ECONOMY Conservatives continue to share Thatcher’s belief in the free market – e.g. they privatised Royal Mail in 2013. However, May talked about new industrial strategy to support certain struggling industries - She has created a new Department for Business, Energy,...
SAME-SEX MARRIAGE Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 - 118 Conservative MPs in favour, 129 against (Free vote) This free vote on same-sex marriage highlights the divisions that exist between the Conservative Party’s more religious, traditionally conservative,...
WELFARE Welfare Reform and Work Bill July 2015 - 48 Labour MPs defy orders to abstain and vote against the bill. The bill included plans to limit child tax credit to two children and further lower the household benefit cap. The then acting-leader, Harriet Harman, had...
EU Conservatives: disagreements between high-profile Remainers such as Kenneth Clarke and supporters of Brexit such as Jacob Rees-Mogg Tory hard Brexiters in European Research Group – 60 members including Rees-Mogg, Tory Soft Brexiters such as Dominic Grieve and...
NATIONAL DEFICIT AND DEBT The recession led to a sharp drop in tax receipts, while bank bailouts, stimulus packages, and rising unemployment stretched public spending, greatly increasing the national deficit - Conservatives argued that Labour had overspent during the...
ECONOMY Monetarism & Dealing with a Recession - Monetarist theory - governments can foster economic stability by targeting the growth rate of money supply. Based on the monetarist theories of Milton Friedman, the base interest rate was raised to 30% in 1979, in...
LEADERS In the 2017 leadership election, there were five candidates, after two rounds of MP ballots, Theresa May and Andrea Leadsom emerged as the top two candidates. However, before the vote could go to party members, Theresa May was declared the winner after Andrea...
EU One way in which Conservative Party policy has changed since the 1990s is the stance on EU membership. This is because in the 1990s, John Major’s government were largely pro-EU, and fought to pass the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 which formally established the union...
ONE-NATION Tory Reform Group – Founded in 1975 to promote more moderate policies influenced by Benjamin Disraeli’s ‘One Nation’ Conservatism and Harold Macmillan’s ‘’Middle Way’. The group’s website explains that it has historically aimed to combine “economic...
NEW/PURPLE LABOUR The think-tank Progress, founded in 1995, was one of the original pressure groups to support Tony Blair’s ‘Third Way’, and continues to champion New Labour policies. In 2011, the group published a series of essays by Blairite MPs in book called ‘The...
ELITE If political parties are not funded, they would then be funded by wealthy individuals which is not fair. Rise of large individual donations to PP’s since the 1990s has led to the perception that one might be able to buy access or political influence. g., in 2006...
OPPOSITION Taxpayers should not be expected to bankroll parties that they oppose. The fundamental right to support and sustain causes and interests that are important to us is one to be valued and protected. Political parties have no less a right to the kind of...
UKIP As a result of the 2009 European election UKIPs profile increased with it securing 13 seats at this election. Nigel Farage captured many disenchanted Eurosceptic Tory voters & those who felt that the main PPs don’t offer sufficient direction in tackling...
REPRESENTATION Traditionally, parties were said to represent the views of their members. This was certainly true in an age of mass-membership parties, when parties and voters were clearly divided along class lines. Partisan and class de-alignment, accompanied by the...
FPTP While the combined vote share of the Labour and Conservative parties has fallen from 96.8% in 1951 to 67.3% in 2015, the percentage of seats held by the two parties has only dropped from 98.6% (1951) to 86.5% (2015). This is because the electoral system used for...
THIRD PARTIES The UK has become a multi-party system now due to the increasing influence of third parties. In the 2010 GE produced hung parliament leading to Con-LD coalition Even as a minor coalition partner, the LD’s were able to act on a number of significant...
PARTY LEADERS Since 1998 Conservative MPs vote in a series of ballots that involve party members and narrow the field of leadership candidates down to two - members vote on a one member, one vote basis to decide which of these two becomes party leader. A leadership...