|
|
Social Life and the Politics of Membership: the Conservative Party in Post-War Britain
| The British Conservative Party had a membership of over three million in the early 1950s yet its grassroots are usually ignored because the party appears to be a classic example of a cadre party where membership is unimportant. Looked at from the top-down perspective of party strategy, the Conservative’s is normally portrayed as involving little interest in members; with no central direction and limited opportunities for the grassroots to influence leadership or policy. At the same time, viewed from the bottom-up, historians have accepted a picture where activity almost exclusively social, without a meaningful political dimension. This paper uses a combination of oral history and archival material to reconstruct the relationship between the Conservative Party and its members. In doing so argues that both top down and bottom up conventional views are misleading. Considering the top-down, the paper shows that questions of membership were central to the party’s strategy in the decades after 1945 with regular membership drives, weekly demands for updated membership statistics and institutions designed to increase membership influence over leadership. Even in later periods these structures persisted, making membership of enduring significance for understanding the dynamics of party politics. The apparent disinterest of the party in its grassroots from the 1960s onwards is revealed as a consciously misleading presentation designed to distract from increasing weakness in the 1960s. Considering the bottom-up the paper argues that historians of the party’s grassroots have given inadequate attention to what is concealed by the Conservative activists claimed antipathy to theory, which led them to present their activity as apolitical. Rethinking the everyday social life of the party through looking at the contested and uncontested aspects of party activity reveals a structure of values which has as an important component the goal of autonomous political activity. The conventional view of British political parties suggests that they are similar because the Labour, as ‘mass party’, and the Conservatives as a ‘cadre party’ is misleading because members were much less important to the Labour Party, and politics not a part of most Labour Party members’ lives. By revising the view of Conservative membership from both top-down and bottom-up, this paper shows that this solution is misleading. Members have been much more important in the Conservative Party, and that the Conservative Party has been much more important to its members than previously believed.
|
|
