ABSTRACT
Like all major political parties in Britain, the Conservative party has always embraced a fairly wide range of political attitudes and views. Yet at the same time it has preserved and still preserves a recognisable unity that makes it resistant to the sort of splits that affected the Liberal party at the end of the nineteenth century and the Labour party in the second half of the twentieth century.
Philip Norton and Arthur Aughey express the point well:
The Conservative Party has always been content to be a broad church of men and opinions rather than a Community of Saints following a transcendent vision. Obviously within the party there will be disagreement and disaffection which, depending upon the circumstances, will be on either a narrow or broad basis. What has kept the party united has never been the monolithic nature of its membership but that divisions have generally been of less significance than views held in common. One may say that the internal debate over policy within the Conservative Party mirrors Lord Butler’s description, following Burke and Baldwin, of the essence of Conservatism itself—‘ordered liberty’. 1
