Some of the less tin-eared Conservatives have taken to declaring that they know the Tory Party doesn’t have a God-given right to exist. Not as one of the primary poles of British politics, anyway. Indeed, given its sheer longevity, even its most implaccable opponents are having trouble adjusting to a world in which the Conservatives are no longer the default Bad Guys.
Yet it seems that at some point in the next five or six years, it will be Labour’s turn to reckon with partisan mortality, as Reform, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and whatever Jeremy Corbyn’s party ends up calling itself,close in on them like the Sixth Coalition. Given that Labour is currently dominated by the sort of sensitive young man who spent the Corbyn era writing tearful Medium articles about their personal relationship with the party, this will be a rather more overwrought grieving process than the Tory equivalent.
The party political realignment which we are now going through gives us an opportunity to reconsider the frameworks through which we think about British politics, and perhaps to update them. Since the end of the 19th century, we have become used to thinking in terms of “left” and “right”; a binary originally borrowed from the French Revolution, which has been in equal parts convenient and misleading ever since.
“Left” and “Right” in England were adopted as convenient shorthand because they were an easy way of expressing a cultural cleavage that was very familiar yet hard to define. It described a difference in temperament more than anything else, but which expressed itself first in religious attitudes, then on constitutional matters and later on political economy.
One side of the divide, which was to become the Left, was upright, clear-eyed, and morally urgent in its approach to problems and injustices. Here, people believed that God had given man free will to address iniquity, and that any structure or hierarchy which interfered with that had to be opposed, if not torn down, as a matter of principle. They regarded an aversion to confrontation as evidence of cowardice and a fundamental moral failure. These were the dissenters, the roundheads, the radicals.
People on the other side of the divide instinctively felt that life and the world were more complicated than that. Human beings, by their nature, were flawed, and consequently flaws should be expected in the institutions, laws and societies humans built. Addressing these imperfections required pragmatism, and some iniquities just had to be put up with. Loyalty, patience and measuredness would see you through, and it was better to back the institutions and hierarchies you had than to tear them down and risk returning to the barbarism and starvation that was man’s natural lot since the fall from grace. These were the people who were reluctant to abandon Catholicism, but took up Anglicanism when told to; who chose the Crown over Parliament and would go on to become Conservatives. We may call them traditionalists, cavaliers or Tories (though the tribe is not the party, nor vice versa).
Most English people today are probably able to see elements of both traditions in themselves and in the people they know. But we can recognise the archetypes throughout the ages. Jeremy Corbyn, for example, is the essential dissenter, a true Commonwealth Man — one who seeks to bring the traditional establishment down as a matter of principle. You can find versions of him as lay preachers in almost any non-conformist church in England (outside London), or nursing half a pint in the corner of the pub while doing the Observer crossword. It’s harder to think of such an elegant archetype of the traditionalist camp; Kingsley Amis perhaps, or Kenneth Clark.
It’s seldom a clear-cut thing, and people often end up on the opposite side to that which you’d imagine. Margaret Thatcher was a cultural roundhead who became the ultimate Tory. Tony Benn was a temperamental pragmatist who spoke in the language of revolutionary socialism. But to English people, this link between disposition and politics is instinctively familiar to us. The provincial, independently-minded conservative middle classes are axiomatically averse to finger–wagging and hectoring; whereas the Left finds frivolity distasteful while there are still so many dreadful problems in the world that need worrying about.
Over the centuries, the sides have completely swapped positions on certain issues; in the 19th century, free trade was a moralist, dissenter cause, whereas in the later 20th century it was a conservative belief. But the two tribes remained cohesive in themselves.
So what of the two camps after 2029? It seems reasonable to assume that there will be a cluster of political entities in the next parliament that will collectively be recognisable as the Left. The Greens and whatever is left of Labour will comprise the most internally coherent element of this pole, but there will be other, more ambiguous elements. These will include nationalists from Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and a very conservative grouping of Pakistani shopkeepers and landlords under the political leadership of a couple of avowed socialists. Then there will be some of the Lib Dems; mainly elected from the most prosperous parts of England, from which the nation’s most productive taxpayers commute, and to which they subsequently retire.
Whatever ideological muddle and conflict may be going on within or between the Conservative Party and Reform, over the next decade it looks likely to be the Left that will be the most fractured wing of British politics. On the Right, the necessity of addressing and reversing demographic changes that are viewed as being unsustainable to the nation state should offer a sufficiently unifying impetus to temporarily overcome disagreements on economics.
