Thatcher’s reforms decimated the British Conservative Party’s own mass base.

Evidence

In the passage on the right-wing overshoot of the 1980s, James Heartfield records that “the right-wing parties and their traditional base in the church and farmers’ organizations” were also hit hard by the capitalist counteroffensive of the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, in the UK, the Conservatives suffered a dramatic loss in membership, from a staggering 2.8 million in 1953 to just over 170,000 in 2022. As Tariq Ali has written, this self-immolation was a product of Thatcher’s market reforms, which led to “the decimation of the Tories’ provincial base of local gentry, bank managers and businessmen through the waves of trans-Atlantic acquisitions and privatizations she unleashed.” The Iron Lady may have “succeeded in rebooting returns on capital and crushed the organized working class,” but at the cost of lasting damage to her party. Both numerically and qualitatively, the English right remains a shadow of its former self. The Primrose League was disbanded in 2004, and anyone visiting rural Britain will quickly notice the faded Conservative Club placards. Those groups which have survived look more like retirement homes than centers of mobilization (the median age of the Conservative Party membership is estimated to be seventy-two). — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 160

Categorization

• SHARE: The 2.8M-to-170K Conservative membership collapse is the kind of precise figure to send to anyone interested in party decline.
• ADDENDUM: Parallels the tree essay’s theme of self-inflicted damage — capital’s counteroffensive consumed the Tory party’s own roots.