The Conservative Party and Welsh Politics in the Inter-War Years

Abstract

Abstract Following the 1931 general election, the Conservative party dominated the electoral landscape in England and reached a twentieth-century high in Scotland. Conservatives in Wales, by contrast, failed to ride the wave of ‘National’ politics in the 1930s, with their best performances at the ballot box confined to the immediate aftermath of the First World War. The following article explores the reasons for Conservative failure in Wales and explains the pattern with reference to two types of constituency, namely the industrial seats of South Wales and the rural seats of Welsh-speaking West Wales, both of which were crucial to any party hoping to advance in the principality. The article highlights the essential durability of pre-1914 political cultures, along with the Conservatives’ failure both to neutralise the anti-English flavour of the Victorian Celtic revival and, unlike Labour in South Wales, to capitalise on the mutable nature of the dissenting tradition. The obstacles to Conservative success were further shaped by social and economic conditions, linguistic peculiarities and denominational identities, compounded by the ability of the Liberal party in West Wales, and increasingly the Labour party in South Wales, to (re)construct imagined ‘national’ political identities that served as counter-hegemonic discourses against British Conservatism. Amid the recent transnational turn, this article alerts us to the continuing scope of the national idiom in discussions of modern British political culture.