Will Britain’s

Conservatives Be in
Power Permanently?
A new book argues that Boris Johnson’s government is already losing its grip.
Here’s why that’s wishful thinking.

By Jamie Maxwell, a political journalist in Glasgow, Scotland.

Boris Johnson waves after speaking to conference on the third day of the Conservative party
conference on October 6, 2015 in Manchester, England. DAN KITWOOD/GETTY IMAGES
OCTOBER 16, 2021, 6:23 AM

Not that long ago, the consensus in British politics was that the Conservative
Party would struggle to win another majority in the House of Commons. The
Tories lost three successive general elections to the Labour Party between 1997
and 2005 and only scraped back into power in 2010 as a minority government
after agreeing to rule in coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Much like the
Republicans during Barack Obama’s presidency, the Conservatives, it was
believed, were geriatric, their voters disproportionately old, white, and rural.
They were divided, particularly on the issue of Britain’s membership in the
European Union. And they were out of touch. David Cameron, who led the
Tories from Downing Street between 2010 and 2016, may have cast himself as
a progressive centrist, closer in style to Tony Blair than Margaret Thatcher. But
his governing agenda, focused on government austerity, was conventionally
right-wing.

Fast forward to 2021 and theories of Conservative decline are harder to come
by. Boris Johnson, Cameron’s successor once removed, commands a
Commons majority of 83. Until recently, the Tories enjoyed a clear poll
lead over Labour. Crucially, Brexit—for years, the main ideological fault line on
the British right—has been implemented. Barring a sudden Europhile shift in
British public opinion, the days of Tory members of Parliament tearing
themselves to pieces over obscure Brussels diktats are done.
Phil Burton-Cartledge, Falling Down: The Conservative Party and the Decline of Tory Britain, Verso, 336
pp., $29.95, September 2021

This feels, then, like an inauspicious moment to publish a book arguing that the
right’s grip on power in Britain is beginning to fade. Yet in Falling Down, the
English sociologist and blogger Phil Burton-Cartledge does precisely that—with
mixed results.

Burton-Cartledge advances two core claims. The first is that demographic

trends are hostile to Tory hegemony—over the long term, at least. Conservative
electoral success rests on ever-rising rates of asset ownership, he writes. Older
Brits who bought property in the 1980s and ’90s lean to the right but will soon
start to die off. Their millennial and Gen Z counterparts, on the other hand,
can’t get on the housing ladder and won’t, therefore, be voting Tory anytime
soon (or in the future).

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The second claim is that Brexit has trashed the Tories’ reputation for economic
management. The Conservatives have traditionally been the preferred party of
the British ruling class, charged with administering the British state for the
benefit of the private sector. But most businesses in Britain opposed leaving the
European single market, and the stripped-down trade deal Johnson negotiated
with the EU last year has damaged U.K. economic growth. The chaotic Brexiteer
populism of Johnson’s Vote Leave government thus stands in stark opposition
to the “collective interests of British capital as a whole,” Burton-Cartledge
writes.

Burton-Cartledge makes some useful points, particularly on the social

composition of the Tory base. He is right to argue, for instance, that British
politics is increasingly shaped by generational dynamics. At the last U.K.
general election in 2019, 57 percent of Brits under the age of 25 voted for
Jeremy Corbyn’s left-wing Labour Party. A slightly higher proportion of voters
65 and older backed Johnson’s Tories. Thirty years ago, the age differentials
were much less pronounced. This pattern maps onto deeper cultural and class
divides. Younger voters concentrate in major metropolitan centers—London,
Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool—where the pressures of the private rental
sector and low-paid employment are acute. Older voters, by contrast, are on
average more suburban and secure. According to the U.K. Office for National
Statistics, nearly three-quarters of British baby boomers own their own homes.
The comparative figure for millennials—after more than a decade of stagnant
wages and soaring house prices—is less than 40 percent. Older Brits also backed
Brexit in much larger numbers than younger Brits and are more likely to share
the right’s atavistic approach to issues like immigration, citizenship, and
assimilation. Younger Brits are more cosmopolitan in outlook.

