The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (57 page)

 
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The British Conservative Party is often said to have origins which are ‘lost in the mist of history’. Samuel Beer traces a lineage back to the supporters of the Tudor court in the sixteenth century. Less tendentiously, there is an unbroken descent from the parliamentary ‘Tories’ of the late seventeenth century whose original defining belief was Stuart legitimism, but whose
raison d'étre
under the Hanoverian monarchy of the eighteenth century became opposition to the ideas and entrenched power of the Whig oligarchy. Only in the nineteenth century did Tories become (also) Conservatives, the name being used in the debate about electoral change which culminated in the Reform Act of 1832. ‘Conservative’ was accepted as a self-description by one of the most prominent Tories, Sir Robert Peel , in the speech known as the Tamworth Manifesto in 1834. The reform debate also brought into being the first real extraparliamentary Conservative institution, the Carlton Club, which was founded in 1831.
The second Reform Act of 1867, which doubled the electorate, proved the stimulus for the creation of a national, extraparliamentary, Conservative Party. The parliamentary Conservative Party responded by creating a National Union of Conservative Associations, a ‘handmaid’ of the Party as one of its founders (H. C. Raikes , MP) was to describe it. The principal purpose of the National Union was to bring a local party association into being in every constituency. In 1870 Conservative Central Office was founded as a body of professional party workers to coordinate the essentially volunteer army of supporters in the constituencies. Thus a modern party was brought into being with great rapidity as an extension of an ancient parliamentary faction and in response to the challenge of a mass electorate. Further reform was stimulated by the heavy electoral defeat by the Liberals in 1905–6 and a Chairman of the Party Organization was appointed in 1911.
The Conservative Party is one of the oldest political parties in the world and also one of the most successful, having held office, usually as sole governing party, for more than half of the period of its existence. The secret of its success largely consists of the loyalty with which constituency associations, who provide much of its resources and whose ultimate autonomy is very great, have been prepared to support both their elected member and their party leader, sometimes studiously ignoring the differences between the two. This support has been possible because the party is, in many respects, the least politicized of political parties, capable of subordinating argument and factionalism to an overwhelming desire to keep opposing parties out of office. Thus, although the party has always contained factions, including, in the late twentieth century, ‘wets’ (in favour of selective state intervention in the economy) and ‘dries’ (supporters of Margaret Thatcher's project to ‘roll back the state’) as well as pro- and anti-Europeans, it has not experienced a serious split since the Corn Law controversies of the 1840s.
There are many parties in the world which might be described as ‘conservative’, but only a few, in Scandinavia and the English-speaking countries, actually describe themselves as ‘Conservative’. Even among these, the British Conservative Party is a unique institution, whose history and structure marks it out as different from any other political party.
LA 

 
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Term developed by the Dutch political scientist Arend Lijphart to explain the mechanisms of political stability in societies with deep social cleavages. Through government by an élite cartel, a democracy with a fragmented political culture was stabilized, e.g., Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands. See also
pillarization
.
WG 

 
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Area whose electorate returns a representative to a national parliament. There are 651 in the United Kingdom, their number and dimensions continually subject to reform under the House of Commons (Redistribution of Seats) Act. The functional equivalent is a ‘district’ in (for instance) the United States, and a ‘riding’ in Canada. ‘Constituency’ may be taken to mean more broadly the support which a politician appeals to or seeks.
JBr 

 
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The set of fundamental rules governing the politics of a nation or subnational body. The word was first used in this sense after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 in Britain, when the deposed king, James II, was accused of having violated the ‘fundamental constitution of the kingdom’. But though the word in this sense is a British invention, it is much harder to determine what the British constitution actually is than that of almost anywhere else.
A typical constitution is written, short, general, and entrenched. The oldest and (except from 1861 to 1865) most successful constitution in the world, that of the United States, illustrates all these points. It was written at a Constitutional Convention in 1787 and ratified by all the existing states except Rhode Island. The US Constitution and all its subsequent amendments run to only around 8,000 words. It contains no rules about what must be done, except procedural rules governing the election of Presidents and Congress and the nomination of Supreme Court justices and other senior officials. It contains many rules about what Congress, the executive, and (since the Civil War) the states may not do. And it contains the rules for its own amendment: proposals must emanate from either two-thirds of each house of Congress, or a convention called at the request of two-thirds of the state legislatures, and to succeed they must be ratified by three-quarters of the states.
Most other written constitutions are longer than that of the United States, and they often contain particular rules (a popular example being clauses like ‘The national anthem is the
Marseillaise
’ from the constitution of the French Fifth Republic, Title 1, Article 2). But they all entrench themselves by making themselves more difficult to amend than ordinary laws. Many go beyond the procedural rights guaranteed in the US Constitution to guarantee substantive rights as well: for instance, ‘Every individual has the duty to work and the right to employment’ (France); ‘Citizens of the USSR have the right to rest and leisure’ (USSR constitution of 1977). They are typically less forthcoming about how the citizen who feels deprived of these rights may seek redress.
Given the tradition of
parliamentary sovereignty
, how can it be said that a British constitution exists? As it is a fundamental idea of parliamentary sovereignty that Parliament can do anything except bind its successor, it follows that anything which purports to be a constitutional guarantee enshrined in a British Act of Parliament could simply be amended by a later parliament. Thus for instance the five-year maximum term of a parliament is set by the Parliament Act 1911, but if a parliament which was near the end of its term decided that it would rather not face a general election, there would be no legal impediment to its simply repealing the 1911 Act. When commentators state that the British constitution is unwritten, they are expressing the nature of entrenchment in Britain in a very misleading way by saying that there is an unwritten understanding that no parliament would actually do that. But unwritten understandings are not always understood until somebody writes them down (and not necessarily then). Those who argue that Britain ought to have a written constitution claim that some of the supposed unwritten understandings have ceased to be understood, pointing in particular to the decline of
collective responsibility
and claiming that the British executive treats the legislature increasingly arrogantly and unaccountably. Those opposed to a written constitution argue that decisions on constitutional matters ought not to be transferred from elected politicians to unelected lawyers.