this process, with the likes of Roger Scruton and Peregrine Worsthorne mourning the passing of the nation’s aristocracy as bearers of unique moral purpose and political acumen. We need not share their supplicancy to recognise that their lament points to a real social process, through which the once distinctive nature of the Conservative Party has been significantly eroded.

Losing the base

While ultimately rooted in the elite, the Conservative Party obviously requires much broader support in order to govern. It has achieved this by managing processes of democratisation in such a way as to ensure ruling class preservation, possibly with a greater degree of success than anywhere else in the western world. Historically, the Party has won the votes of around a third of workers, particularly the more affluent layers or those concentrated in small workplaces and provincial settings; in short, those sections of the working class most insulated from the appeal of socialism. The real mass base of the Party, however, has been middle class, encompassing property owners and professionals, farmers and landlords, small capital and the petit bourgeoisie. The attraction of these constituencies towards Conservatism is explained by their shared anxieties. Intermediary social positions render whatever advantage they have gained within the class structure vulnerable to both larger concentrations of capital and proletarian agitation. This status produces paranoia and the perception of precarity, and hence a proclivity towards ideologies that promise to reinforce the existing order (or restore an idealised lost one) by identifying and eliminating threats from both ‘above’ and ‘below’. Playing into these anxieties has historically allowed the Conservative Party to represent itself as not just an elite project, but one that speaks for ‘the people’, stands up for ‘common sense’, and defends the middle classes as the moral backbone of the nation. Far from a recent innovation, this ‘populism’ is an essential component of Tory tradition, endlessly recycled and recalibrated as social anxieties are reproduced by the turbulence of capitalist development.

When Thatcher reconstructed popular Conservatism by peeling off layers of affluent workers and pitching for the petit bourgeoisie and small business owners, this was in no way a departure from the Party’s historic methods for gaining mass support. Just as, in the mid-1980s, the lower-middle class was mobilised against the miners’ strike, so too in 1926 the petit bourgeoisie had provided the majority of strikebreakers. Thatcher, far more than the Labour Party at the time, was attentive to underlying changes in the class structure inculcated by the very model of post-war capitalism she was about to destroy. Better-off workers, anxious to defend their advance towards the middle class in the face of economic crisis and social unrest; small capital, squeezed out by big national corporations and hostile to union power under Keynesianism; a wider distribution of prosperity during the boom years, creating a ‘consumer society’ less bound to collectivist cultures and non-commercial recreation: this provided a social base that Thatcher rightly sensed was ready to be radicalised, mobilised, and incorporated into her bloc. This was largely achieved through what Stuart Hall famously termed ‘authoritarian populism’, in which free-market capitalism was combined with a ‘law and order’ appeal that cast industrial militants and racialised outsiders as the enemies of social peace. Ideology was bolstered by material benefits specifically targeted at these groups, most notably ‘Right to Buy’ and the sale of shares in privatised state companies, which together created a new mass layer of homeowners and individual investors whose interests were aligned with rising asset prices and falling inflation.

This has formed the core of the Conservative vote ever since. For some time, however, it has been clear that this base faces a crisis of reproduction. While, in each of Thatcher’s three election victories, more people aged eighteen to thirty-five voted for the Tories than for any other party – often by wide margins – by the 2024 election the age at which someone is more likely to vote Conservative over Labour had risen to sixty-three: precisely the age someone would now be had they first voted for Thatcher as an eighteen-year-old in 1979. In a very literal sense, the Party’s support base simply has not changed or renewed in nearly half a century. Expansion beyond this core is of course possible and has at times been achieved, but only in an unstable fashion reliant upon conjunctural factors, as shown by the growth of the Party’s vote in 2019 and its subsequent recession in 2024. As Phil Burton-Cartledge argues in The Party’s Over, a key reason why Tory voters are not being replaced at a sufficient rate is that younger generations are increasingly struggling to get on the housing ladder, meaning that the conservatising effects of home ownership are delayed. This presents a serious dilemma to the Conservatives, as any move to address the housing crisis risks crashing the asset values of existing mortgage owners and outright owners, including the cohort of pensioners who make up an increasingly large proportion of the Party’s supporters and rely on housing wealth to fund their social care or provide meaningful inheritance to their children. The same could be said for the other major material offer of the Thatcher years: ‘shareholder democracy’ or ‘popular capitalism’. While initial waves of privatisation swelled the number of individual shareholders from 7 per cent to 25 per cent of the population between 1979 and 1991, a recent article in the Economic History Review shows that by the start of the twentieth century this had fallen back to just 2.5 per cent, as ownership was once again centralised and concentrated in fewer hands. And unlike in 1979, there is no source of readily available wealth equivalent to the national industries or North Sea oil that can be easily diverted through targeted redistribution to the lower middle-classes to cohere popular support, nor a booming sector on the scale of the City in the 1980s that can provide an avenue for upward mobility and class recomposition in terms favourable to the Conservatives.

