Conclusion

Summary

The Conclusion draws together the most important arguments arising from the preceding chapters and offers a commentary on the methodological and historiographical implications of the book for our understanding of popular Conservatism, and popular politics more broadly, in twentieth-century Britain. It highlights three phenomena that shaped the character of inter-war Conservatism. The first is the fact that party activists saw the task of cultivating the new electorate in resolutely local terms, reflecting their abiding commitment to pre-war conceptions of popular Conservatism and how it operated. The second is the role that voters’ material interests played in shaping activists’ understanding of representative politics; the methodological point here being that the agency of local activists, hitherto emphasized in the wake of the ‘linguistic turn’, was circumscribed by existing and inescapable agendas defined by trade, employment, economic prosperity, living standards and amenities. The third phenomenon is the growing significance of modern central government to the enterprise of popular politics between the wars: electoral strategies in the constituencies rested on the assumption that living standards could be successfully managed by government initiative. The chapter concludes by exploring how the Conservatism of the 1930s therefore fostered a programmatic, activist culture of government that did much to foreshadow the statist turn of British politics in the 1940s and 1950s.