Students and the Modernisation of the Conservative Party

10 November 2025

In my last post, I discussed Conservative students involved with the European Democrat Students in the late 1970s and early 1980s and their role in a particular moment of Tory European engagement. While thinking about that post I was struck by how active students were in the Conservative Party in a longer periodisation, a story I don’t think really registers in the received account of the period. I also don’t think this really appears in the historical work on the party, although I’m happy to be corrected. There is John Davis’s chapter in Inventing the Silent Majority in Western Europe and the United States and his collaborative chapter with Anna von der Goltz in Conservatism, Christian Democracy and the dynamics of transformation [both edited volumes are definitely worth checking out] but I don’t think there’s a real British equivalent to von der Goltz’s excellent monograph The Other ‘68ers and this is a somewhat different argument (it is entirely possible I am missing works as this has not been an area of focus in my research).

One thing I’ve been writing about recently is the modernisation of the Conservative Party. This transformation broadly began in the 1960s and thus predates what is discussed as the modernisation of the Labour Party, although they feature similar characteristics, beginning with a ‘democratisation’ of party structures, developing as an attempt to modernise the party, its ideology and programme, and ending with the adoption of neoliberal policies. While for the Conservatives this can be read as a story leading to Thatcher, it is to my mind better characterised by Macmillan to Heath with Thatcher emerging from the transformed/modernised party.

In some of my posts here and on the microblogging sites, I also tend to draw attention to the Conservative students in the 1980s and 1990s, when they were led by a union of libertarian and authoritarian factions, with strong racist rhetoric and imagery and overlapping membership with the National Front. A series of scandals led to Norman Tebbit closing down the FCS in 1986. On this last period, a useful source is Conservative Radicalism. That source is perhaps too sympathetic to the actors and exculpatory for their racism, but it does show the origins of a number of actors later significant from John Bercow to Guido Fawkes and doesn’t hide away from the bigotry. In this post I want to join these two periods together because I think there is an interesting story here.

The modernisation of the Conservative Party involved a range of institutional reforms to the Conservative Party and accompanying sociological change in its membership. A useful work here is Bale’s Conservatives Since 1945 but I’m more specifically drawing on Pat Seyd’s work from the period. These included the introduction of MPs voting for their party leader, greater empowerment of local associations in candidate selection and the explosion of internal factions and think tanks – all breaking away from a centralised top-down political party. These changes coincide with and likely compel a change in the composition of those elected by the party, away from the party of the aristocracy and towards a party of businessmen. As such, Heath is seen as a sea change from Douglas-Home, and Heseltine becomes the prototypical Tory.

What I think goes missing in the grand narratives presented here is the role of students in the modernisation of the party, particularly its factions. Here I want to push against two simplistic readings of the existing literature. The first is the narrative of the decline of the mass party, which reads modernisation as linked to the decline in mass membership of the party, which could be a reading in Lawrence Black’s work on the YCs as a cultural force. The other narrative is the related story of the professionalisation of the Conservative Party where modernisation marks the emphasis on the central party and the think tanks, shifting towards professional politicians. Both emphasise the central party and an imagined career trajectory of networked students joining the Conservative Research Department and paying their dues before landing in a constituency and becoming an MP. I want to suggest that there are some other dynamics going on.

To start this story, we begin not in the 1960s but in the 1950s with the formation of the Bow Group in 1951 (on the early Bow Group, you must read this article by Richard Rose; on a longer history, see the book by James Barr). The Bow Group was set up as a political club by undergraduates who looked to create an equivalent to the Fabian Society – and itself induced the formation of the Young Fabians. Membership was limited to people with Conservative views under the age of 36 and it positioned itself initially as articulating a young and modern strain of Conservatism. The Bow Group conducted research and published pamphlets and can be understood as a think tank, but one driven by students and young professionals. While there were elected officers and publications, the professionalisation of think tanks, with brick and mortar officers and full time staff had yet to arrive: early officers held their roles in addition to positions in the CRD, journalism or other professions. Quite quickly the Bow Group became very influential in the Party, shaping the policy agenda but also developing many of the young talents who would come to office from the 1960s (there's a table of office holders, many of whom became senior politicians, in the Barr book).

In its early years, the Bow Group was characterised as progressive Conservatives and would develop into a liberal wing within the party but it aimed to not enforce a political line and instead support analytical policy focussed work. It was composed of students and graduates and while it had branches across a number of universities the leadership, who had the closest networks into the party were a smaller cohort linked to the Oxbridge universities. The Bow Group, especially its leadership, also reflected a bias towards public schools - an anecdote from the Rose article is telling on this dynamic and broader Tory modernisation, with the member positioning themselves as non-elite due to being ‘first generation public school’. The group was conscious of this elitist dynamic but welcomed it as a reflection of their merit. There’s an interesting letter/essay in the New Year 1960 issue of the Bow Group journal Crossbow by a (relatively) young Maurice Cowling, before he had even become a fellow at Jesus College, which criticises this elitism and lack of representativeness of the Bow Groupers who he characterises as a self-identified ‘intellectual aristocracy’.

