The British Conservative Party

The author analyses how these leaders echoed and re-signified more traditional political ideas and ideologies while negotiating with and borrowing new flourishing concepts during those years.

Citizenship has been an ill-explored subject within Conservative Party studies. When this subject has been analysed, it is usually made by scholars of citizenship, more concerned with general overviews than understanding specific Conservative approaches to the concept. This book intends to fill this gap.

Through a rigorous analysis of sources, the author explores how the Conservative Party contested the welfare model of citizenship and sought to recreate a new relationship between the individual, the state and civil society. Starting from Thatcher's idea of 'active citizenship' and going through the analysis of John Major's 'Citizen's Charter' and David Cameron's 'Big Society' project, the book sheds new light on how these developments responded to long-term problems while dialoguing with specific circumstances and the different Conservative leaders' ideas.

From an ideological perspective, the author analyses how these leaders echoed and re-signified more traditional political ideas and ideologies while negotiating with and borrowing new flourishing concepts during those years. Far from being a unidimensional citizenship concept, in reinterpreting old ideas and utilizing new ones, these Conservatives elaborated a complex and many times contradictory citizenship model that tried to address both long-lasting and more timely issues that overlapped in British society.

Autorentext

Lenon Campos Maschette is Postdoctoral Fellow in Politics at the State University of Campinas and holds a PhD in History from the University of São Paulo. His research interests include political ideologies with a focus on ideologies of the right. Some of their publications are Citizenship and ideology in David Cameron's 'Big Society' (2023) and Was there a legislative moral agenda in Thatcher's administration? (2021).

Inhalt

Introduction: Citizenship and the conservatives 1. Margaret Thatcher's 'active citizen': placing civil society at the centre of citizenship 2. John Major's Citizen's Charter and the consumer citizen 3. New Labour and Conservative Party reconstruction 4. The ideology behind the Big Society: 'There is such thing as society' 5. Conclusion.