Burton-Cartledge’s faith in the inevitable demographic erosion of Tory support

is misplaced, however. For one thing, it is difficult to establish a link between
economic insecurity and a sustained upsurge in leftist radicalism. Millennial
precarity may have fueled the recent socialist insurgencies of Corbyn as well as
Bernie Sanders in the United States. But in other Western countries, the far-
right is beginning to capitalize on youthful discontent with the status quo. In
France, the ultranationalist Marine Le Pen is currently the candidate of
choice for voters aged 25 to 34 ahead of next year’s presidential standoff against
Emmanuel Macron. And in Germany, the anti-immigrant Alternative for
Germany drew significant support from the under-30s in a recent provincial
election. Dig deeper into “Generation Left’s attitudes and ideas,” James
Meadway, a former Labour Party advisor, wrote in July, and “we start to see just
how potentially fragile” its enthusiasm for socialism is.

Then there is the looming prospect of a millennial asset boom. In Britain, the
postwar generation has amassed a huge amount of on-paper wealth. In
2019, ONS data showed that—largely as a result of Britain’s hyperinflated
housing market—1 in 5 Brits over the age of 65 was now technically a
millionaire. At some point—albeit not imminently, perhaps—that wealth is
going to shift from British pensioners to their adult children. The “great wealth
transfer” will exacerbate intragenerational inequalities, with middle and upper-
class millennials reaping the benefits of their families’ lucrative property
portfolios while working-class millennials miss out. But it could also create a
cohort of asset-rich voters hostile to the inflationary spending policies of the
left. “[N]o righteous ‘revenge of the millennials’ can be taken for granted,” New
York Magazine’s Eric Levitz wrote in July. In fact, their “collective investment
in the status quo” may be greater than that of any other generation in history,
Levitz said.

The second part of Burton-Cartledge’s analysis is more intricate than the

first. Falling Down charts the history of the Conservative Party from the rise of
Thatcherism in the late 1970s to the ascent of Johnson after Brexit. The Tories
must rank among the most successful political organizations in the world,
Burton-Cartledge says. Since 1900, 14 of Britain’s 23 prime ministers have been
Conservatives; Tory governments have ruled Westminster for 46 of Britain’s 76
postwar years. To that extent, the Conservatives feel like an embedded feature
of Britain’s constitutional architecture, as permanent and unmoving as the
Palace of Westminster itself.

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The electoral dominance of the British right nonetheless reflects its capacity for
adaptation, according to Burton-Cartledge. Tory leaders reluctantly accepted
the social democratic reforms implemented by Labour between 1945 and 1951.
In the 1980s, Thatcher embraced a more aggressive governing project aimed at
defeating the left and restoring capitalist priorities to the heart of the British
civil service and government. Cameron’s election as party leader in 2005,
following the rise of Blairite New Labour, signaled a shift away from the hard-
line social values of the Thatcher era and the emergence of a softer brand of
“liberal Toryism,” less hostile to progressive causes like same-sex
marriage and climate change.

Johnson’s leadership represents another shift for the party, blending some of
the core themes of Thatcherite ideology—an authoritarian appeal to law and
order, the belligerent rhetoric of Anglo-British nationalism—with a pragmatic
approach to state power. The prime minister’s willingness to commit significant
sums of money to a “leveling up” strategy aimed at reducing the regional
inequalities in growth and prosperity that have long scarred Britain’s economic
landscape suggests he has dispensed with the principal tenets of laissez faire—
or, at least, that he is open to a long-term expansion of the U.K. public sector in
a way that his recent predecessors, Theresa May aside, were not.

Johnson’s success, of course, is Brexit-dependent. On Jan. 31, 2020, the U.K.

left the European Union, resolving the central schism in contemporary British
conservatism—how much sovereignty should Britain cede to its continental
neighbors?—and decisively unifying the Tories in Parliament after years of
internal wrangling. Six weeks earlier, at the U.K. general election on Dec. 12,
2019, Johnson had also won a swath of historically Labour voting seats in the
north of England by campaigning on the uncompromisingly simple pledge to
“get Brexit done.” Two decades of incremental Labour decline, coupled with
a subtle hardening of English national identity since the creation of the Scottish
and Welsh parliaments in 1999, helped demolish Labour’s so-called “red wall”
and deliver the largest Tory majority in three decades.

