Britain’s adversarial parliamentary system has been conducive to a framing of our party politics as a clash between two rivals. The Conservative Party, the broad church of the right, and since the 20th Century the Labour Party as the representative of the left. Each with their own dissenters, but ultimately coalescing around a set of shared values.
Since 1922, every single British Prime Minister to date has belonged to one of these two parties, almost always leading majority governments in the Commons. Only the occasional coalition or confidence and supply deal has interrupted this century-long streak of political domination by these parties. A streak which continues centuries further back if the era of Tory-Liberal duopoly is also considered.
Facing each other down on Wednesday for Prime Minister’s Question Time, both parties are portrayed as equal and opposite adversaries standing for harshly contrasting visions of the future. The wide adoption of this framing by both the media and the electorate merits the question: how different are these parties in practice? There is a growing counternarrative that, in fact, the Conservative and Labour parties are not so different after all. With a growing section of the public perceiving more continuity than change between Labour and Conservative administrations, an investigation into the core ideas professed by the two electoral giants and how they have changed over time is warranted.
One-nation conservatism has for almost two hundred years been a major force within the Conservative and Unionist Party. Descending from an even longer tradition of pragmatic Tories, this position owes its formulation to Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Observing in the wake of the French Revolution a growing rift between the rich and poor in his own country, Disraeli sought to both bolster traditional institutions while cautiously adopting reforms to prevent tensions and social inequalities from boiling over into revolution. His fears that class distinctions would divide society into two nations drove his desire for social harmony. Hence, he made efforts to make the Conservative Party more appealing to the newly enfranchised working-classes. Philosopher Michael Oakeshott later elaborated upon this pragmatic conservatism, framing his position as a disposition favouring known goods to hypothetical improvements of society. His stated preference for, “the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss,” from On Being Conservative became one of the most influential articulations of modern conservatism to date.
For almost a hundred years following Disraeli’s departure from office, one-nation conservatism remained the core animating philosophy of the Conservative Party. Despite deviations from this position a number of times throughout its history, perhaps most notably with the rise of the New Right and Thatcherism in the latter 20th Century, the early 21st Century saw something of a revival for one-nation conservatism within the Conservative Party. David Cameron, Theresa May, and Boris Johnson all attached their professed visions of governance to a one-nation disposition, with the attempt at restoring a more Thatcherite trajectory to the party by Liz Truss being short-lived. During the pandemic, the impulse of the Conservative government seemed to be economic stimulus in what has been described by some as crisis Keynesianism. One-nation conservatism, therefore, is evidently still alive.
Social democracy, the main ideology of the Labour Party, has its own intellectual origins. While on the continent social democracy was synonymous with the orthodox Marxist position of Karl Kautsky and other prominent figures from the Second International prior to the war, the ideology manifested differently this side of the Channel. In Britain, social democracy has always been more moderate and reformist than its siblings on the continent; unlike the German Social Democratic Party or Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party, Labour has never had an overtly Marxist platform. Instead, the animating philosophy of the British Labour movement was Fabianism, a nod to the strategy of attrition deployed against Hannibal during the Second Punic War. A reformist doctrine professing a desire to gradually transition the country towards a socialist society, Labour replaced class warfare with a desire to change Britain’s institutions via electoral participation and the expansion of the franchise to the working-class. To this end, Labour governments created the National Health Service, brought key industries like steel into public ownership, and bolstered welfare provisions for the worst off in society.
These disparate intellectual origins provide the impression that the Conservative and Labour parties have distinct and irreconcilable positions on the political spectrum. Yet upon further inspection, the two parties have far more in common than first meets the eye. They have co-operated on many occasions, with the clearest examples being the various National Governments of the 1930s and Churchill’s subsequent war-ministry. Since, eras of convergence between the two parties have been observed; the years following World War Two are often dubbed the post-War Consensus due to the Conservatives accepting the reforms enacted by Clement Attlee and other Labour administrations. Interrupted by a period of polarisation under Margaret Thatcher and Michael Foot, subsequent efforts by Labour to moderate its platform led to its adoption of a post-Thatcher Consensus and an effort to find a Third Way between laissez faire capitalism and state socialism. In an attempt to reinvent the party and distance himself from the baggage of past leadership, Ed Miliband even attempted to cast himself as a proponent of ‘One-Nation Labour’. The flagship policies of either party are respected by incoming administrations far more frequently than may be assumed.
This could only be the case if there was some ideological compatibility between the positions of the Conservatives and Labour. And in comparing their respective ideologies, such overlap is discovered. There are a number of dispositions shared by both social democracy and one-nation conservatism: regulated capitalism; cautious and gradual reform; respect for fundamental institutions like Parliament; a tendency towards paternalism and welfare policies designed to look after people and retain a degree of social cohesion; a desire to promote communitarian values as a check on individualism. The only major remaining difference between the two is in how said positions are framed. One-nation conservatives frame reform as a necessary process which allows traditions to organically adapt to new conditions; tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. Social democrats, on the other hand, emphasise the use of reform as a means of progression towards a stated end. In practice, this distinction is hardly discernible. The number of social democratic movements which have spawned socialist societies is zero, making any difference between this position and the desire of moderate conservatives to adopt gradual and pragmatic reform even more obscure.
Similarly, one-nation conservatism and social democracy share a complicated relationship with liberalism. Preferring active government intervention and sceptical of unfettered individualism, neither position could be described as liberal in the classical sense. And yet both have pragmatically adopted aspects of the liberal political project into their own agendas. Social democracy distinguishes itself from socialism in its acceptance that the private sector and market competition will feature prominently in the economy. Just as one-nation conservatism is keener to embrace capitalism than some prior iterations of Toryism, which leaned more towards protectionism and the preservation of traditional hierarchies. They also both accept liberal democracy as a political system, though are more ambivalent towards civil liberties and individual rights than most liberals. From ID cards, growing state surveillance, draconian restrictions on protest, and attacks on the rights of groups like transgender people, Labour and the Tories seem to be in a race to the bottom when it comes to supporting personal freedom. Perhaps lending credence to Nick Clegg’s verdict during the 2010 general election, that they increasingly sounded the same, both of the established parties share in their platforms a mixed relationship with political liberalism. Ultimately, they both refuse to fully commit to human rights and dignity for all.
Is it therefore any surprise that the public increasingly feel as though Labour and the Conservatives are two sides of the same coin? These two parties have worked together, preserved each other’s innovations, and adhere to similar ideological positions. The only remaining distinct features of each party are their more radical factions, which may not remain so given the rise of ReformUK on the right and growing enthusiasm around Zack Polanski’s Greens on the left. Similarly, voters whose their primary concern is preserving the liberal aspects of our political system may find themselves gravitating towards the LibDems as they adopt a more overtly anti-populist stance. All the while, the moderate statism of the Labour right and one-nation conservatism endures a period of growing unpopularity. Few seem willing to come out to bat for this persuasion after a decade of Conservative failure and far more continuity than change from Starmer’s government.
In spite of our plurality-based electoral system, it seems as though the electorate have finally had enough of the Labour-Conservative duopoly and are committed to bringing about its demise one way or another. Whether either side of this bipartisan coin survives the first half of the 21st Century is left to be seen. What is apparent is the emergence of an ideological upheaval in our country which will have profound impacts for decades to come. Let us hope that whichever movement emerges from this period as the dominant force in British politics will use its position to pursue justice and freedom, rather than prejudice and authoritarianism.