Falling Down: The Conservative Party and the Decline of Tory Britain - Phil Burton-Cartledge
Published in 2021 by Verso, London, UK and New York, NY
304 pages
ISBN: 978-1-83976-036-5
On July 24, 2019, British Prime Minister Theresa May stepped down from her office, leaving in disgrace after two votes of no confidence, failure to negotiate Brexit, and the Tory Party’s dismal performance in the May 2019 elections. Promising to “get Brexit done,” Boris Johnson was then elected in a snap election to take the reins of government in a landslide victory. Yet, after three years filled with scandals (most notably “Partygate”), incompetent mismanagement around COVID, and internal chaos within his own cabinet, Johnson resigned from his position in July 2022.
After scrambling for another party leader, the Tories placed Liz Truss at the helm of government. Sworn into office by Queen Elizabeth II just two days before her death, Truss resigned after only fifty days in office, making her the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history. Rishi Sunak was then elected as the leader of the Tory Party and was appointed Prime Minister on October 25. Sunak has never been popular with British voters, as his immense wealth and social conservatism have alienated him from the average voter. His tenure as prime minister was marked by growing discontent and decreasing standards of living within the UK, resulting in the election of Labour leader Kier Starmer to the position of Prime Minister in a landslide result on July 4, 2024.
With centrist Starmer now in 10 Downing Street, the Tory Party’s 14-year grip on power in the UK has come to an end. For the past several years, it has been blatantly apparent that the Tory party has been in a miserable state of crisis. The party is deeply fractured, borne out of decades of austerity and throttled by Brexit. How did the Tory party -- once a stalwart behemoth of British politics -- become so chaotic and disdained by the general population? Has the decline of the Tory party been inevitable, or is it the result of the mismanagement of incompetent individuals? In his 2019 book, Falling Down: The Conservative Party and the Decline of Tory Britain, Phil Burton-Cartledge seeks to answer this question by tracing the history of the Tory Party in the past half-century.
Overview:
In his sweeping account, Burton-Cartledge provides a critical historical overview of the Tory Party from Thatcher to Johnson. Far from offering a unified vision for the UK, the Tories have been deeply fractured since its ascendency during the Thatcher era. Burton-Cartledge argues that the party has overly relied on older, property-owning constituents as their primary base of voters. These retirees could often weather the severe austerity programs of the Tories through property acquisition, and the Tories specifically tailored their messaging to this narrow, but powerful base of support.
These voters are now rapidly dying away and are not being replaced by new property owners, primarily due to the collapse of the housing market, stagnating wages, and the increasing precarity of the labor market. In addition to their inability to acquire property due to the consolidation of rental property and inadequate housing, these younger voters are also largely resisting adopting increasingly socially conservative values as they age. This is becoming especially apparent in the wake of Brexit, which has proven to be an unmitigated disaster for the Tories and has split previously unified conservative social blocs while uniting the opposition. As such, the Tories have created an inescapable death spiral for themselves that puts their future viability in British politics into serious question.
Deeper Dive:
In the introduction and first chapter, Burton-Cartledge provides a structural overview of the Tory Party, suggesting that the party's decline has been written on the walls for quite some time. He then highlights three theories and analyses (two from the right, Geoffrey Wheatcroft and Ed West, and one from the left, John Ross) that have been recently posited which argue that the Tories will inevitably decline in popularity before positing his own. He argues that since the Thatcher era, the Tory party has pursued policies that have worked to undermine its own base of support, thus eating itself alive from the inside. Thatcher’s neoliberal program initiated the privatization of the economy and the individualization of the social sphere (i.e. “There is no such thing as society”), which worked to undermine institutional support networks across the political spectrum, affecting both unions and churches alike.
In the wake of this trend toward privatization and individualization, the Tories positioned themselves as the party of the petit bourgeoisie, emphasizing policies that would benefit those who possess moderate, relatively stable financial assets, especially small businesses and retirees. According to Burton-Cartledge, the demographic that the Tories rely upon are primarily retirees who are able to weather the financial crisis caused by austerity measures through the ownership of tangible assets such as housing. Yet, since retirees depend on a fixed income that can evaporate quickly during economic downturns, they are not as financially secure as the capitalist class, as Burton-Cartledge writes, “Like the petit bourgeoise dependent on their own efforts and their modest amount of capital to survive challenging market conditions, retirement is a social location in which anxiety exercises an overhanging presence” (34). these voters are the most likely to support the authoritarian measures instituted by Thatcher and her acolytes in order to maintain their position of relative security.
