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https://www.britannica.com/topic/conservatism/Great-Britain
Explanation:
Conservatism since the turn of the 20th century
The Allied victory in World War I resulted in the downfall of four great imperial dynasties—those in Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Ottoman Turkey—that were the last major bastions of conservatism based on monarchy, landed aristocracy, and an established church. After the war, conservative parties became the standard-bearers of frustrated nationalism in Germany as well as in Italy and other former Allied countries. In a process that began in the 1930s and intensified during World War II, conservative parties across central and eastern Europe were destroyed or co-opted by the totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany.
European conservative parties began to recover their strength only after 1946, and then only in western Europe, since Soviet power had extirpated all conservative political organizations in eastern Europe. To the chagrin of western European socialists, conservative parties—or, more commonly, Christian Democratic parties in which various moderate and conservative elements had coalesced—began to win elections in West Germany and other countries. After the defeat of the fascist regimes, and given socialism’s apparent inability to speedily rebuild shattered postwar economies, many Europeans turned once more to conservative policies, which seemed to promise both economic growth and democratic freedoms. This revived conservatism was by now completely shorn of its old aristocratic associations. Instead, it emphasized the raising of living standards through a market economy and the provision of a wide array of social services by the state. For the rest of the century conservative parties were characterized by liberal individualism tinged with a strong sense of social conscience—as well as by an implacable opposition to communism.
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Great Britain
At the start of the 20th century, the Conservative Party in Great Britain seemed to stand at the summit of its popularity. This ascendancy was temporarily halted by the Liberal victory in the general election of 1906. By this time, however, the Liberals had begun to lose trade-union and working-class supporters to the Labour Party, and the Labour victory of 1924 spelled the end of the Liberal Party as an effective political force. During the next four decades the Conservatives formed the government most of the time. Their success was partly the result of their having absorbed large numbers of formerly Liberal middle-class voters. The Conservative Party thus became a union of old Tory and Liberal interests combined against Labour.
In the interwar period, conservatism in Britain became closely identified with the defense of middle- and upper-class privileges, an unconstructive opposition to socialism, and, during the 1930s, appeasement (a deal-making and commercialist approach to the rising Nazi menace). However, following the introduction of a mixed economy and the vast extension of state welfare services under the Labour government of Clement Attlee after 1945, the Conservatives reversed very few of their predecessors’ innovations when they returned to power in 1951. Instead they claimed to be better able to administer the welfare state efficiently. Indeed, to some extent they even tried to outbid their opponents with their own programs of social spending, including measures to encourage the construction of new homes.
