British Conservative Research Articles

Reform to conserve: Europe and David Cameron’s Conservatism

ABSTRACT This article argues for the importance of considering ideology in any analysis of major political judgements. Through an exploration of British Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron’s judgement – an actor sometimes referred to as a pragmatist – the article shows that to understand why a referendum was held on Britain’s membership of the EU, we must consider Cameron’s ideology. His interpretation of conservatism showed an affinity with ‘reform to conserve’ – an idea that functions like a metaphor within British Conservative traditions for interpreting a core political concept within conservatism: that of managing what Freeden has called the ‘problem of change’. In setting out Cameron’s beliefs, and his perception of the beliefs and actions of others, the contingency of the referendum judgement is revealed – and existing explanations for the referendum decision are reframed. Narratives that approach an ‘inevitability thesis’ regarding Cameron’s decision should be resisted. Instead, we should recognize and consider the beliefs that inform such narratives and the assumptions they make. Outcomes based on ideological motivations can be unintended or even appear contradictory. For Cameron, a strategy of ‘reform to conserve’ resulted in something close to a political revolution.

Governing against the tide: Populism, power and the party conference

In this article we argue that a tendency to treat populism as a ubiquitous, mechanistic characteristic of contemporary penality has impeded systematic theoretical discussion of how populist ideologies find contingent expression within national penal systems. Drawing upon an agonistic perspective we seek to show that the intersection between populism and punishment must be understood as a structured process that is shaped by struggle between actors with different types, and amounts, of political power. We illustrate these claims with reference to a historical case study of the 1981 British Conservative Party Conference; a political calendar ritual that facilitated symbolic conflict and provided an institutional point of entry for populist movements seeking to disrupt the prevailing liberal consensus on crime and secure substantive policy concessions from government.

National Myth in UK–EU Representations by British Conservative Prime Ministers from Churchill to Johnson

Britain’s withdrawal of its EU membership has a number of political and economic implications for UK–EU relations. In seeking to understand the 2016 EU referendum outcome, it is insightful to study the historical development of discourses representing the UK–EU relationship. Doing so reveals the trends of British exceptionalism and British Euroscepticism as integral to these discourses. Applying a diachronic approach, this paper examines ten speeches by nine Conservative Prime Ministers (PMs) held at the annual Conservative Party Conferences from 1945 to 2020. The speeches include, among others, those by Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, David Cameron and Boris Johnson. The qualitative analysis traces the discursive strategies employed by PMs in their construction of the Conservative narrative of national myth, focusing especially on the issues of British national identity in relation to Europe. Methods of Discourse Historical Analysis (DHA) and Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) are applied in order to identify strategies employed by PMs as tools of persuasion for the purpose of consolidating political power and promoting their policies. This study has identified three major interrelated strategies—myth, ally and enemy creation—which are used to narrate the story of Britain’s relationship with Europe as a potential member of the Union, as a member, and up to its efforts to leave the EU.

SPEECH BEHAVIOR: COMMUNICATIVE AND PRAGMATIC ASPECT (ON POLITICAL DISCOURSE BASIS)

The article is devoted to the communicative and pragmatic aspect of an utterance. A review of the basic principles and maxims leading to successful communication is made by the author. The purpose of the investigation involved is to identify actively used speech tactics, their structural features to achieve the perlocution. The material of the research is the political speeches by D. Cameron, a representative of the British Conservative Party. Based on the investigation, some conclusions can be made. In the political discourse self-presentation and accusation / blame tactics are regarded as the most active ones created on the explicature and implicature basis.

Cognitive maps of discourses of British conservative and Australian liberal political manifestos

The research endeavors to study and determine the influence of cognitive maps on production of political manifestos discourse. The research has been conducted in the framework of Sociocognitive Discourse Studies. The results show that discourse cognitive structure of British Conservative Party and Australian Liberal Party manifestos is characterized by different sets of cognitive maps on the level of communicative strategies and somewhat similar sets of cognitive schemas on the level of communicative tactics. Applying the method of interpropositional semantic analysis, the communicative strategy and communicative tactic of comparison was identified in Australian Liberal Party manifesto. Despite the close affinity between political discourses of the UK and Australia, there are significant differences in patterns of information organization in online manifestos of the ruling parties to engage the community and enhance persuasion.

With friends like these, who needs enemies ? The Conservative Party and the British Constitution

This article challenges the idea that the British Conservative and Unionist Party is, or has ever truly been, ‘conservative’ when it comes to the British Constitution. It emphasises not only the degree to which the party’s self-appointed role as a bastion of constitutional heritage and moderate reform has often overlapped with self-interest, but also the remarkably radical ideas that the party has been prepared to embrace from time to time. Despite frequent electoral use of the constitutional issue as means to paint its political opponents as dangerous, the modern Conservative Party has now brought itself to a position where its approach to constitutional debate and niceties has become coloured by populism, albeit a populism still cloaked in a veneer of traditionalism.

