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The Conservative and Unionist Party, commonly the Conservative Party and colloquially known as the Tories, is one of the two main political parties in the United Kingdom, along with the Labour Party. It is the current governing party , having won the 2019 general election , and has been the primary governing party in the United ...
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Conservative Party, in the United Kingdom, a political party whose guiding principles include the promotion of private property and enterprise, the maintenance of a strong military, and the preservation of traditional cultural values and institutions. Since World War I the Conservative Party and its principal opponent, the Labour Party, have domina...
The Conservative Party is the heir, and in some measure the continuation, of the old Tory Party, members of which began forming “conservative associations” after Britain’s Reform Bill of 1832 extended electoral rights to the middle class. The name Conservative was first used as a description of the party by John Wilson Croker writing in the Quarterly Review in 1830. The first Conservative government was formed by Sir Robert Peel, whose program, set out in the Tamworth Manifesto (1834), stressed the timely reform of abuses, the necessity of law and order, an orderly system of taxation, and the importance of both landed interests and trade and industry.
Prospects of an extended period of Conservative rule disappeared in 1846 when the party split over the repeal of protectionist regulations known as the Corn Laws, and for most of the next 30 years they were out of government. The party was reorganized by Benjamin Disraeli, prime minister for a few months in 1868 and from 1874 to 1880. The Conservative Central Office, a professional organization established by Disraeli in 1870, and the newly formed National Union, which drew together local voluntary associations, gave the party additional unity and strength. At the same time, Disraeli’s emphasis on social reform to reduce the enormous disparity in the living conditions of rich and poor, combined with a strong, activist imperial and foreign policy, helped the party to transcend class barriers. Disraeli’s contribution was to transform the party from one that spoke primarily for landed interests to one that could draw supporters from the middle class and from newly enfranchised workers.
The Conservative Party was further strengthened in 1886 when it allied with the Liberal Unionists, a faction of the Liberal Party that opposed the policy of Home Rule in Ireland put forward by the Liberal leader William Ewart Gladstone. Thus reinforced, the Conservatives held office for all but 3 of the next 20 years, first under the leadership of Lord Salisbury and then under Arthur Balfour. A split over tariff policy caused them to lose the election of 1906 in a disastrous landslide, and they did not regain power until they joined a wartime coalition with the Liberals in May 1915. In the election of 1918, most of the candidates elected to support the coalition were Conservatives.
In 1922 Conservative backbenchers forced the party’s withdrawal from the coalition and thereby precipitated the resignation of party leader Austen Chamberlain. The rebellion owed much to the revulsion felt by many backbenchers toward the Liberal leader and prime minister, David Lloyd George, and to their unease over some of the more interventionist reforms introduced by Liberal ministers. A surprise election called in December 1923 by Conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin proved to be a miscalculation that briefly reunited the ailing Liberal Party and opened the way to a minority Labour Party government, though the Conservatives remained the largest single party and were able to regain power the following year. Apart from another brief Labour administration in 1929–31, the Conservatives dominated national office until 1945. Baldwin emerged as a popular figure and the architect of what he called the “new Conservatism,” an attempt to appeal to the middle class through a modest movement away from the laissez-faire economic policies that the party had advocated since 1918.
Baldwin’s successor as party leader and prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, was forced from office in May 1940 by his own backbenchers because of his poor leadership in the early months of World War II. Chamberlain was replaced by another Conservative, Winston Churchill, who formed a coalition government with the Labour Party. Although Churchill led the country to victory in the war, he failed to lead his own party to success in the first postwar election in 1945. The party’s stunning defeat can be attributed to the electorate’s desire for social reform and economic security, as well as its inclination to blame the Conservatives for not having done enough in the 1930s to alleviate mass unemployment or to thwart the aspirations of dictators. While in opposition, the party reformed its policies and organization. It created a new youth movement (the Young Conservatives) and an education wing (the Conservative Political Centre), revived the party’s research department, and undertook a drive to increase party membership. The party returned to power in 1951 and maintained office until 1964. Under the leadership of Churchill, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, and Alec Douglas-Home, the Conservative Party came to accept the key tenets of the “postwar consensus” with Labour—that is, it recognized the state’s responsibility for maintaining full employment and endorsed the use of techniques of economic-demand management, based on the theories of John Maynard Keynes, to achieve that objective. Moreover, the party did not seek to reverse the welfare measures nor most of the public ownership of industry that had been introduced by Labour in 1945–51. The Conservative government did embark on an extensive house-building program and was able to reduce income taxes while increasing spending on the National Health Service. In the early 1960s, however, an economic downturn and a series of scandals—one of which involved an adulterous affair between the secretary of war and an alleged Soviet spy—undermined the party’s support.
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29 gen 2024 · Rishi Sunak has fired the starting pistol on the general election - it will take place on 4 July, writes BBC senior political analyst Peter Barnes. The opinion polls suggest his Conservative...
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Il partito è stato uno dei due più importanti partiti politici inglesi del XIX secolo insieme ai Liberali. Ha cambiato il suo nome nel 1912 in Partito Conservatore e Unionista a causa della fusione con il Partito Liberale Unionista, ma generalmente è chiamato solamente Partito Conservatore.
10 mag 2024 · The 2019 Tory coalition proved fragile: Only 43 percent of 2019 Conservative voters plan to vote for the party in an upcoming general election, according to a recent YouGov poll.
Conservative Party - BBC News. Rishi Sunak's and Keir Starmer's speeches in full. UK Politics. 7h. Election poll tracker: How do the parties compare? UK Politics. 8h. NI parties react to...
