Conservatism in Wales

Introduction

The Conservative party is often the second political party in Wales, one of the four constituent nations of the United Kingdom. Wales has long had a reputation for being a haven of Labour party support and that party has indeed dominated Welsh politics since the early twentieth century. Despite popular misconceptions, however, the Conservatives have not been an irrelevant force in Wales. They have certainly struggled to find the same electoral success that they have in England, but they engaged proactively in the governance of Wales in the pre-1997, pre-devolution era. The party has also been successful at winning parliamentary representation in the more rural, more Anglicised and less industrial parts of the nation, resulting in it being more popular than the nationalist party, Plaid Cymru.

History

In the pre-democratic nineteenth century, the Conservatives were the representatives of the landed aristocracy in Wales, which sat in contrast to more Welsh-speaking farmers and industrial labourers.^[1] Consequently, divisions based around class, language and nationhood became fundamental to politics, with the Liberal party better placed to represent those people gradually being enfranchised.^[2] Whilst Conservatives were able to win the support of the small numbers of people who had the vote in the mid-nineteenth century, by 1906 it was entirely wiped out in Wales in terms of number of parliamentary seats.^[3]

Inter-War Period

Inter-war Wales was a difficult time for many ordinary people and the fortunes of Conservatism suffered accordingly. The inter-war Depression led to hardships in many of the industrial parts of the country and swathes of Wales were badly hit.^[4] For decades afterwards, the Conservative party’s opponents in Wales would talk passionately about the dreaded thirties, laying the blame very much at the door of the party that had led the government for most of that period and consequently seemed out of touch and uncaring.^[5]

Post WW2

The post-Second World War period, however, marked a shift in the relationship between Conservatism and Wales. Spurred on by talk of freedom and decentralization in reaction to the policies of the post-1945 Labour administration, the government of Winston Churchill introduced the first specific Minister for Welsh Affairs on its return to office in 1951.^[6] The role was initially filled by the Home Secretary, David Maxwell Fyfe.^[7] (It would eventually expand into a standalone cabinet role, introduced by the Labour party in 1964).  

Membership figures were huge in this immediate post-war period, bolstered by the party’s post-war recruitment drives.^[8] In some Welsh seats, there were up to 11,000 ordinary members who were paid-up members. Whilst most of these did not equal committed activists, they did represent almost half the Conservative vote in those seats in the early 1950s.^[9] A vibrant associational culture existed in some instances as a result of this.  

The Conservatives were in office in Britain for the majority of the rest of the century. With no devolved national parliaments until 1999, Wales was subject to Conservative policymaking from Westminster. One of the most notorious moments in this regard was the decision in 1962 to drown a small village of Capel Celyn to create a reservoir to provide water for the English city of Liverpool and its surrounding region.^[10] An uptick in nationalist sentiment was evident from this period onwards, and the government of Harold Macmillan acknowledged that Welsh cultural specificity had to be recognised.  

This did not stop the party leading the arguments against devolved parliaments in Scotland and Wales in the late 1970s when the issue was put to referendums. Public opinion – especially in Wales – was simply not in favour of this kind of devolution (particularly when the economic climate of the time was grim) and the No campaign won easily.^[11] The Tories judged this to be a moment when they had been on the right side of the argument in Wales.

Thatcher Era

Despite this, the 1980s was a turbulent period in Welsh political history. The government of Margaret Thatcher met with a mixed response in Wales and its attitude to policymaking in that decade was much more nuanced than many might think. The coal miners’ strike of 1984/85 and the winding down of heavy industry left many negative marks on Welsh society, but in other ways the Conservative government bolstered areas of public life.^[12] In particular, it gave large amounts of financial and political support to the Welsh language, promoting its use in the public realm and eventually ensuring that it was a compulsory subject in all state schools where it is still taught until the age of 16.^[13] The argument revolved around the fact that conserving an ancient language was an inherently conservative thing to do, although the government did feel under pressure to act on things like setting up a Welsh language television channel.^[14]

Thatcher herself was not particularly interested in Welsh policy and gave her Welsh Office ministerial team, particularly her first Secretary of State Nicholas Edwards, his predecessor Peter Walker, and the long-serving minister Wyn Roberts, a free hand to design and implement ideas as they saw fit.^[15] Unlike in Scotland, the Conservative vote held up well in Wales in the 1980s. 500,000 people voted Tory at the 1983 and 1987 general elections, despite the totemic event of the miners’ strike playing out in between them.^[16] The ‘Right to Buy’ scheme, which allowed council tenants to purchase their houses, was particularly popular in Wales for example.^[17]

1990s

As the political woes of the Conservative party in the mid-1990s wore on, however, the party’s fortunes in Wales plummeted. It lost all its parliamentary representation at the 1997 general election and then found itself on the wrong side of the argument in the second devolution referendum in the same year, when the Yes campaign won by the tiniest of margins.^[18]

The Conservatives struggled initially to adapt to the new devolved parliament. The original leader of the Tory group there, Rod Richards, was a robustly conservative anti-devolutionist.^[19] He was quickly replaced, however, by Nick Bourne who reshaped the party’s attitude to the new parliament, making it more sympathetic to the new status quo.^[20] Despite this supposed ‘detoxifying’ project, the Conservatives remained stuck in Wales, seemingly unable to appeal beyond its normal heartlands and seemingly plagued by its image as ‘un-Welsh’ and out of touch with ordinary concerns. The party has been the official opposition in what is now called the Senedd for much of the period since the establishment of the Senedd. The current leader of the Conservative group, Andrew RT Davies, is the Leader of the Opposition.

Present Day

Labour, however, has been in government in their own right or as the largest party since 1999. Despite everything, the Conservatives have done little to shift the left-leaning dial of Welsh politics.^[21]