So far as I understand it from reading its literature and from discussion with its members, the Bow Group as a whole (if not its members individually) thinks of itself as the standard-bearer of enlightenment within the Conservative Party, the guardian of liberal values and the administrator of sharp shocks to the well-established shibboleths of its elders. It is hostile to the reactionary barbarism of feeling characteristic, so the Observer has told it, of constituency associations. In place of sternness towards crime, it offers understanding, psychiatry and reformation. Its members are democratic on principle except when majority decision involves, as it did in Bournemouth East, embarrassment to a liberal Conservative. They bear a dutiful load of class guilt and race guilt (though few have any reason to feel either and most would feel a good deal less if they were more discriminating in their choice of newspaper). Finally, in place of a precise concern for Britain's interests in the world, they offer a distant range of moral obligations involving World Refugee Years, aid to under-developed countries and reconciliation of the black races to the white. (‘Letter to a Bow Grouper’, 51)

Through the 1960s and into the 1970s, the Bow Group began to divert from its original principles. As noted before, it shifted towards a stronger political line on economic liberalisation. As its early leadership grew older, the age restrictions were relaxed and the formal institutionalisation of leadership grew stronger. This was somewhat counteracted as many leaders moved into the parliamentary party and could not directly serve the group. In spite of this, the links to and platforming of student Tories continued. While working through old issues of Crossbow, I came across an article from a 19 year old Philip Norton from the University of Sheffield, advocating that 18-20 year olds be able to stand in General Elections. As I will return to in this piece, it is hard to imagine an undergraduate given a comparable platform in party policy debates today.

In spite of their internal elitism, relative to Bow Group membership and the composition of the broader party membership, the Bow Group also advocated for Conservative Party democratisation. They campaigned for changes in leadership selection, transforming the relationship between party and members, and modelled a form of pressure group politics as a group closely tied to the Conservatives but willing to criticise and push against the official party. As Rab Butler characterised it, the Bow Group were: ‘The beehive . . . from which we obtain honey as well as an occasional sting’.

As the passage from Cowling indicates, the Bow Group positioned themselves against the central party but also against some of the reactionary currents within Constituency Associations, especially on topics related to race. As a result, the Monday Club split off in 1961 and took positions in opposition to decolonisation. The Monday Club is perhaps easiest characterised as Powellites and racists but they are worth exploring through the lens of party democratisation and student politics. Pat Seyd has some good articles on the Monday Club and democratisation from his doctoral research, but see also Lisa Mason’s PhD thesis, Mark Pitchford’s book The Conservative party and the extreme right, and contemporary work from Searchlight.

The Monday Club had a central organisation and publications like the Bow Group, but also mirrored the Bow Group’s emphasis on branches. Here the Monday Club included both local branches with lay party members and student branches which were also very active. Both became infamous for entryism from the National Front but they also represented an appeal to the central party on the basis of the grassroots, which was felt to include the students. Pitchford's book demonstrates how these branches were key for the mobilisation of this faction within constituencies as well as the development of its activists, creating a lecture circuit and fundraising apparatus. This was the basis of much of Powell’s assumed legitimacy in the party, that he reflected the views of party members and had their support against party leadership. Such a claim would have been harder to sustain if the faction did not have visible and vocal form. The Monday Club and the authoritarian faction remained an active player in student politics, as mentioned above, shaping the terrain of coalition building into the era of the New Right.

While the Bow Group were liberal and the Monday Club authoritarian, another key institution was the Greater London Young Conservatives, who were on the progressive wing of the party. While technically a YC grouping, this was also closely tied to students and young graduates and a tight vanguard of actors, including Eric Chalker, Lynda Chalker and Peter Sinclair. The GLYC were particularly active for institutional democratisation of the party and made visible campaigns on this front at party conferences. This all predates the real era of think tanks and professional party activists. A member of GLYC who I interviewed emphasised the point that when they started, it was not the done thing to campaign against the central party at conference, a point that echoes analysis in Richard Kelly’s book on Conservative conferences, and that when GLYC began campaigning in this manner the only other organised group was the League of Empire Loyalists – by then already old fogeys. Within years that would change.

Members of GLYC became involved in what would become the Tory Reform Group, which emerged from student groups like Pressure for Economic and Social Toryism (PEST) and the Macleod Group where the GLYC activists had been active. These were a progressive alternative to the Monday Club and shared the emphasis of other groups on publishing, discussion groups and philosophy groups. PEST and the TRG were initially close to the Bow Group, seeing themselves as jointly organised against the Monday Club but tensions divided the two as the Bow Group moved towards economic liberalism. The Bow Group had been key to position itself as the future of the party and had their finger to where the winds were blowing, while the TRG became more clearly defined as an oppositional force. The youth was a source of the energy of PEST and the transformation into the TRG where they took a more formal institutional form with MPs as patrons, created more straightjackets on expression alongside access to new resources and opportunities.

