ABSTRACT
Its name suggests that the business of the Conservative Party is to conserve. One of the main criticisms of Margaret Thatcher has been that she broke with Conservative traditions by leading the party in dangerous new directions. One of her monetarist gurus, Milton Friedman, asserted – more it has to be admitted from an understanding of economic theory than political history – that she was not a true Conservative at all, but a nineteenth-century Liberal.1 Her misleading assertions about Victorian values (see Chapter 13) might seem to support this interpretation. The Conservative Party, however, has not historically been a party of narrow reaction. It has usually been receptive to new ideas, whether generated from within or outside. Looked at from this perspective, Thatcher’s period in office, however much it shook the country up, hardly represents a betrayal of Conservative values. Far more often than ‘conserving’ for its own sake, the Conservative
Party in both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries has been a party of change. When it attempted to defend the old political system against modest proposals for parliamentary reform, in 1828-32, it suffered one of the two largest electoral defeats in its history. Sir Robert Peel nursed the party back to health during the 1830s and 1840s by adopting ‘necessary reforms’ and supporting major changes to legislation on the poor, prisons, factories, mines and local government as he sought to make the Conservatives responsive to the new industrial age. He then broke it on an issue of reformist economic principle – free trade generally and the repeal of the Corn Laws in particular – in 1846. The party has avoided overt splits ever since. It was Disraeli and the Conservative Party in 1867, rather than Gladstone’s Liberals, who placed more trust in working men by giving a majority of urban workers the vote.2