These developments, for Burton-Cartledge, throw up a number of challenges

that Johnson may or may not be able to meet. Can stoking an intergenerational
culture war, fought over Brexit-adjacent issues like the BBC and the British
national anthem, disguise the absence of a coherent Tory economic program?
Will the food and workers shortages associated with the Brexit crisis eventually
prompt an electoral backlash for the Conservatives in middle England or push
British business interests into the arms of Labour, now under the struggling
centrist leadership of Keir Starmer? Frustratingly, large chunks of Falling
Down read like a neutral overview of how the Conservatives have behaved in
office, leaving the important analytical questions posed in the opening chapters
of the book only partly answered by its end.

Equally, there is little sign of Brexit having disrupted Conservative ties to British
capital. In the run-up to the 2019 election, businesses donated just under 6
million pounds ($7.9 million) to the Tories. Labour, on the other hand, received
a fraction of that amount—about 200,000 pounds ($263,000)—from
businesses. Moreover, Johnson has carefully bolstered his corporate credentials
by appointing two former investment bankers—Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javid,
both stanch free-marketeers—as chancellor of the Exchequer and health
secretary, respectively. If Johnson’s dominance of the Conservative Party has in
anyway undermined its “historic propensity to win elections and form
governments,” as Burton-Cartledge puts it, or operate as “the indispensable
machine for arranging and repeating patterns of dominance and subservience
across British society,” the damage, for now, remains well hidden.

By focusing on somewhat vague generational and class trends, Burton-

Cartledge overlooks the more obvious fracture opening up beneath the prime
minister’s feet. Brexit has confirmed the Conservatives as primarily a party of
English nationalism, built around the demands and expectations of an English
electorate increasingly indifferent to the future of the U.K. as a multinational
state. Scotland’s grievances are chiefly democratic. The Conservatives may be
the dominant force at Westminster, but they haven’t won a general election
north of the Anglo-Scottish border since 1955. And Scots may have voted
overwhelmingly against Britain’s departure from the EU in 2016, but, as a result
of Brexit, they have now lost their European citizenship rights just like everyone
else in the U.K. These tensions will be difficult to contain. In May, Nicola
Sturgeon’s pro-independence Scottish National Party won a fourth term at
Holyrood, the devolved Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, on a promise to hold
a fresh referendum on leaving the U.K. within the next five years. In 2018, a poll
by YouGov found that 63 percent of Conservative Party members would be
happy for Scotland to leave the U.K. if it meant Britain could complete its
departure from the EU without obstruction. Granted, Brexit may have partially
bridged the north-south divide in England, but it has at the same time wrenched
open a deeper set of constitutional rifts across the U.K.—rifts that Johnson, who
owes his premiership to the growth of Euroskeptic sentiment in England, looks
uniquely ill-equipped to manage.

As his victories in the Brexit referendum in 2016 and general elections in 2019
show, Johnson is an astute and effective political campaigner. But he is not cut
out for government. His handling of the COVID-19 crisis has been a disaster.
No country in Europe has lost more of its citizens, in absolute numbers, to the
virus than the U.K., and even now, despite the relative success of Britain’s
vaccination program, case rates are higher in the U.K. than in any other
European nation. Johnson’s instinct for self-preservation has softened in office,
too. On Sept. 7, the prime minister announced plans to boost the post-pandemic
social care system through an across-the-board increase in National Insurance
payments. As well as discriminating against low-wage workers—Brits making
as little as 9,500 pounds ($12,800) per year pay National Insurance
contributions—the announcement broke a specific Tory election pledge not to
raise taxes. Two days later, on Sept. 9, a new poll of Westminster voting
intentions showed Labour ahead of the Conservatives for the first time in 10
months.

Still, the likelihood of any momentary dip in Conservative support marking a

permanent decline in the party’s fortunes is slim. If Johnson goes, he can always
be replaced by a more competent successor. By the end of Falling Down, even
Burton-Cartledge has lost faith in his premise. “No one got rich betting against
the Tories,” he concludes. Instead of “How long will the Tories rule Britain?”
perhaps the question Burton-Cartledge should have asked was: How long will
Britain survive under Tory rule?