Communication strategy, change and the British Conservative Party

This paper asks how the British Conservative Party responded to changes in wider socio-political events and techno-cultural trends from 2010-20, under the leaderships of David Cameron (2005-16); Theresa May (2016-19); and Boris Johnson (2019- until the paper’s submission in 2021). Using secondary analysis of the author's earlier published work; and fresh analyses of evidence from news media and party-related archives (for example, ConservativeHome), the article aims to offer an indicative historical analysis of the party's development with a focus on key drivers of change, including Brexit and digital media in the context of the party’s communication strategy. Four key markers of analysis are used to focus the examination of several campaign case studies across a decade stretching from the 2010 general election period to the so called 'Brexit election' of 2019. The paper argues that, overall, across the decade, the party adapted to external factors, like Brexit and advances in digital communication; and a period of discontinuity in the party, from 2016 to 2019, contributed to punctuating the party’s wider evolution, following the fallout from the 2016 EU referendum and events in the run-up to the 2019 General Election.

Policy or Partisanship in the United Kingdom? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Brexit

Are voters motivated by policy preferences or partisan identities? In this paper, we argue that the British Conservative Party’s sudden change in Brexit policy (following the surprising result of t...

Intra-party dissent over Brexit in the British Conservative Party

This article seeks to map the evolution of intra-party dissent over Brexit in the parliamentary Conservative Party between July 2016 and January 2020. It shows that dissent was primarily due to the relentless intra-party disputes over the fact that the Conservative Government failed to deliver Brexit during Theresa May’s premiership. Brexit could not have been settled if Boris Johnson had not managed to reunite the party through the 2019 general election. This article gauges the intensity of intra-party dissent by drawing on three representative indicators, including the number of Conservative MPs quitting the party, the number of ministerial resignations and parliamentary voting records of the Conservative MPs over Brexit. Three dominant factional groups, namely hard Brexiteers, soft Brexiteers and Bremainers, competed to shape the government’s handling of Brexit. They diverged over issues of sovereignty, economic implication of Brexit, and the UK–EU future relationship. The research also finds that the hard Brexiteers and the Bremainers appeared less compromising over Brexit, while the soft Brexiteers with a pragmatic mindset were relatively flexible and ready for concessions.

Policy, office, votes – and integrity. The British Conservative Party, Brexit, and immigration

ABSTRACT While Europe’s so-called migration crisis is of fairly recent origin, some of the continent’s centre-right parties have been successfully politicising immigration for at least half a century. But that success and that politicisation can come at a heavy price – for the country, for the party, and for those who lead it or want to lead it. With both incumbents and challengers doing their best (and doing a great deal) to determine the party line on the issue, politicisation of immigration for electoral and personal advantage can make for incoherent, even counterproductive public policy. It can also tempt the leaders, both actual and aspirant, of centre-right parties into making promises to restrict immigration which are impossible to keep, thereby raising the salience of the issue and threatening their ownership of it. Attempts to hold on to, or to regain, ownership can, along with intra-party competition, create a vicious cycle, driving policy in an ever more unrealistic direction and creating not only serious internal instability but immense external costs. The Conservative Party’s experience is a case in point.

КОНСТРУИРОВАНИЕ БРИТАНСКОЙ НАЦИОНАЛЬНОЙ ИДЕНТИЧНОСТИ В КОНТЕКСТЕ БРЕКЗИТА: ЭВОЛЮЦИЯ ДИСКУРСА ПРЕМЬЕР-МИНИСТРОВ ВЕЛИКОБРИТАНИИ

The discursive reality of Brexit had its effects on the discourse of the British Conservative Party which is important as the latter plays a key role in the process of making political decisions. The article discusses the components of the British national identity linked with the UK's membership in the European Union and Brexit as a political process. The UK's case is unique as it allows us to trace the identity transformation during the process of withdrawal from this integration group. The author chooses the constructivist approach and post-positivist discourse analysis as the main method. The paper studies the speeches of conservative politicians and parliamentary debates to analyze the changes in the discourse of the Conservative Party during the terms of the UK’s last three prime ministers. The discursive layers are highlighted: basic concepts, basic political orientations and extratextual ideological constructions used by conservative politicians to construct reality. The author traces the transformation of ideological constructions of the conservative party's discourse and consecutive changes in the significance of individual elements of the British national identity in the discourse. The paper examines relations between British and European identities, between the images of Britain and the EU in the discourse of British conservatives.

