Abstract
The Conservatives since 1945 is a rich, historical analysis which seeks to address pressing questions relevant to all parties today: what drives parties to change? Parties need to adapt to changes in their environment – to their voters, donors and members – if they are to survive. All political leaders bent on winning power need to know how to make their party change: Blair, Clinton, Rudd and Cameron all had to take their parties through periods of modernisation and adaptation. Yet political parties often present many barriers to change because of their culture, organisation, societal connections and general institutional inertia.
Sources of party change are multiple – as Bale says, it can be elections, factions, leaders, members, interest groups, though this list could be expanded to include electoral law, the media, changing societal patterns, the consumerisation of the electorate and global events and Bale has an ‘additional drivers’ section in each chapter to cover this. The Conservatives since 1945 presents high quality research using a wide range of sources including existing primary party data to explore them, which represents a mammoth task which Bale should be commended on.
Such historical detail could be tedious, yet Bale has written it in a way which makes the material fascinating and allows the reader to connect old events with current questions and themes, such as the British Conservatives’ struggle to make its MPs representative of society in terms of background, gender and race. The ‘Disaster and Deliverance’ chapter, for example, explores how the party responded to shocking losses in the 1945 election: bringing in new MPs to change the public face of the party including those from more modest backgrounds such as manual labour and schoolteachers and undergoing a substantial membership recruitment and fundraising drive to rebuild the organisation. This has echoes of Hague’s attempts to bring in more socially representative candidates including women and ethnic minorities in 1997–2001.
Bale’s writing brings to life the different machinations, internal debates, attempted projects and the impact of outside consultants. For example, the book uncovers early examples whereby a PR consultant and an advertising agency were appointed in 1957 and the party used target marketing: now a hyper-specialised electoral tool used in the 2012 US presidential election to great effect. Back in the UK in 1957, ‘You’re looking at a Conservative’ ads were placed with different images depending on the media audience and in response to market research: the News of the World had a cloth capped lumberyard hand; the Sunday Express a black-coated worker; The Observer a young scientist and the Sunday Pictorial a working woman (see p. 65). Internal concerns about mis-using political market research at the expense of leadership judgement – a common critique of modern political marketing – are also found (pp. 67–68). Another surprise finding was that in 1964–1970 the Party held theories that electoral success was increasingly based not on ideological positions but on valence – the ability of parties to deliver outcomes. Delivery is a key part of governing today, but it is interesting to think how long it took governments to realise this: Blair’s Delivery Unit, now superseded by Cameron’s version – the Efficiency and Reform Group – was not set up until 2001. The book therefore provides a rich account of many different aspects of party behaviour which will be useful to a wide range of academics needing to understand the origins of current controversies, not just those focusing on party change.
Another important contribution the book makes is to show how parties undergo more significant change in opposition than in government. Bale notes party figures in 1970–1974 that were ‘far too busy with their government responsibilities to show even the slightest interest in the running of the party’ (p. 175), and observes a similar indifference to change and lack of organisational change during Thatcher and Major’s times in power. This provides important evidence for how leaders in power neglect their party at their peril, leaving a weakened structure that takes time to rebuild in opposition without the resources of government.
The weaknesses of the book are that, firstly, it suddenly feels gender-biased when it fails to discuss the impact of a female leader on the image of the party or Thatcher’s success in gaining re-election twice and attracting votes from traditional Labour voters – instead focusing on Major and his humble background even though Thatcher was not from a rich background either. Secondly, that the analysis ends in 1997 is disappointing when exploration of party change in the Conservatives in opposition would have provided the chance to consider four different leaders’ attempts to change the party.
The official conclusions of the book – that the drivers of change are defeat, the leader and dominant factions – are mostly expected. The most valuable contributions are the broader implications – even if they are ones that the author himself neglects to observe. The party’s struggle with its image because of its rich upper class origins occurs repeatedly through the different chapters. Whilst policy has changed most, the public face has changed least – and in today’s 24-hour media environment where the visual matters more than the detailed text, this is a weakness which current and future Conservative leaders need to be concerned about. That Cameron only achieved government through coalition may be reflective of this dormant aspect of party development. The book, therefore, suggests an area for future research: challenges to change and solutions to these challenges. Taking what this book has learnt about what causes change, a similar analysis could provide an explanation of what the Conservatives took so long to change during 1997–2010, or what made it hard for Labour from 1979 to 1997. Moreover, what are the solutions/tools that leaders can use to create change in old major parties like the Conservatives? The book thus constitutes an extremely valuable addition to the academic literature, opening the door to further avenues for discussion which would provide important practical lessons for politicians and parties, not just academics.