As a young Conservative, older members have tried to reassure me that our party still has a future in government despite the local election results. Our party, they say, is the most successful political party in history for a reason. But I rarely get to hear from them what that reason is. They often reminisce about what Thatcher understood and what this government just doesn’t get. But the Conservative party’s history stretches far beyond Thatcher; is there not something deeper behind our electoral success?

Whilst Thatcher worked for the 1980s, maintaining a Thatcherite consensus toady fails to appreciate what the political economist Karl Polanyi identified in 1944 as a “double movement” occurring throughout history: the intergenerational nature of class conflict swinging society between the opposing principles of economic liberalism and social protection.

Conservatives, consciously or not, have succeeded by routinely mediating each iteration of class conflict. Whilst some parties exploit contemporary conflicts, rallying one class against another, Conservatives moderate them. Take Disraeli’s interventions when the working class were subjected to the inhumane conditions of the industrial revolution. Contrariwise, consider how Thatcher stepped up for capital holders when unions brought this country to a halt. Conservatives consistently temper the fallout resulting from one class’s domination over another. To Macmillan, the moderation of these extremes of social conflict defined Conservatism.

This position is what gave the party its longevity. By serving to ensure no one class’s interests dominated another’s, the party guaranteed it could find national appeal regardless of how social class evolved with history.

Today, a new political divide is emerging once again, but this time the Conservative party has stalled.

Unlike senior party members, I was born into this new political divide, a cleavage shaped by the fallout of globalisation. Born into a Northeastern town, our local industries had been outcompeted internationally. By the time I was one year old, there was already far more traffic on Amazon.co.uk than in our town centre, leaving vacant shops and druggies as the most prominent features of my high-street.

In 2008, the financial crisis raised unemployment and depreciated property prices across northern post-industrial towns, preventing my family and others from moving home.

By 2016, a bus asked my town if we would like to take back control. It promised £350 more million for the NHS that is currently going towards the EU’s free market. Given what little international markets had left us with, towns like mine voted overwhelmingly for the plan.

And just as I reached voting age, I encountered a Conservative Party which understood me. Boris Johnson was on my phone, behind a podium reading ‘Unleash Britain’s potential,’ spluttering out a vision of Britain where left-behind towns recover their vibrancy and their commercial life. A vision which implicitly admitted that market distribution had not worked and that Conservatives were nostalgic for what towns such as mine used to be like. For occupying this position, the Conservatives were rewarded enormously, sweeping traditionally working-class voters out from underneath a socialist Labour Party.

In that moment, the Conservatives were once again riding the arc of history, propelled into government by a new class of voters who were exposed to the harsh edge of globalisation.

Yet, as quickly as that moment came, it went.

The brakes were slammed so hard after Johnson’s departure that the Conservatives tumbled back to a half-century-old Thatcherism, back into status quo managerialism. The link with the new voting class was snapped. They instead approached new parties: Reform and the Greens.

To regain these voters, I would argue, requires Conservatives to become conscious of the role wealth plays in these historical moments. Although Conservatives hail Thatcher’s liberal economics, you cannot explain her electoral success without wealth redistribution. Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme transferred public assets to the most vulnerable in society at a discount of up to 50%. One-and-a-half million council homes were sold, leaving homeownership up by 12% upon her departure. Subsequently, the working class, having received the greatest transfer of wealth since the fifties, voted en masse for Thatcher. Although her economic reforms made working-class regions vulnerable, Thatcher temporarily bolstered the foundational safety net of civic society: the home-owning family.

Unfortunately, Conservatives today have forgotten this. Where the state is absent, Conservative civic society should step in; the family first, reinforced by an organic medley of civic institutions like charities, churches and small businesses. But these groups require wealth to make a significant impact upon people’s lives, and currently wealth is inaccessible except to those who already have it.

In 2024, median property prices across the country reached almost eight times the median wage, pushing the average age of first-time buyers to 34 years old. Over 50% of these buyers required two incomes to complete a purchase, a daunting statistic given only 25% of those under 29 live as a couple.

The picture is just as bleak for local entrepreneurs. Research from the Estates Gazette in 2019 revealed overseas investors are quickly acquiring British highstreets, owning 17.3% of high-street properties. Meanwhile just 5.3% of retail units belonged to their small business occupiers. Commercial properties, meant to be the pride of local businessmen, are increasingly just portfolio pieces of an overseas asset-owning class.

And the collapse of wealth does not stop at civic society; it has gripped government. National debt has reached the point that discussion of the bond markets is an ordinary feature of political media. Today’s government sits helpless as they watch a fresh wave of inflationary predictions rise from an oil price crisis in the Middle East. It is portentous to remember that Thatcher’s arrival was preceded by an oil price crisis in 1973, one inflamed by the government’s inability to restrain the fallout of a contemporary class conflict.

Just as Thatcher arrived to subdue the unions’ power, today it is time for a countermovement. Capital owners’ dominance has grown for 40 years; the consequences are apparent in ballooning asset prices and stagnating wages. These conditions have fuelled support for a wealth tax, backed by 75% of the public. Whilst wealth taxes sound lacking in nuance, embodied within their support lies a truth Conservatives must not ignore, a truth which parallels Thatcher’s recognition of the problem inherent in the unions’ overbearing strength in the seventies: the domination of the asset-owning class is pushing society towards breaking point.

The Conservatives have failed to articulate a vision of our party which appreciates this. They are stuck in the eighties. And yet, for me, they still symbolise a route of moderation, a route back to a stable political economy. To secure a role in our country’s future, and restore Conservative civic society, Conservatives must think about wealth inequality seriously.

Original image is a photo by No 10.