When Planets Collide: The British Conservative Party and the Discordant Goals of Delivering Brexit and Preserving the Domestic Union, 2016–2019

This article explores how the British Conservative Party has dealt with the dilemmas arising from its pursuit of two increasingly discordant goals: delivering Brexit and maintaining the domestic Union. Drawing on interviews and analyses of parliamentary debates, we identify a resurgence in the 2016–2019 period of an older belief in a unitarist state, and a new form of pro-Union activism in policy terms. Against those commentators who depict Britain’s Conservatives as having abandoned their unionist vocation, we explore the coalescence of a more assertive and activist strain of unionist sentiment. But we also find a willingness among Conservatives at the centre to sub-contract thinking about non-English parts of the UK to ‘local’ political representatives such as the Democratic Unionist Party and the Scottish Conservatives, and a growing anxiety about how to handle emergent tensions between the competing priorities associated with delivering Brexit and maintaining the domestic Union.

Digital media as a driver of change in political organisation: 2010 and 2015 UK general elections

In Britain, by 2015, Web 2.0 had become a more widely accepted and established mode of civic engagement of which political e-participation became an observable extension. However, in the run-up to 2010, social media were newer, less understood and largely associated with younger generations. These changes present questions about how wider technocultural developments impacted political engagement between the 2010 and 2015 UK general elections. This article aims to go some way in examining this question with a theoretical focus on the role of Facebook as a driver of change in political organisation. Using the British Conservative Party as a case study, the article analyses and compares events, observations and shifting power relations associated with digital technology and organisational change observed over two election cycles spanning from 2005 to 2015. A focal aim is to examine changes in Conservative Party campaigns and organisation in order to contribute to wider debates about the impact of digital technology in changing the organisation and activities of actors, like political parties and political participants, in democratic contexts. The article concludes that a complex combination of internal and external, technological and human, and grassroots and centralised factors played roles in changing the Conservative Party.

Współpraca eurodeputowanych w ramach grupy politycznej Europejskich Konserwatystów i Reformatorów

The aim of the article is to investigate a cooperation between the Members of the European Parliament in the European Conservatives and Reformist Group. ECR Group was formed in the European Parliament in 2009 and the biggest parties in ECR are the British Conservative Party and Polish Law and Justice. United Kingdom will leave the European Union and the question is whether the ECR group is enough institutionalised to survive after Brexit? The Author of the article uses the analysis of the scholar literature, reports and ECR’s political programs, and tries to find answers to the following research questions: how did the conservative parties cooperate within the ECR? What is the internal structure of the ECR group? What positions were held by ECR in the European Parliament?

An Age of Ages: Nation, Empires and their Discontents

In August 1902 the British Conservative MP for East London, William Evans-Gordon, spent two months in Eastern Europe surveying the living conditions of Jewish populations across the Russian Pale of Settlement. His reflections – and photographs – morphed into a booklet published the following year in London, entitledThe Alien Immigrant. Abstracts from the manuscript were read in the commission hearings that led to the adoption of the Aliens Act in 1905, a milestone in the introduction of immigration controls across the United Kingdom and the codification of the legal right to asylum. Among the places that Evans-Gordon visited was Vilna, also known in Polish as Wilno – today's Vilnius. The city was ‘one of the most congested cities of the Jewish pale’; it lay in ‘the centre of the great Jewish drama’. Facing the misery of the Jewish ghetto Evans-Gordon ruminated on the conditions of life in the slums of east London which were populated by Jewish families during the period of the ‘Great Departure’. Eerily anticipating present-day debates across Europe,The Alien Immigrantframed the migration crisis as a ‘national question’ and warned prospective migrants that the United Kingdom could not offer them a better future. Evans-Gordon's arguments gave popular anti-Semitism a progressive veneer. ‘When altruism towards aliens leaves some of our poorest folk without homes and without work’, he noted, ‘it is time to say that the burden of solving the problems of Eastern Europe is not to be laid on them’.

The domestic policies of the Margaret Thatcher’s governments in english language sources and literature