By this point we have reached the 1970s and the era of the think tanks who were very active in trying to court students. Neoliberal think tanks flooded student groups with resources as a front on the battle of ideas. Keith Joseph’s period actively directing CPS emphasised engagement with students as a key front in their strategies giving speaking circuits and setting up summer schools. As Evan Smith’s No Platform demonstrates universities also became a key place for politicians on the right of the party to build their profiles by giving controversial speeches and inciting students to no platform them – so the Tories could then criticise the ‘extremist’ left. By this point students and student groups were understood to be important spaces of organising but the agency of students themselves were becoming more marginalised.

The final group to note here are the libertarians who had strong student wings, associated with St Andrews in particular, but also built their own institutional forms through the Libertarian Alliance and the Alternative Bookshop, which had the strong imprimatur of the student activist Chris Tame but also gained real mobilisation and support on campuses. The libertarians were a strong dynamic within the student movement that was little represented on the national stage, but would have strong impacts in the sociology and membership of the neoliberal think tanks and activists. These are the basis for elements like Steve Baker, the Taxpayer Alliance, and FOREST which clearly informed both Brexit and the Reform Party today.

Nonetheless, student politics in this period remained very political, as the institutional reforms that defanged Student Unions had yet to be introduced. Conservative Societies were active places of organising for students and the stakes of factional competition within the FCS were seen to be high. As I described in the last post, the factional disputes and coalition building between progressives, liberals, libertarians and authoritarians were key dynamics in the 1970s and 1980s. Even though the actors operated within a student politics world they were a topic of conversation and analysis in the national press.

One dynamic worth mentioning, although do read the last post to see more on it, is internationalisation. The FCS’s international officers were key actors in building links between the Conservative Party and other centre-right parties in Europe – extending beyond student groups to national party organisations like the European Democrat Union. The Bow Group influenced college Republicans in United States to set up the Ripon Society. Even into the 1980s, the radicalising FCS became active in the Cold War including set delegations to support the Contras. Here students, student mobility and a measured distance from the central party allowed students to build international alliances and networks.

It's clear to me that at some point the dynamic changed and the democratisation of the Conservative Party, which represented a pluralisation of organisations and factions, was recaptured by the central party bureaucracy. The think tanks survived, as did much of the political realignment, but the voice for students in policy debates was comprehensively lost. It seems unimaginable in the twenty-first century to imagine students being a key font for policy development within a major party, let alone the Conservative Party which has overwhelmingly pivoted to a party of pensioners (I would imagine there's a certain cohort who have spent their whole adult lives being catered to by the Party). Where the ‘voice of party members’ is invoked, it is by astroturfed pressure groups who speak for the constituency associations and big donors, not grassroots organising from students.

I was reading in the past week about how Tory students have been forming new societies in collaboration with the Reform Party as well as about the ‘groyper-fication’ of Young Republicans in the USA and had some thoughts about what I’ve observed on campuses over the past decade – understandably an impressionistic rather than scientific study. I remember when I started university that student Tories patterned themselves on the Cameroons – Cameron was PM at the time – and emphasised their liberal positions socially and economically. The differences between Lib Dem students and student Tories was often a choice of which party to tie your career to, rather than a strong difference on principle – although the Lib Dems did have STV and Tories were more Christian. This began changing around the time of Trump and the Brexit referendum when student groups began to see more activists in the vein of Farage and UKIP, and began to position themselves to the right or in opposition to the Left. I remember my universities student Tories making a big deal from 2014-16 about electing women leaders, before that appeal to progressive values was dropped altogether. Throughout this period students networked with the central party and MPs but never as peers, it very much was a route to a graduate career in and around politics, and only then, after university, that a student could expect to have a voice at a table.

From around 2018, student Tories became much more outrageous and controversial, positioning themselves against the left and moderate Tories – reflecting their parties’ radicalisation over Brexit and Boris, purging the moderate. The new extremist students are perhaps the closest thing in decades to a return of student voices to influence. It’s certainly the case that influencers in the USA like Charlie Kirk and Nick Fuentes are shaping global trends on the right. Within Britain, attempts to set up equivalent groups have been less successful but there is a notable shift within student Conservatives and the party grassroots as well. Nonetheless, this new form of young people power, which influences discourse and stirs up hostility, is a marked distinction from the focus on policy development from the student groups in the 1970s. The professionalisation of the actors and their policy development have no parallel. Even the Monday Club, for example, emphasised the development of policies on immigration, race relations and economics, drawing on a clear form of political engagement that the Bow Group proved could be effective.