The name Tory, originally derived from the Irish insult for a horse thief, goes back some hundreds of years. The Tories emerged as the force of reaction against the then progressive Whigs, so-called as an insult for extreme Scottish covenanters, being Calvinists. In a Traditionalist sense the Tories were the political force in the Parliamentary system defending Monarchy and Hierarchy against the rise of mercantile Protestantism, They were the political manifestation of the Cavaliers who had fought for the King and his divine right to rule in the English Civil War.
Today Toryism is associated more with the merchant class and the City of London than were its political ancestors. As Socialism became the main threat, the Tories shifted from being defenders of landed gentry and the rural system of protectionism and to favouring of the new establishment - Whiggish capitalism.
This was a long journey. Having been entirely excluded from power by the Whigs after the Glorious Revolution, the Tories became extinct during the Whig supremacy, which favoured a corrupt mercantile class over landed gentry - the South Sea Bubble and the rest.
Toryism as a force re-emerged during the American War of Independence when on both sides of the Pond, Tory was a word again hurled as a form of abuse against the supporters of the King's allegedly obtuse stubbornness in the face of American colonists' demands. Arguably from a Tory perspective the revolutionaries were working towards a new type of state - a propositional state based on Enlightenment principles hostile to monarchy, established church and tradition.
One champion of the colonists' demands, a certain Rockinghamite Whig of Irish family, was to become the great philosopher of English conservatism - one Edmund Burke. Known as the Father of conservatism, having sympathised deeply with American rebels and been a champion of compromise, he took a very different view of the French Revolution. Seeing their old enemy the French King in difficulty, the English aristocracy was inclined to interpret the initial moves of the Jacobins as nothing more than an equivalent of their own Glorious Revolution of 1688, reaffirming ancient liberties and parliamentary sovereignty..
Seeing the American rebels as in a great English tradition of liberty, Burke realised the abstract theories and radical rationalism of the French revolution were far more radical. This was a far more serious challenge to the ancien regime of Crown and Altar - the two cornerstones of Western European civilisation, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant.
In the later wars against revolutionary France and Napoleonic France, the United Kingdom fought for the principles of tradition, monarchy and Christianity against Jacobin revolutionaries and Napoleon the demagogue and dictator. Pitt the Younger's government, with its authoritarian crackdowns on those with French sympathies and his adversarial clashes with the more liberal Whig, Fox, found he and his followers again inheriting the name of Tories.
After the wars, Liverpool and Wellington as Tory prime ministers found themselves under extreme pressure from the democratising forces that led to the collapse of the Tories, amidst the Peterloo massacre, in the face of the Whigs and their Great Reform Act of 1832 extending the franchise.
Sir Robert Peel, one of the Tories, who as Home Secretary had established the Metropolitan Police, known as Peelers or Bobbies, after their founder, re-established the Tory Right as the Conservative Party, which would come to dominate British politics and is the oldest political party in the world. From Burke, who defended aristocracy and High Anglicanism, Peel found the principle of piecemeal reform as an alternative to radical or revolutionary change based on abstract theory. In the context of his own political career prior to his premiership, with Catholic Emancipation and the Great Reform Act, one can understand this willingness to reform. It became his undoing as Tory backwoodsmen representing rural constituencies, resisted his free trade policies in the context of the Irish potato famine. Peel believed free trade would relieve the starving Irish, but Conservative backbenchers rejected the new orthodoxy of free trade in favour of protection. The party split and re-emerged in opposition reduced to a rump, calling themselves the Protectionist Party.
Under the charismatic Jewish leader, Benjamin Disraeli, the Conservatives or Tories as they were still known colloquially, became a powerful political force again, opposing Liberal William Gladstone's free market policies. Disraeli fought to keep the rich and poor as one nation in the division resulting from capitalist industrial change, with a growing gap between rich and poor. The phrase One Nation retains resonance in today's Conservative Party.
After Conservative success under Lord Salisbury, when working class voters newly enfranchised by Disraeli's Conservatives, repaid the honour by putting the last peer, Lord Salisbury into Number 10 and delivering a Conservative majority with their votes at the turn of the last century, disaster stuck. Joe Chamberlain, a Liberal defector to the Tories over home rule and father of the famous Neville, championed the cause of tariff reform. His group of Unionists passionate about Ireland's place in the United Kingdom had joined the Tories and given it the new name of the Conservative and Unionist party. Chamberlain, a powerful political figure in Birmingham, with a strong social conscience for the poor, was deeply committed to the British Empire. Tapping into old Tory sympathies for protectionism, he wanted tariffs to protect the British Empire and the abandonment of free trade. The party split and foundered. It only re-emerged as the stabilising force in the turmoil after the First World War as the Liberals collapsed and Labour emerged as the other major party.
Moderate conservatism in the spirit of piecemeal reform was the order of the day under Baldwin. This continued after the Second World War as the Tories accepted the Socialist settlement of the post-war Labour Government and governed as a consensus party. Only with the collapse of the Keynesian model did the Conservatives adopt a radical position under Margaret Thatcher as the free marketeers, in economic terms resurrecting Gladstone's economic liberalism.
Recent context then is of a divide between Thatcherite free marketeers and left wing One Nation Conservatives. A similar division along similar lines arose over Brexit. Like repeal of the Corn Laws or Tariff Reform, the Tories tore themselves to pieces over the Brexit referendum.
An obvious conclusion from a progressive perspective is that forces of reaction divide and destroy the Tories. There is though a very different interpretation. It is rather this specific point taken from Burke of accepting piecemeal reform and the idea of an evolutionary polity has been the problem. #it has meant accepting the Left's agenda, even when the public want it to be resisted.
While rejecting the abstract theory of the Left the Conservatives have always accepted implicitly the agenda of whoever the progressives of the day happen to be. This means Tory causes are lost causes, even if they did not have to be.
It meant for example in the last fourteen years the Conservatives failed to reverse the radical constitutional changes by the Blair government and never had the courage to confront woke agendas such as transgenderism. The lesson of history is not that the reactionaries split the party, putting it out of power. The real lesson is the minority of true conservatives in the party were fighting for genuine conservatism, but the party establishment had already surrendered the ideological or philosophical battle. Progressivism will inevitably win, is the assumption and the Tories must simply mitigate the impact.
As a result of this way of thinking the Conservatives have time and again failed their own supporters. This is not a liberal or progressive nation. However, the only centre right party able to win under our constituency system has already always surrendered the battle of principle. It has accepted the revolution and merely wants to slow it down to make it more palatable to a conservative country.
This is why the Conservative Party always fails in the end. It has always misinterpreted the lessons of history. It has always assumed the progressives, nearly always part of the elite, are probably right. And this is because so many of the Conservative Party hierarchy exist in the same social and class world as the arrogant progressives - who are always from the top of society. So there is no intellectual confidence amongst Conservatives. And indeed some of the Conservative establishment agree with the progressive agenda, but believe their job is to help a conservative public to accept what is inevitable.
In large part the establishment still accepts a positivist and progressive idea of history. From its very roots, with Peel's acceptance of Whig reforms, in its genesis the Conservative Party accepts the Right has nothing to say about the direction of history, only how to mitigate the impact of fast-paced change. They accept that the progressives have rightly identified the direction of history and they simply have a political role to mitigate, to slow and to make acceptable the changes the Left pushes onto the country. And this is why the Conservative Party is facing an electoral wipe out on Thursday.
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