The Lost World of Young Conservatism

Abstract

The Young Conservatives were primarily a social club, hosting dances, beauty contests, car rallies and winning endorsements from sports stars. They made a virtue of this apolitical reputation to recruit a mass, middle-class membership, and with rhetoric of service and citizenship embedded themselves in local civil society. This article reflects on why this associational culture has been neglected by political and social historians. In the approach of Raphael Samuel's ‘Lost world of British Communism’, it explores the worldview and lifestyle of YCs in 1950s and 1960s Britain, drawing on national, local, and oral sources. Boasting of being ‘the free world's largest youth political movement’ it was a considerable political resource and confounds Conservatism's aged public image in this period. The article accounts for the Ycs' falling membership through the 1960s and discusses its legacy. Decline came as it experienced social and cultural change, as the value of mass party membership diminished and as, after the Macleod report, YCs sought to become more conventionally ‘political’. The resulting debates about politics–social mix are illuminating about political culture more generally. It argues the YCs were not simply victims of social change, but that the decision to become ‘political’ was also a factor. Until the later 1960s it contends the YCs attest to the persistence of strands of Conservatism described by interwar historians like McKibbin and Light – an associational appeal, whose light touch deftly avoided the appearance of being partisan in anything other than name.

Grassroots Conservatism in Post‐War Britain: A View from the Bottom Up

“… Recently, this interest has been extended to the cultural aspects of party organization, most notably in Lawrence Black's recent reconstruction of the ‘party political’ but only ‘partly political’ post‐war Young Conservatives. The project of recovering the culture and ideology of popular Conservatism has not, however, addressed the core of the party's organization, its associations and membership in the post‐war period.…”

Review of periodical literature published in 2008

“…Heilbronner attempts to explain the Beatles' success in terms of their cultural origins in the English north and traditions within British popular culture. Black's highly informative and entertaining paper on the Young Conservatives (YCs) reinterprets the relationship between what was at one time the largest voluntary political movement in the world and the changes in British society and culture that allegedly led to its marginalization. Black contends that, paradoxically, until the 1960s, it was the maintenance by the YCs of a strong ‘apolitical’ stance, a stance made possible because of prevailing middle‐class attitudes, that accounted for the YCs' organizational success.…”

Thatcher’s troops? Neighbourhood Watch schemes and the search for ‘ordinary’ Thatcherism in 1980s Britain

“…Schemes' self-projection of themselves as 'non-political'-a highly powerful political statement in itself-demonstrated the ways in which conservative practices could be found within indefinite political spaces beyond parties, think tanks and pressure groups and were, perhaps, more powerful but less certain because of this. 26 In this respect, parallels can be drawn with the ways in which associational life permeated an informal sense of conservatism during the inter-war. 27 To echo Alison Light's work on interwar literary culture, the Neighbourhood Watch offered a non-elitist 'common sense' and a scarcely discernible politics that sustained an informal conservatism.…”