Dr Tim Bale is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Sussex University and is the author of The
Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron, published this week by
Polity Press. He will be launching the book this Wednesday, 3rd February, at
a public lecture and Q&A at the LSE which will be chaired by ConservativeHome’s Jonathan
Isaby.
Devoted denizens of ConservativeHome could hardly be blamed if they preferred to file and forget a fair few of the twenty years that have elapsed since Margaret Thatcher’s departure from office, especially now that the Tories look set for a return to power. But remembering what happened over the last two decades is important – if only, once they take office, to avoid repeating the mistakes which tipped the Conservative Party into opposition in the first place, as well to learn from the errors that trapped it there for so long. After all, the seeds of the serial defeats inflicted by Tony Blair were sown several years before 1997, and the Party was to a very great extent the author of its own misfortunes in the years that followed.
Part of the problem under both Thatcher and Major was that the Tories began to believe their own propaganda. Rather than realising that their electoral victories in 1983, 1987 and 1992 were contingent affairs – achieved through a combination of astute timing and a Labour opposition widely seen as incompetent and out of touch – Conservatives too eagerly bought into the myth that they had ‘won the battle of ideas’ and thereby won over a stodgily centrist country to the advantages of small-state neo-liberalism. As a result, instead of offering a change of direction, the Party believed it could, under John Major, get away with offering a change of tone.
In fact, by the early 1990s, polls were showing that public had got pretty much all they wanted from the Conservatives and were looking for a government that was going to invest more in health and education, not close coalmines, privatise the railways and the post office, and clamp down on spending. Yet, rather than making for the politically more profitable centre before Labour finally got its act together, the Party – consumed by its own internal rows over Europe – seemed instead to head for the hills.
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