Yet, as these voters are literally dying away, they are not being replaced by the next generation. Due to the devasting effect of decades of austerity measures and the informalization of work, younger generations are less able to purchase permanent housing and are increasingly driven toward private rental property, especially in the absence of publicly subsidized housing. These voters acutely feel the financial impact of austerity policies and do not resonate with the policies that the Tories pass in order to satiate their eroding electorate.
These younger voters are also increasingly liberal when it comes to social issues, which places them further away from the conservative ideology of the Tories. According to Burton-Cartledge, this shift toward social liberalism: “is not simply the result of successful struggles against discriminatory practice and oppression, but their subsequent incorporation into the logics of capital accumulation…Social conservatism as practised by the right, with its emphasis on tradition, authority and the vilification of undesirables and scapegoats, cuts fundamentally against the prevailing (and expanding) social-liberal common sense. Their way of the world jar with younger workers' experience of the world” (31). The increasing role of gig work and “immaterial” labor among younger generations plays a role in this as well, as these jobs are typically service-oriented and depend on cooperative social labor.
These trends illustrate that the coalition that the Tories have depended upon during the past four decades is steadily eroding as it finds itself out of step with modern British society. The rest of the book serves as a step-by-step history of this forty-year process, beginning with the election of Margaret Thatcher and ending during Johnson’s response to the COVID crisis. What emerges from this close reading of the historical record is a vivid picture of how successive Tory administrations (Major, Cameron, May, and Johnson) worked to consolidate Thatcher’s legacy and appeal to an ever-narrowing base of support that was internally fracturing, leading to the rise of UKIP and Brexit.
Commendations:
There are several commendable aspects of Burton-Cartledge’s work. First and foremost, it serves as a useful introduction to the history of the contemporary Tory party. There has been a surprising lack of serious analysis of the Tories from the British Left, and Falling Down serves to fill that gap. Burton-Cartledge is a prolific and incredibly active member of the blogging community, and his consistent analysis of British politics is remarkable to behold. Burton-Cartledge takes the breezy, accessible style of his blog and successfully employs a similar style throughout this book, making it imminently accessible to most readers. Even if you only have a passing familiarity with British politics, Falling Down will still be relatively easy to understand, even as he dives into the weeds of electoral politics over the last four decades.
Furthermore, Burton-Cartledge astutely diagnoses the critical weaknesses of the Tory party and its rapidly declining base of support. While there are plenty of opportunities for grandstanding and moralizing when addressing the failures of the Tories, Burton-Cartledge never stoops to over-the-top polemics, choosing instead to guide the reader step-by-step through each successive Tory administration, patiently describing major policies and electoral strategies. He is incredibly detailed in his historical account and he keeps his commentary fairly restrained, subtly guiding the reader through each administration to show how they struggled to attain mass appeal. The Tories have been defined by ruthless austerity measures, the dismantling of social safety nets and public services, and the construction of an imaginary British past as their primary method of governance, with declining rates of success. Burton-Cartledge’s account is well-researched and astutely argued, as his central thesis has held true in the years following its publication.
This main argument, which is that support for the Tories is predicated on turning retirees into a petit bourgeois class, is fascinating and offers a salient explanation for the behavior of the party and its steady decline. Retirees have traditionally been able to live off of stable pensions and typically possess shares and tangible assets, most notably in the form of housing. Since retirees rely on pensions and rent (if they have second homes) for their income, if the economic or political tide were to turn against them, then they are particularly vulnerable to financial losses. Thus, it is in their material interest to vote and donate to a party that keeps private renting policies in place and undermines the construction of public housing in order to keep their assets inflated. While this has been a reliable coalition of voters that have successfully and consistently ensured Tory victory in countless elections, they are slowly withering away.