The article systematizes and analyzes the main groups of historical sources and scientific andnon-fiction literature on the theoretical and practical principles of neoconservatism, its Britishmodel «Thatcherism» during 1979–1990; Margaret Thatcher’s methods, tools and results inimplementing social and economic policies and further prospects for research. Various types ofhistoriographical sources and literature of English origin were used: memoirs, interviews andspeeches, party and program documents, collective and individual monographs, profile articlesand intelligence, press information, Internet resources, etcetra have been used. By synthesizinghistorical, comparative sociological and problem-chronological methods for the first time in thedomestic historiography attempts have been made to comprehensively analyze historical sourcesand scientific works on economic and social policy headed by M. Thatcher of neoconservativegovernments. Found out on the basis social science studies of social scientists, economic, politicaland ideological factors that caused the turnaround of the British Conservative Party on socialissues in the 80’s the years of the twentieth century; outlined and traced the problems encounteredin the context of reforming the British economy. It is determined that among gaps that need furtherscientific reflection are this legislative support of the social and economic policies of Tetcher’sgovernment and clarification of the categorical and conceptual apparatus in the field of socialpolicy. For the first time in national historiography, a comprehensive generalization and systematicdata of English sources and literature on internal the policies of the M. Thatcher governments.The opportunity to go deeper understanding the features of internal political and socio-economicprocesses that took place in the UK in 1979–1990, their degree reflection in English-languagesources and research; expansion of information and reference base for scientific writing works.

Brexit : towards a neoliberal real utopia ?

Although Brexit is sometimes regarded on the left as an opportunity to move away from neoliberalism, most notably by facilitating the renationalisation of public services, it is regarded by many on the right of the British Conservative Party as a significant opportunity to lead the way in market deregulation, pushing the UK towards a neoliberal real utopia – a free market ideal with real practical consequences. This paper seeks to outline the contours of that real utopia before highlighting the political obstacles that stand in its way. Yet, whilst the realisation of a post-Brexit real utopia may be regarded as nothing but a dream, ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ is likely to survive intact as the economic uncertainties of Brexit place corporate power in a particularly strong bargaining position.

SWOT Analysis: A Powerful Tool of Strategic Competitive Management Effectiveness

Britain is one of the world’s most open economies. Most dependent on trade than any other major country. Our success depends on our competitiveness and our competitiveness depends on raising our productivity, as our competitors are raising theirs.’ -Philip Hammond (British Conservative Party Politician) Globalization has sharpened the level of competition, i.e., domestic and international both. In this cut-throat competitive era, a company must have to acquire the ability to provide products and services as or more effectively and efficiently than their relevant competitors. The main challenge is how to take advantage of new resources and markets while dealing with intense and growing global competition. The need of the hour is to design and implement supportive policies and strategies to compete with the competitors. In this context, SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis has been a useful tool to face the competition and to achieve future growth. It identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the organization along with the opportunities and threats present in the market in which it operates in SWOT analysis requires an internal survey for strengths and weaknesses and external survey for opportunities and threats. This analysis can be used as a strategic planning approach to face the competition and as well as to enhance the managerial effectiveness of the organization. This article proposes the application of the SWOT tool for making strategies to enhance competitive organizational potential. The researcher has attempted to get insight into the wide range of potential applications of SWOT analysis. A brief discussion has been made about the limitations of SWOT analysis. ‘The essential element of a successful strategy is that it derives its success from the differences between competitors with a consequent difference in their behavior.’ -Bruce Henderson

Taking back control? Brexit, sovereignism and populism in Westminster (2015–17)

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the claims for national sovereignty made in the British Conservative and Labour parties. In Britain, national sovereignism has been embedded within an entrenched tradition of Euroscepticism, whereas populist claims have periodically punctuated the discourse of both main parties, before emerging with more vocal tones during the discussion on Brexit. While most sovereigntist claims share some degree of populism, we reserve the populist label for what we identify as explicitly populist claims (as opposed to four other categories of sovereignism). After presenting a historical recall of the main dynamics of sovereigntist claims in British politics, we hypothesise that different types of sovereigntist discourses feature in the major British parties. While ‘nationalist-populist’ sovereignism should prevail in the Conservative party, we expect ‘economic’ sovereignism to be the form mainly used by the Labour party. Systematically analysing the debates in the House of Commons on all divisions on the EU from the 2015 General Election to the end of October 2017, we show that significant differences on the use of sovereignist claims exist both within and across British parties. We find that national populist claims dominate among Tory MPs and civic sovereignism prevails over economic sovereignism among Labour members.

Policy or Partisanship in the United Kingdom? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Brexit

Are voters motivated by policy preferences or partisan identities? In this paper, we argue that the British Conservative Party's sudden change in Brexit policy (following the surprising result of the 2016 referendum on EU membership) offers a unique opportunity to study partisanship in the context of a natural experiment. Using an interrupted time series design, we find evidence that voters primarily care about policy: Europhilic Conservatives disaffiliated from the party, while Euroskeptics became more likely to identify with the Conservatives. These findings suggest that voters are sufficiently policy-motivated to change parties if they disagree with their party on important issues. But we find that partisan identities do play a role in the development of voter preferences in another issue area: voters who joined the Conservatives immediately after the referendum subsequently adopted more right-wing views on economic redistribution.