The Conservative Party's survival as a significant political force was now open to serious question for the first time since the crisis over the Corn Laws. The Labour Party has commanded a fairly consistent level of attention, whether in office or in opposition. But it seems that the Conservatives are fated to be regarded either as unavoidable or irrelevant. This book presents an analysis that suggests that the party leader plays a less important role in Conservative recoveries than a distinctive policy programme and an effective party organization. It examines the Conservative position on a series of key issues, highlighting the difficult dilemmas which confronted the party after 1997, notably on economic policy. New Labour's acceptance of much of the main thrust of Thatcherite economic policy threw the Conservatives off balance. The pragmatism of this new position and the 'In Europe, not run by Europe' platform masked a significant move towards Euro-skepticism. The book also traces how the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Parties adapted to the creation of the Scottish Parliament, exploring the re-organisation of the Scottish party, its electoral fortunes and political prospects in the new Scottish politics. It examines issues of identity and nationhood in Conservative politics in the 1997-2001 period, focusing on the 'English Question' and the politics of 'race'. The predictable results of the Conservatives' failure to develop an attractive, consistent narrative are then analysed. Right-wing populist parties with charismatic leaders enjoyed some electoral success under the proportional representation systems in 2002.
reached, for example, about the policy of reducing tariffs. If markets are competitive, and the political economy is impotent, then reducing tariffs turns out to improve the general welfare, suitably defined, despite some distributional consequences. But political economy is not of course impotent, otherwise the repeal of the Corn Laws in nineteenth-century Britain would not have been such a prolonged affair, and the Economist magazine would not have had Bayly 04_Tonra 01 21/06/2011 10:20 Page 118 118 History, historians and development policy to be founded to argue
repealing the Corn Laws, which kept the price of grain artificially high, Conservative Prime Minister Robert Peel was merely doing his monarch’s work. This is because repeal is instigated immediately after Victoria is shown becoming aware of the people’s suffering – through reading Oliver Twist . At the precise moment she first appreciates the unfortunate position of her subjects the royal couple are disturbed
News from Nowhere (1993 [1890]). Writing in the Observer newspaper, the political journalist Andrew Rawnsley (2014) recently compared current divisions amongst the British Conservative Party over Europe to what he regards as the party’s last ‘fundamental’ schism when, in 1846, it was critically divided by the Corn Laws. He writes, ‘History does not repeat itself, but it can rhyme’. Resisting (for the most part) a temptation to play with the relationship between the Corn Laws and conceptions of sustainability, I will nevertheless develop my argument via Rawnsley
hundred times. He heard Carlyle lecture in 1840 and was deeply impressed. 2 The violence implicit in Chartist agitation caused much anxiety. As the economy deteriorated, the Chartist challenge became more pressing and public order became an issue, Dickens found the manifestation of the mob an ever more fascinating subject. The Anti-Corn Law League was formed in 1838; in 1839 there were Chartist riots in
appeal at the disillusioned voters of ‘Middle England’. The Conservative Party’s survival as a significant political force was now open to serious question for the first time since the crisis over the Corn Laws. John Major resigned as Conservative leader immediately after the election and a number of potential successors lost their seats in the landslide. By electing William Hague as leader, Conservative MPs handed the daunting challenge of restoring the fortunes of a shattered party to the youngest and least experienced of the leadership candidates. This volume
, riots broke out in London and the Midlands.3 Keats wrote amidst febrile debates concerning responses to the spiralling corn prices generated by the 1815 Corn Law and cheap labour exacerbated by the influx of soldiers returning from the Napoleonic Wars (Barnes 1930: 117–84; Gash 1978). Proposals for a second Corn Bill were debated in Parliament during late 1818 and early 1819. The impact of these factors on the prices and distribution of food led to increasing food insecurity (and profoundly influenced Keats’s poetry at that time; see Marggraf Turley et al. 2012). It
-Boer’ stance and criticism of the government. For the peace movement, she quickly became the heroine of the conflict. This chapter examines Butler, Fawcett and Hobhouse’s wider attitudes to war, imperialism and race, and considers the contribution each made to debates on the Anglo-Boer war. Josephine Butler (1828–1906) came from a prosperous Liberal background. Her father, John Grey, had been active in the anti-slavery movement, the campaign against the Corn Laws and the agitation for the 1832 Reform Bill. His influence on Josephine is confirmed by the fact that she
reconcile the party to the 1832 extension of the franchise to the new manufacturing classes. This involved the attempted but abortive conversion of the party to free trade and the scrapping of the Corn Laws (1846) that, to some extent, damaged landed interests and so split the party. It was around this time that the term ‘Conservative Party’ began to be generally used. Later in the century Disraeli was to
associated with Adam Smith and, later, the nineteenth-century ‘Manchester School’ of economists, dominated by the Anti-Corn Law activists John Bright and Richard Cobden, and were reiterated in the twentieth century by the ‘Chicago School’ and the ideas of Milton Friedman, von Hayek and Robert Nozick. However, the limitations of this approach led to the emergence of New Liberalism at the end of the nineteenth