If the Party’s base is locked into a declinist dynamic, the wider political landscape is increasingly volatile. This is partly due to conjunctural reasons, most obviously Brexit. But gone are the days when future voting behaviour could be reliably read as that of the past: according to the British Electoral Survey, half of all voters switched party at least once across the 2010, 2015, and 2017 elections. In 2024, the Conservatives lost 47 per cent of their 2019 voters. Beyond the specifics of individual leaders, manifesto promises, or immediate issues, the growing tendency for voters to switch parties – or, indeed, simply not vote at all – is related to changes in the underlying class structure and associated developments in political identities and socio-cultural habits and norms. Again, these changes are clearly related to neoliberalism in general and Thatcherism in particular, but they are generally regarded as posing problems for the left. The destruction of the labour movement was a key Thatcherite objective, and one that was largely achieved, with figures provided by the Trades Union Congress showing that trade union membership has fallen from 13 million in the 1970s to under 7 million today within a much larger workforce. Industrial employment has similarly collapsed, from around 30 per cent of all jobs pre-Thatcher to just 8 per cent now according to the Resolution Foundation. Along with the direct political defeat of organised labour, this has also meant the destruction of a distinctive working-class habitus, as associational life, collective institutions, and identifiably proletarian leisure practices have faded.

As the relatively defined class blocs and lifeworlds of the mid-twentieth century have diminished, the class structure has exhibited a growing complexity. In particular, there has been a proliferation of intermediate, petty managerial positions, such that over three million people now work in lower technical and supervisory roles: store managers of Tesco outlets, overseers in warehouses, call centre supervisors. While often barely better off than their subordinates in material terms, the social positions and supervisory responsibilities of these groups differentiate them from the working class proper. A second major development has been a huge growth in self-employment, as recently discussed by Dan Evans in A Nation of Shopkeeper. Under Thatcher, this category grew by 68 per cent, far outstripping any other major economy in terms of proportionate increase. From 8 per cent of the workforce in 1975 to almost 15 per cent today, this peaked at over 5 million people pre-Covid-19 – almost matching the numbers employed in the entire public sector. Of all those registering as self-employed, only 2 per cent employ others, down from around half in the 1970s. For Evans, this means that the majority of the self-employed now fit the classic definition of the petit bourgeoisie, owning their own means of production but not employing wage labour. Evans argues that at its lower end, typified by ‘gig economy’ delivery drivers and other highly exploited platform workers, this class occupies a ‘grey zone’ between the petit-bourgeoisie and the proletariat, due in large part to the individualised subjectivity promoted by these labour practices; others, such as Jamie Woodcock and Callum Cant, view them as a significant new working class layer. More important than technical classifications, however, is a recognition that, despite some examples of gig workers successfully challenging platforms through collective action and unionisation, the platforms themselves are clearly designed in ways intended to mitigate against such outcomes. And, by and large, they succeed. For Evans, the gig economy enforces intra-worker competition, individuates work practices, and promotes entrepreneurial modes of action that are both function to capital accumulation and extend traditionally petit bourgeois norms of labour and socialisation to much wider sections of the population, complicating the widespread notion that the ‘Red Wall’ seats that flipped from Labour to Conservative and back again between 2019 and 2024 can be identified as straightforwardly ‘working class’. Beyond those working for platforms like Deliveroo, TaskRabbit, and Amazon Flex, the solo self-employed comprise personal trainers, hairdressers, taxi drivers, and tradesmen, along with creative professionals, consultants, and a myriad of other freelancers who range from the impoverished to the very highly remunerated. The growing heterogeneity of self-employment further complicates the class structure and the production of political and social identities. Studies of gig workers highlight, on the one hand, widespread support for unionisation, minimum standards of pay, and protection from dismissal and discrimination – that is, the classic demands of waged labourers. On the other, they find the proliferation of individualised, ‘entrepreneurial’ tendencies as a way to improve their conditions: upgrading the ‘means of production’, no matter how meagre (a better car, a motorised bike); rigging platforms to allow them to take on more work (and thus depriving other workers, with whom they compete, of ‘gigs’); informally sub-contracting work to younger family members or friends (in a manner analogous to traditional self-employed tradesmen). If this creates a large layer of voters who are theoretically ‘up for grabs’ by whoever can most effectively appeal to their diverse and contradictory interests at any particular time, it also disarticulates the coherent social blocs upon which all parties have traditionally relied.