Despite the Tories’ attempts to address these concerns and fill the gap in their base, these efforts more often alienate these older voters, who constitute the core of their electorate. As Burton-Cartledge writes, “Keeping this base loyal, which disproportionately turns out at election time for the Conservatives, means that the Tories have an electoral interest in pitching their programme at them, even if the price the party will pay is decreasing political viability in the medium to long term” (37). Tories have also had the additional benefit of running against a weak opposition in Labour that has often been ideologically divided, which has handed them victory time and again. Yet, the significant damage that Cameron did to the Tories and wider British society, led to populist resistance in the form of the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP), the UK Independence Party (UKIP), and the Corbynite Labour movement, which significantly weakened the Tories’ grip on power, despite a strong showing in 2019. As we’ve seen in the most recent election, however, this string of good fortune for the Tories has finally run short.
It was also fascinating to consider Burton-Cartledge’s account as to why younger voters are not becoming more conservative as they age. He illustrates that this is not an inevitable trend, but rather is dependent largely on the acquisition of assets, most importantly property. As rental prices continue to skyrocket and younger people are increasingly relying on piecemeal gig work in order to scrape by, they have limited ability to put a down payment on a house or acquire other assets. Tory policies have only worked to alienate younger voters, who even if they inevitably inherit their parents’ property, will unlikely convert to conservatism nearly as readily as previous generations. This analysis of the shift toward social liberalism provided a useful and interesting materialist framework for understanding current demographic trends.
Critique:
On the other hand, Falling Down suffers from a few drawbacks. First and foremost, while the book begins with Burton-Cartledge’s intriguing thesis, the rest of the book is a fairly cut-and-dry history of the Tory party with little connecting tissue. The vast majority of the pages within this work are a blow-by-blow history of the Tory party, including specific strategies, and detailed election results. While the book is immaculately researched and serves as a great resource for anyone interested in the contemporary history of the Tories, its excruciating level of detail makes the book a bit of a slog to get through at times. One can easily gloss over page after page of minutiae, such as specific policies passed, electoral results, and shifting developments through the years.
Furthermore, while the book begins with Burton-Cartledge’s thesis regarding the decline of the Tory party, the following chapters seldom refer back to this central argument. While each chapter is highly detailed in recounting the history of the Tories, they don’t cohere together to support his opening argument. Aside from the opening chapter and a few thoughts at the end, there’s not much elaboration on why the Conservative party will continue to struggle into the future beyond that the electorate is literally dying away. While this may partially explain why the Tories continue to struggle, without strong supporting evidence, his thesis seems incomplete and underdeveloped. Burton-Cartledge’s analysis of the Tories would have been greatly strengthened by examining the party’s reliance on corporations and the financial sector as well as an aging population. Furthermore, Burton-Cartledge does not address how the Tory Party faces competition from the political right in the form of UKIP, which siphons votes away from the Conservative Party. While such an analysis is perhaps beyond the scope of this work, it would have given greater context to why the party has continued to dominate the UK, even in its steady decline, and what salient threats it faces in the near future.
Conclusion:
Overall, Falling Down is an imminently useful and prescient analysis of the Tory Party and its long decline over the past four decades. While it is overly detailed in many places and only occasionally connects back to its central argument, Falling Down still serves as an immaculately researched historical overview of the Tories and their strategies from Thatcher to Johnson. Burton-Cartledge has written a meticulously researched and accessible book in Falling Down and it will undoubtedly be of interest to students of contemporary politics and historians alike. As such, this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the structure and history of the Tory party, as well as how they have managed to maintain power and shape the British political landscape.
Burton-Cartledge’s analysis has proved prescient in the years since this book’s publication, as the revolving door of increasingly chaotic Tory leadership continued to rapidly revolve under Johnson, Truss, and Sunak before finally jamming shut. After 14 consecutive years in power and occupying 10 Downing Street for 32 of the past 45 years, the shortcomings of the Tories have finally caught up to them, at least for the time being. While the 2024 election was a boon to Labour leadership, Keir Starmer’s centrist policies have shifted the Labour Party sharply rightward, especially in the wake of Jeremy Corbyn’s ouster. Starmer has been openly hostile toward the Leftmost wing of Labour and it remains to be seen if the Left will now push Starmer back toward the Left or attempt to form a new party. Regardless of this infighting, one thing remains clear: the Tories, however small, will remain waiting in the wings. Only time will tell whether they will have a viable future in a post-Brexit Britain.