Abstract
As a social institution organized under party auspices, the Young Conservatives (YC) intersect political and social change, like other core samples in Redefining British Politics. Making a virtue of its apolitical reputation to recruit a mass, if mainly middle-class membership, the YCs deployed a rhetoric of service and citizenship to embed themselves in local civil society through the 1950s. Its low key, light-hearted and associational appeal attests to the persistence of strands identified by historians of inter-war Conservative political culture — deftly avoiding the appearance of being political or partisan in much other than name. If this amounted to evidence of a relatively unpolitical culture, it was also testimony to party’s ability to negotiate this. After The Macleod Report (1965) into the YC’s falling membership, debate ensued about the impact of social change on YC fortunes, whether the ratio of social to political activities needed adjusting and whether a smaller membership of greater political quality was preferable. The ‘politicization’ of YC activity initiated by Macleod was not uncontested, but provides a means of tracing shifts in the texture and parameters of not only YC and Conservative, but the wider political culture.
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Notes
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Black, L. (2010). ‘The largest voluntary political youth movement in the world’: The Lifestyle and Identity of Young Conservatism. In: Redefining British Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230250475_4
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