The victory of Cameron’s Conservatives in 2010 ushered in the idea of a new Conservative Party, repairing both image and electoral prospects. However, this chapter will examine to what extent that change occurred, and how much the Conservatives were united or divided by the same older questions of policy and ideology – particularly on Europe and the economy. The chapter will also analyse the development of the party’s structures, power and personnel, and contemplate what effects any change may have had.

By looking at the impact of migration within Britain and concentrating on the industrial workplace in Luton, this chapter shows how different forms of mobility within ‘working-class culture’ were consonant with the enduring salience of stories about historical hardships drawn from early life. It explores how, even as the Labour Party shied away from discussing the inter-war Depression, many manual and non-manual workers still spoke about politics in these older terms. However, remarkably similar stories about unemployment and the Depression before the war could also feed into Conservative support. The chapter closes with a discussion of attitudes towards immigration and the welfare state.

Looking at London, a relatively prosperous area between the wars, this chapter points to the persistence of ambiguous memories of the inter-war period, with partial achievements in social reform, efforts to halt international conflict, and decent standards of consumption recognised alongside poverty, unemployment, and the slide towards war. This chapter establishes some of the challenges that people faced in passing on stories about the past to younger generations shortly after the Second World War, in a landscape in which different political parties were competing to ‘fix’ the memory of the inter-war decades in place.

This chapter opens up a fuller discussion of how sites of socialisation outside the family reworked the meaning of stories about the past. Looking at Huddersfield, it focuses on the consequences of selective grammar schooling for disrupting ‘traditional’ attachments to working-class cultures of politics, shifting people’s class- and place-based identities and weakening the political status of memory. It explores these issues from the perspectives of both socially mobile grammar school leavers and their parents left in Huddersfield. It also highlights cases in which parents and their children concurred about these issues.

This chapter explores the transition from the politics of identity to what we define as ’the unfinished politics of race’. It moves on from the substantive accounts of specific types of mobilisations to the broader transformations that characterise the current conjuncture, in which we see a continually shifting relationship between counter publics and alternative public spheres on the one hand and the mainstream institutions of society on the other. An important theme in the chapter is an account of the changing political debates on race and multiculturalism in both the Conservative and Labour Parties. This includes a critical analysis of the arguments put forward under the labels of Red Tory and Blue Labour. We argue that these arguments, although they cover a wide range of social and political issues, have been deeply inflected by continual preoccupations about the articulation of a new form of identity politics framed by concerns about race, immigration, and the positioning of whiteness in the current period.

This chapter examines the politics and the practice of partnership in the urban renewal era. This public-private dynamic was the central political relationship which drove urban transformation; it was codified and mandated explicitly within planning legislation and central policy diktats and pursued energetically by many individual local authorities eager to remake the image and economy of their towns. I show how this hybrid, mixed economy of planning was situated within the wider political economy of post-war Britain, tracking the political influence and connections of the property and construction sectors as well as the attitudes and policy positions of both the Conservative and Labour Parties. I also trace the operation and impact of partnership-based urban renewal on the ground in various cities, focusing in particular on Manchester, Liverpool and Nottingham. Local authorities had a range of motivations for working with the commercial development sector and their experiences were not uniform. The chapter shows that some cities managed to navigate the new terrain of public-private developmentalism more successfully than others, but I also stress the basic asymmetries involved in these relationships, particularly for those places that were struggling most economically.

After the end of the premiership of Margaret Thatcher in 1990, the Conservatives struggled to regain the hegemonic position they enjoyed under her leadership, having to wait until 2019 to once again win a general election with a convincing majority. This chapter analyses these travails in relation to the silent revolution and the silent counter-revolution. As a classic catch-all party, the Conservatives have had to battle to hold together a sufficiently broad electoral coalition, challenged in the political centre by the Liberal Democrats and (for a time) New Labour, and on the right by Eurosceptic populists in the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and more recently the Brexit Party. As the chapter explores, the Conservatives in opposition after the 1997 general election responded initially to the silent counter-revolution, attempting to shore-up their support on the right. Ongoing electoral defeat saw the party under David Cameron embrace the process of value change identified in Inglehart’s ‘silent revolution’ thesis. In more recent years, the Conservatives have sought once again to contain, and arguably have embraced, the silent counter-revolution of the populist radical right.

The National Government entered a new phase in the spring of 1937, as Neville Chamberlain succeeded Stanley Baldwin as Conservative leader and Prime Minister. As this chapter shows, appeasement, though controversial, preserved peace in the present and did little to disrupt the Conservatives’ continuing efforts to construct their popular appeals around the government’s record of economic recovery from 1931. Drawing upon all twelve constituency case studies, the chapter considers the impact of rearmament on employment levels and assesses the local implications of the government’s social reform programme, including the Education Act 1936, the Holiday with Pay Act 1938 and especially the impact of the Physical Training and Recreation Act 1937 on local government facilities. The chapter also demonstrates how Labour wrestled back some control of the political initiative in the late 1930s. It argues that Labour began to restore its own reputation for competent government through a well-publicised programme of municipal social reform in London, its growing presence in neighbourbood organization (including among the suburban electorate), and its critique of the government’s handling of the distressed area. In doing so, Attlee’s party not only contested the government’s narrative of recovery, it also began the process of articulating a particular version of 1930s Britain that ultimately defined Britons’ political and historical imaginary for several generations.