The Conservatives’ struggles in constructing a durable new popular bloc are heightened by the virtual disappearance of one very particular expression of associational life that has withered since its post-war height: the Conservative Party itself as a mass organisation, as detailed in studies such as Martin Pugh’s The Tories and the People and Angels in Marble by Robert McKenzie and Allan Silver. As the franchise expanded (largely through Tory legislation), new voters had to be managed and won over to the Party’s cause. Particularly following the 1867 expansion, the Conservatives either founded new local membership organisations or formally incorporated pre-existing ones into the central party structure. By 1880, there had developed a complex party structure reaching large swathes of the population, with the Conservative Registration Association, Conservative Club, Conservatives Working Men’s Club, Primrose League and Orange Lodges all likely to be present to some degree in both rural and urban constituencies. The real strength of these associations, which each had different relations to the central Party, during the nineteenth century is difficult to measure, and the leadership was always careful to withhold any actual power from those organisations aimed specifically at workers, often offering free membership to avoid any actually enforceable demands for influence over policy. Nonetheless, by the end of the century there were around 300 working men’s clubs, with some cities such as Liverpool boasting several thousand members. Similarly, the arm’s-length Primrose League, founded to promote conservative values through family-friendly social activities, could boast 1.5 million members, and was unrivalled by any other party machine anywhere in the world. In Tory Nation, Earl recounts how the events it organised featured ‘a mixed bag of entertainers, including flying trapeze artists, clowns, minstrel shows, trick bicycle riders, jugglers, ventriloquists, marionettes, and brass bands.’ Responding to the 1945 election defeat, the Party added a million new members in just eight months, reaching a peak of nearly three million in 1952. As Tim Bale documents in Footsoldiers, his study of contemporary party memberships, by 2019 this had fallen to just 190,000, a decline of 95 per cent. Kemi Badenoch was elected leader by just over half of 95,000 member votes on a turnout of around 73 per cent, indicating a total current membership of only 130,000.

In The Conservative Century, Anthony Seldon and Stuart Bell discuss the previous centrality of the Party to many aspects of social life, recounting how in many rural areas and smaller towns it often provided the major outlet for leisure activities, networking, and match-making for young singles. The networks of cheap pubs, village fairs, and variety shows also created organic forms of mediation and connection between the Party leadership and ordinary members, as well as a means through which to attract local businessmen and other notables to bolster the Conservatives’ support among small capital. As individualism, consumerism, and modern leisure practices have spread, the cultural institutions of Conservatism have suffered just as much as those of the trade unions and popular socialism: the lifeworld of mass Toryism is now a relic of the past. This does not, of course, mean that conservative social values have or will disappear or even necessarily recede. It does, however, suggest that the Party is less able to bind these values to a broader political agenda that can both win mass appeal and be centrally controlled. Worse, as that membership has receded to a hardcore rump more and more out of step with the population as a whole, the Party has clung to it with increasing desperation, empowering a rank and file with the final say over electing the Party leader. This has consistently saddled the (relatively speaking) more moderate parliamentary Party with leaders reflecting (authentically or otherwise) the views and priorities of a more extreme membership, simultaneously boosting the importance and visibility of backbench groups promoting similar agendas as they jostle for prominence. The effects were clearly seen in the parliamentary impasse over Brexit and the profile of the likes of the European Research Group. Ironically, William Hague, who first granted members a say over the leader, now sees returning to a model of purely parliamentary selection as being essential for taking back control of the Party’s future direction. In last year’s leadership election, the farce of the relatively centrist James Cleverly’s supporters inadvertently sabotaging their own candidate by switching votes to Robert Jenrick in a botched attempt to keep Badenoch off the final ballot shows how one of the Party’s traditional great fears has been realised: control by a vulgar rank and file that it must court, but ultimately detests.

