Preston Manning: What’s Next for Britain’s Conservatives?

A Union Jack flag flutters in front of the Elizabeth Tower, commonly known as Big Ben, in London in a file photo. Jack Taylor/Getty Images

Commentary

What’s next for Britain’s Conservatives, after having suffered a major defeat in the UK’s recent general election, removed from office after governing for 14 years, abandoned by millions of voters who either refused to vote or protested by voting Reform UK, and replaced by a Labour government of which little is expected by a dispirited electorate?

The predictable advice from those who view Britain’s political landscape from the traditional perspective of left-right-centre is that the party must move “leftward” toward “the centre” and must especially avoid any association with anything that could possibly be labelled as “right-wing” extremism.

But there are other sources of advice, which may be much more relevant.

One of these is the experience of Canadian conservatism in which a Conservative government, after nine years in office, suffered a devastating defeat in the 1993 federal election, its representation in the House of Commons plummeting from 155 seats to 2.

Much of this defeat was attributed to the failure of the party to recognize the emergence of bottom-up, grassroots forces in Western Canada and Quebec—“populist” forces, if you will. The governing Progressive Conservative party chose to ignore or denounce these forces rather than seeking to understand and accommodate at least some of what they represented. When this accommodation eventually occurred, under new leadership, the realigned Conservative Party of Canada was returned to office for nine years under Stephen Harper and is again poised to replace Justin Trudeau’s Liberal-New Democrat alliance in next year’s federal election.

But the Conservative Party of Canada is only 20 years old, whereas the Conservative Party of the UK is 190 years old. British conservatives can therefore be forgiven for perhaps looking askance at the experience of the former, and more comfortably seek instruction on “what to do” from the far longer and deeper experience of their own party.

The part of that history which may be most instructive to British conservatives today comes from the party’s response to the bottom-up, grassroots—populist, if you will—movement at the beginning of the 19th century, whereby increasing numbers of ordinary Brits began to demand a say in who formed the government, demanding in particular the right to vote.

As an initial response, in 1831 the House of Commons passed a Reform Bill expanding the franchise. But that bill was vehemently denounced by the Tory (conservative) opposition in the House and defeated in the Tory (conservative) dominated House of Lords. Thus, conservatives initially got on the wrong side of a bottom-up, populist demand for change. Their defeat of the Reform Bill resulted in riots and violent disturbances in London, Bristol, and a dozen other cities, and a landslide victory for the reform-championing Whigs under the leadership of Charles Grey in the following election.

The Whigs went on to pass the Great Reform Act of 1832, its actual title being “The Representation of the People Act.” It did away with the so-called “rotten boroughs” and expanded the franchise (gave the vote) to middle-class males. However, it left room for further expansion by failing to enfranchise the working class—an expansion which the Conservative Party under Benjamin Disraeli would later champion.

The 1830s were characterized by political polarization over the electoral reform issue and the creation of the political clubs representative thereof. In 1832, the Carlton Club was founded by Tory peers, MPs, and other conservative supporters who opposed electoral reform, following the disastrous 1831 election. For many years, it served as the headquarters of the Conservative Party. In 1836, the Reform Club was created by the Whigs and Radicals (democrats) who supported the Great Reform Act. It became the headquarters of the Liberal Party, and years later its most prominent member was William Gladstone, the Liberal leader who served as prime minister four times and who once conceded that on certain issues—such as the slavery issue—“the masses had been right and the upper classes had been wrong.”

In 1836, Benjamin Disraeli joined the Carlton Club, one year after the publication of “Democracy in America“ by the French political analyst Alexis de Tocqueville. In that work, de Tocqueville argued that the most fundamental division between political parties in democracies was over whether they were animated by the “aristocratic passion” which sought to limit the role of the ordinary people in the government of their affairs, or by the “democratic passion” which sought to expand it. Under Disraeli’s leadership, whether for pragmatic or principled reasons, the Conservative Party came to be animated more by the democratic passion. In particular, it was the Disraeli government that passed the Second Reform Act in 1867, which significantly expanded the franchise by finally giving the working class the vote and a greater say in their public affairs.

Today, the Reform Club and the Carlton Club still exist, a few blocks from each other, and it is the political ghosts that haunt both clubs that whisper the wisdom of acknowledging, embracing in part, and seeking to moderate and direct populist political energy rather than ignoring or opposing it.

What’s next for Britain’s Conservatives? Will it be to ignore the 40 percent of the country’s electors who chose not to vote at all in the recent elections, and the 14 percent who voted for Reform UK as a protest against the political establishment? Will the party denounce and distance itself from the populist sentiment which calls for a rethinking of unrestricted immigration and other policies repugnant to the average citizen, no matter how attractive those policies might be to the elites who dominate political discourse?

Or will the party and its future leadership make a concerted effort to, first and foremost, understand what motivates populist sentiment in Britain? Will it enter into dialogue with, rather than avoid, those who best represent that sentiment? Will it seek to limit the extremes to which unfettered populism may tend, not by ineffective denunciations but by urging and demonstrating “prudence” as Gladstone once advised, and “informing the discretion” of the rank and file through educational efforts as Thomas Jefferson once advised?

Will British conservatives seek to harness populist political energy to the advancement of conservative principles and objectives as Disraeli once did, or will they reject that course as many traditional Tories once did? Only time will tell, but Britain’s future may well hinge on how, and how well, questions such as these are answered in the days ahead.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.