Political Movements in Urban England, 1832-1914 by Matthew Roberts

Author:Matthew Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan Education UK
Published: 2009-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7: Defining and Debating Popular Conservatism

The electoral success of the Conservative party used to be dismissed as accidental, or else it was seen as the result of anti-democratic strategizing. According to this ‘negative’ interpretation of popular Conservatism, the Tories were largely the passive beneficiaries of deference; religious, ethnic and class tensions; or of patriotic and imperial sentiment, and their opponent’s weaknesses.1 In addition, it was noted how the Tories went to great lengths to ‘avoid rather than confront the mass electorate’.2 Few historians would now accept, in the wake of the critique of ‘electoral sociology’ and the ‘new political history’, that popular Conservatism can be viewed as the product of elite manipulation or reduced to the expression of underlying socio-economic structures, such as class.3 As Francis and Zweiniger-Bargielowska have argued, the problem with subjecting the history of the British Conservative party to a class analysis is that it has ‘always had difficulty in explaining how a party led by landed aristocrats and the bourgeoisie has sustained a dominant position in an emerging parliamentary democracy in which the majority of the electorate were working class.’4 This chapter offers a critique of the ‘negative’ and sociological model of popular Conservatism. It shows just how active, creative and integrative the Conservative party was in the face of democratization, and how aspects of Conservative ideology resonated with popular audiences.

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