The decline of the Thatcherite bloc, reworking of the class structure, and destruction of the mass party – alongside the erosion of important aspects of state capacity discussed earlier – mean that the Tories are unable to reliably capitalise on the social anxieties their policies have produced. Again, this is exemplified most clearly by Brexit – both the wedge issue through which the Party secured its only convincing parliamentary majority in over twenty years and the source of a historic split in the right-wing vote which threatens their long-term electoral prospects. While Reform, with 14 per cent of the vote in 2024, did not substantially improve upon UKIP’s 13 per cent in 2015, the series of Faragist parties pose a persistent challenge to the Tories’ right, of a significance and scale that they have rarely if ever had to contend with. The appearance of this revolt on the right is related to all the major dynamics discussed thus far. Neoliberal patterns of accumulation and changing modes of state intervention have produced wider inequalities between London and the British regions than exist between East and West Germany or North and South Italy, with those areas most weakly integrated into the contemporary economy most likely to support Brexit and, at best, feel ambivalent towards a party so closely associated with a state that has largely abandoned them. Splits in the ruling bloc and the Party’s loss of collective discipline opened the way for minority factions of finance capital to ally with personally ambitious figures within the Tory leadership to reorient British capitalism away from Europe and towards the more lightly regulated American model, in a way that was dysfunctional for accumulation as a whole but served factional agendas well. And the withering of the party structure and consequent loss of popular socio-cultural identification saw hitherto impeccably loyal constituencies jump ship: a quarter of small business owners voted UKIP in the 2014 European elections, around 20 per cent of Conservative members view big business as exploitative of the common people, and a majority of the rank and file stated that they wished to see Brexit through even if it meant the destruction of the Tory Party itself. In the 2019 European elections, they were as good as their word, with 60 per cent of Tory members voting for the Brexit Party and only 20 per cent for their own. And, while it remains to be seen whether the Reform vote share is a staging post to bigger things or a high watermark, there are signs that Farage’s pop-up parties are beginning to achieve something that the Conservatives have singularly failed to do: win sections of the youth, particularly young men, over to right-wing politics. Combined with their close relationship with the newly re-elected Donald Trump and links to a number of extremely wealthy international donors, as well as Farage’s ability to tap into a burgeoning right-wing alt-media, this suggests that the challenge from Reform is indeed set to become more significant over the course of this parliamentary term.

The rise of the Faragist right points to a number of historic fractures in the Conservative bloc: between rival sections of large capital, which the Party can no longer effectively unify behind its leadership, and between large and small capital, testing the alliance the Party has historically formed between big business and middle class reaction. As these contradictions intensify, the temptation will be to continue to veer to the right. But this threatens to further accelerate and radicalise a populist dynamic, seen most clearly in Brexit, that the Party no longer has the means to control. Even if electorally successful, recent years have shown that governing in such terms threatens to bring the Party into conflict with the state institutions and sections of business with which it has historically been so closely identified. But going in the other direction by returning to a more socially liberal tenor offers no guarantees either, at least as long as the Faragist guerilla challenge continues. Here, the arithmetic is of little help: the recent election saw 19 per cent of 2019 Tory voters defect to Reform, with precisely the same number splitting in the opposite direction to Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and Greens. After dominating the first 150 years of mass democracy in Britain through its unparalleled ability to integrate competing ruling class factions and agendas behind its domination of state power, the constituent parts of Conservatism are coming apart at the seams: globe-trotting, free-market liberal capitalism and little-England Toryism; centralised authority and provincial appeal; open elitism and populist agitation; ideologies of state, nation, and individualism. Whether these elements do in fact split in formal terms is open to question and still appears unlikely. It does seem, however, that they can no longer be as easily articulated into an effective whole in the manner that they have been for most of the Party’s modern history.