The Conclusion draws together the most important arguments arising from the preceding chapters and offers a commentary on the methodological and historiographical implications of the book for our understanding of popular Conservatism, and popular politics more broadly, in twentieth-century Britain. It highlights three phenomena that shaped the character of inter-war Conservatism. The first is the fact that party activists saw the task of cultivating the new electorate in resolutely local terms, reflecting their abiding commitment to pre-war conceptions of popular Conservatism and how it operated. The second is the role that voters’ material interests played in shaping activists’ understanding of representative politics; the methodological point here being that the agency of local activists, hitherto emphasized in the wake of the ‘linguistic turn’, was circumscribed by existing and inescapable agendas defined by trade, employment, economic prosperity, living standards and amenities. The third phenomenon is the growing significance of modern central government to the enterprise of popular politics between the wars: electoral strategies in the constituencies rested on the assumption that living standards could be successfully managed by government initiative. The chapter concludes by exploring how the Conservatism of the 1930s therefore fostered a programmatic, activist culture of government that did much to foreshadow the statist turn of British politics in the 1940s and 1950s.

Existing accounts of how the Conservative party responded to the challenges of mass democracy after 1918 draw heavily on Stanley Baldwin’s leadership. Chapter 2 explores how local Conservative parties related to this Baldwinite public appeal, which was created in their party’s name using the latest mass-media technology but which they often found at odds with their own conception of popular Conservatism. It considers how activists sought to rehabilitate a ‘politics of place’ after 1918, shaping their own policy appeals, choice of language and public identity according to local political traditions and the perceived interests of the local electorate. It argues that the Conservatives’ experience of the 1920s was therefore marked by an uneasy asymmetry of appeals at national and local levels and highlights the mixed reception and doubts about the effectiveness of Baldwinite Conservatism. In doing so, it brings to the fore the attitudes with which Conservative activists approached the formation of the National Government in 1931.

Drawing upon Stockton-on-Tees and Leeds West as case studies, this chapter explores the relationship between the National Government and popular Conservatism in urban, industrial, predominantly working-class constituencies. It demonstrates how Conservatives in the depressed regions, despite budgetary impediments to social reform legislation, succeeded in constructing a distinctive working-class appeal in the 1930s. They did so first by seeking to assert a reworked version of anti-socialism among working-class voters at the 1931 general election; then, in relation to relief campaigns among the unemployed, by seeking to rehabilitate a conspicuous Conservative presence in working-class communities; and ultimately, in 1935, by embracing the National Government’s cross-party example to advocate a programme of economic reconstruction that was both in keeping with reformist Conservatism and capable of retaining erstwhile Liberal and Labour voters.

Drawing upon the case studies of Norfolk North and Devizes, this chapter explores the relationship between the National Government and popular Conservatism in rural, mixed-class constituencies. Through its policies of tariff protection, targeted subsidies, marketing reforms and, in due course, preparations for wartime food production, the National Government transformed British agriculture in the 1930s. This was orchestrated on behalf of the government by Walter Elliot, the ambitious and reformist agriculture minister between 1932 and 1936, who projected the policies as integral to national recovery both by means of self-sufficiency and improved public health. The chapter shows that, despite their interventionist nature, these policies were embraced by local Conservatives as demonstrable evidence of the party’s commitment to agriculture. It also shows that historical critiques centred around the political and social control allegedly wielded by the Conservative landholding interest remained a common and updated feature of Labour and Liberal politics. Under the National Government, however, Conservatives were able to combine modernity and paternalism. Government policies helped to modernise farming methods and restore profitability, and in consequence rehabilitated traditional paternalist politics through new methods of welfare provision. Whether by means of private largesse (as in the case of Sir Thomas Cook MP in Norfolk North) or public provision, the amenities and improvements championed by rural Conservatives aimed to match those already available to the urban population and to secure for the rural worker a share in the national recovery.

