UK Conservatives Are Banking on a Losing Strategy
The approach that delivered electoral success for the UK’s Tories over the last decade is starting to run out of road. But for now, the Conservatives are lucky to have an ineffectual Labour opposition that’s afraid to criticize their pandemic response.
UK prime minister Boris Johnson in August 2020. (Andrew Parsons / No 10 Downing Street via Flickr)
When Britain departed the European Union (EU) at the end of January 2020, it did so with the Tories at the peak of their powers. Not only had they won convincingly in 2019, but this was also the culmination of rising support for their party since 2001.
To talk about the problems the Tories have, and to argue that the party is facing long-term decline, might seem premature, if not downright delusional. But there are powerful social forces working against the Conservatives.
Sawing Off the Branch
The Margaret Thatcher and John Major governments were corrosive of their own political dominance. Thatcher’s successful assault on the labor movement left the door open to rolling back the social wage. The preeminence of the executive, with its crude but ruthless attacks on independent points of authority within the state system, and the accelerated closure of swaths of the country’s industrial base, alienated natural supporters in the professions and among the petty bourgeoisie who made a living from the working-class communities the Tories destroyed.
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