Conclusions

Does all this mean that the Conservatives are bound for extinction, or, less dramatically, that their immediate and mid-term electoral prospects are bleak? Not necessarily. In electoral terms, as mentioned, there are serious problems with renewing their vote base. However, the Labour Party has its own set of challenges, reflected most obviously in its committed lack of ambition and victory through a series of marginal wins amidst depressed turn-out. After 2019, commentators widely predicted a ‘decade of Boris’; Starmer’s ‘ten-year plan’ could easily go the same way as disillusionment sets in. If that were to happen, the likelihood of a return to power of an even more populist or authoritarian incarnation of the Conservatives – perhaps even in coalition with Reform – cannot be ruled out. As chaotic as the Tories seem and as far as they have fallen, any determined ideological attack that succeeds in appealing to a significant section of the discontented electorate has the potential to seriously threaten a Labour administration that bases its entire pitch on mere (and as yet unproven) technocratic competence.

But the increasingly wild swings of electoral politics should not detract from the longer-term dynamics I have tried to sketch above. The Conservative Party may return to power sooner than some think. But it is unlikely to show the same levels of stability and statecraft that have hitherto marked its history. Times of rule may return and may even, such as, from  2010 to 2024, be relatively extended; but they are unlikely to show the same level of purpose or strategic intent as prior periods of domination. The transformations of state, capital, and class since the 1980s, authored in Britain largely by the Tories themselves, have eroded much of what made the Party distinct in the intervening years. What, beyond a general social and public degeneracy, have the Conservatives achieved over the last fourteen years? Their record will surely not bear historic comparison with earlier lengthy spells in office: propped up by an electoral system designed to protect them, the Party had nowhere to hide, its decomposition as publicly evident as that of a corpse in a gibbet. As with previous periods of evolution and crisis within the Party, given their exceptionally close association with the state and the ruling classes, their present crisis reflects and encapsulates certain features of contemporary capitalism: its persistent exhibition of a ‘perma-crisis’, its evacuation of democratic society, its production of social volatility and dissolution of traditional lifeworlds.

This is, of course, part of an evolving international field. The shift from Keynesianism to neoliberalism did not, of course, represent a replacement of ‘national’ by ‘international’ (far less, ‘good, democratic’ by ‘bad, elitist’) capitalism, but a shift in global regimes of accumulation and Britain’s place within them. Much of the Conservatives’ traditional claim to wisdom, competency, and strategic statecraft was made far easier by the enormous resources captured by empire, and later generated by the unprecedented and seemingly unrepeatable post-war boom. The degeneracy of Britain’s natural party of government is not, therefore, simply an issue of personnel or even of its broader sociological composition, but a reflection of an ongoing relative national decline which makes it immeasurably more difficult to chart a long-term path or disguise fundamentally elite politics with cheap imperial imports or hand-outs skimmed from a once dominant international position. As the traditionally pre-eminent party declines, ruling class factions become more difficult to bind into a stable bloc and political space opens on all sides to competitors. The left may rightly find pleasure, amusement, and vindication in the Conservatives’ electoral decimation. But their crisis will not necessarily be to our advantage. Instead, as long as the Party remains locked into a radicalising dynamic with its rump base, which it can no longer control, it is likely to destabilise the entire political field, creating a void on the right that both Labour and Reform will attempt to capture for themselves and feeding a dynamic that may see us alternate between periods of technocratic liberalism and middle-class reaction. This bifurcation ultimately reflects increasingly sharp splits within the ruling class itself, as different factions adopt either aggressive or defensive orientations towards the states and global institutions of the existing order within the context of rising international competition, impending climate crisis, and mass migration. As satisfying as it may be to see the Tories suffer, whether their crisis provides any cause for triumphant optimism remains a very different question.

Duncan Thomas is a socialist and writer living in Glasgow. His work has appeared in Jacobin, openDemocracy, Salvage, and elsewhere.