The Left, on the other hand, lack anything like a similarly unifying cause. Even the Greens regularly seem to tire of the so-called “climate crisis”, preferring to focus on old student union favourites such as unilateral nuclear disarmament. The various nationalists are committed to their respective irredentist causes that would ultimately see them withdraw from Westminster entirely. The Pakistanis maintain a laser-like focus on the Arab-Israeli conflict, with occasional forays into the construction of an airport for Mirpur. Meanwhile, the rise of the Greens signals a bitter fight with the Lib Dems over Britain’s most radicalised demographic group; wealthy pensioners living in barn conversions.
What is interesting, and bewildering, about this kaleidoscopic mixture of potential parties and voter blocs is that for the first time, the Left — Right divide will no longer roughly map on to the older English tribal division between temperamental roundhead and cavalier. There is a distinctively Low Church streak running through Reform, with its urgency and earnest zeal to “save our country”. Conversely, a lot of the Lib Dem and Green support seems set to come from deepest Middle England, appalled at populist crusades to tear down venerable institutions like the BBC and the EU. And indeed, much of Labour’s support in 2024 came from white collar professionals in their thirties and forties craving stability and leadership from “grown-ups in the room”. Hardly the stuff of radicalism.
Of course, though the radical side has traditionally co-opted immigrants and their descendents as part of their tribe, the Left post-2029 will see people who are not defined by the age-old warp and weft of English political thought play a far more dominant role.
Where exactly does all of this leave the Labour Party? In many ways, the party, and perhaps the whole dissenter tribe, now find themselves the victims of their own political ubiquity, if not necessarily their success. Since the Restoration in 1660, the cultural roundheads have always assumed a posture of opposition, even from within government. Whether it was radical free trade Liberals in the 19th century, or the Attlee government after the war, they were surrounded by a broader establishment that was predominantly made up of the Tory tribe — the Church of England, the aristocracy, the Monarchy, the armed forces et cetera, et cetera.
Rather than tearing down the creaking old order, Labour are the ones desperately trying to prop it up
But now all of this is turned on its head. It was the Conservatives, or at least a handful of them, who when in government seemed the odd ones out amidst an elite marinated in progressive assumptions. This will be even more the case when or if Reform gets in. Rather than tearing down the creaking old order, Labour are the ones desperately trying to prop it up. Whether it’s the welfare and tax system, the civic conception of a nation capable of assimilating large numbers of immigrants, or a progressive, rights-based justice system, the major causes of popular discontent today are pillars of the Britain that Labour built. There can be something almost Oakeshottian to the tone of Labour MPs defending the post-Blair world.
But the dissenter tribe as a whole is not a coalition that is temperamentally suited to what is essentially a conservative political task; upholding gains won and defending an imperfect settlement from its detractors (and some would add, from reality). They need “hope” and optimism and a sense of mission in order to go on. Like a shark, they must keep going forward or they will sink. Hence, we see an event like the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York being seized upon across the Left as a moment of great significance, despite the fact that a radical winning in a metropolis full of minorities and bohemians isn’t particularly surprising.
Of course, the traditionalist tribe is equally adrift, given that it seems to make little sense to champion the cause of defending old institutions when those institutions are in total service to one’s opponents’ causes. Hence the Tories’ existential malaise.
Is it any great loss that Right and Left may henceforth exist separately of the older, tribal distinction left over from the times of the Lollards and the Reformation? Perhaps two opposing political blocs that include elements of both sides of the national personality will make for a politics that is less acrimonious. In the conclusion of The English and their History, Robert Tombs wrote quite movingly about how Tory and dissenter, Anglo-Catholic and Non-Conformist, need one another to create a functioning polity and to express the singular nature of Englishness.
Harmony and predictability are not the order of the day
My observation would be that British politics has been at its most civil and predictable at those times when the two tribes were set in their comfortable furrows, opposed to one another and united internally. Those issues which have become the most rancorous are those which have cut through the traditional cleavages and given cavalier and roundhead common cause against others of their own respective stables. To pick two recent examples, the Brexit debate painfully divided elements of the traditionalist camp, and the “trans” question has torn the dissenter tribe asunder.
But harmony and predictability are not the order of the day, and the pressure for big things to change is becoming overwhelming. It may be that, decades hence, the old cultural tribes of England will somehow reconfigure themselves and the familiar dichotomy will be restored. But in the meanwhile, we will watch parties and coalitions rise and fall, lacking the internal cultural understandings that have underpinned British politics for so many generations. It will not be a cheerful or soothing national experience.