Drawing upon the case studies of Ilford, Epping, Birmingham Moseley and Liverpool East Toxteth, this chapter explores the relationship between the National Government and popular Conservatism in suburban, predominantly middle-class constituencies. In the 1920s, as chapter 2 argued, suburban Conservatives rejected Baldwin’s attempts to appeal to voters along apolitical lines and instead urged a robust party stance; however, their own struggle to rehabilitate the conspicuous partisanship that had characterised the civic culture of Edwardian Conservatism – and which they interpreted as apathy among ‘known’ local Conservatives - led many activists to doubt the future prospects of Conservatism in the face of Labour competition. Chapter 5 argues that 1931 proved a turning point. The experience of the general election of that year initiated Conservative activists to the advantages of articulating a non-party variety of anti-socialism that matched the cross-party makeup of the National Government. It also encouraged them to cultivate an ostensibly non-party presence in the associational life of the suburbs, including in the new housing estates. Yet, as the chapter demonstrates, the National Government continued to challenge the suburban Conservative activist in some ways: National anti-socialism could be as much a source of competition as cooperation between local Conservatives and Liberals, and the government’s policy of Indian constitutional reform antagonised elements within the party. Even so, by 1935, the Conservatives’ suburban grassroots, so often the voice of diehard Conservatism, remained wedded to the National Government and looked enthusiastically to Baldwin as both the embodiment and facilitator of its ‘national’ appeal.

This chapter charts the overall course and key episodes of the National Government during Ramsay MacDonald’s premiership (1931-1935) and that of Stanley Baldwin (1935-37), considering in particular the fortunes of popular Conservatism in the constituencies. It has four sections. The first explores how the Conservatives exploited the financial and political crises of August 1931 to construct a new anti-socialist paradigm that gave the outgoing Labour government’s alleged failing a concrete form around which all Conservatives could mobilise. The second and third sections outline the National Government’s work in securing economic recovery and responding to the plight of the unemployed. It argues that this reflected a culture of active and imaginative government. The final section explores the relationship between party and ‘national’ political identities in the constituencies. IT argues that the process of defining the National Government in the interests of local Conservatism introduced the rank and file to a broader range of political discourses, which complemented but did not supplant their preoccupation with rehabilitating a traditional politics of place.

The formation of the National Government and the debates around national recovery bring into stark focus the national distinctions that still shaped British politics in the age of mass democracy and mass media. This chapter explores the effect of these distinctions on how Scottish Unionists and Welsh Conservatives related to the National Government, how they presented its record of economic recovery to local voters, and how their opponents responded. Drawing on case studies including Dunbartonshire and Dundee in Scotland, Pembrokeshire and Gower in Wales, the chapter analyses the popular politics of National Conservatism as it traversed the so-called ‘Anglo-Celtic frontier’. Starting with a discussion of the 1931 general election campaign, it demonstrates how the National Government helped the Conservatives to neutralise old hostilities while also helping their opponents to renew or inspire anti-Tory sentiment. This was reflected in the election results: in Scotland, the Unionists gained twenty-eight seats, including Dundee for the first time, while in Wales it gained only five seats and failed to regain Pembrokeshire. The chapter argues that this in turn set the politics of recovery in Scotland and Wales on different trajectories. Through its MPs and ministers, the government enjoyed a high-profile presence in Scotland that it lacked in Wales. Even so, in both nations its claims of recovery, like the National Government itself, provoked renewed anti-Tory – and often anti-Westminster – rhetoric among Liberals, Labour and, in Scotland, nationalists. At the 1935 general election while little changed in the relative strengths of Scottish Unionism and Welsh Conservatism, Labour emerged as the net beneficiary.

Chapter 1 outlines the purpose of the book. It assesses existing accounts of interwar Conservatism and highlights our inadequate understanding of the Conservative party’s role within, and its reasons for supporting, the cross-party National Government of 1931-1940. The chapter explains the benefits of focusing the analysis on the role of party activists and local politics as a way of reassessing how the party responded to the challenges of mass democracy after 1918, before introducing the reader to each of the twelve constituency case studies which form the analytical basis of the book and to the related archival material. It then offers a re-reading of the electoral performance of interwar Conservatism, arguing that contrary to the picture of electoral ‘dominance’ normally associated with the party’s national performance, the local experience in the 1920s proved to be one of stagnancy and even decline from the pre-war heyday of local politics. It argues that this re-reading of the 1920s is crucial to understanding the attitude with which the Conservative grassroots approached membership the National Government in 1931 and beyond. The concluding section provides a summary of the book’s chapters.

We examine the emergence of a new party, UKIP, which exploited the new political opportunity presented by growing identity divides, mobilising discontented identity conservatives to secure the strongest electoral performance by a new British party since the 1920s. We unravel the puzzling timing of UKIP’s surge. If immigration rose to the top of the political agenda in the mid-2000s why did it take nearly a decade for a radical right party to fully capitalise on public discontent over the issue? This delay was the consequence of an older reputational legacy from the first wave of immigration. Since Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher, the Conservatives had been seen as the party of immigration control. The Conservatives were able to use this reputation in opposition in order to win over the anxious identity conservatives. But doing so required setting up expectations of radical cuts to immigration, expectations the party was unable to meet once it returned government. It was the collapse in the Conservatives’ reputation for immigration control at the start of the Coalition that opened up space for a new party, space that UKIP rapidly filled as disappointed identity conservative voters abandoned the Conservatives and turned to the radical right.