Conservative Party (UK)
영국 보수당
British centre-right to right-wing party founded in 1834 by Robert Peel, with the Tamworth Manifesto, as the successor of the Tory Party. It formed a two-party system with the Liberals in the 19th century and with Labour from the 1920s. After merging with the Liberal Unionists in 1912 its formal name became the Conservative and Unionist Party.
In depth
The name 'Conservative' was suggested in an article by John Wilson Croker in the Quarterly Review in 1830 and formally adopted under Robert Peel around 1834. In 1846 the party split over the repeal of the Corn Laws between Peel's supporters and the Protectionists led by Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Stanley (later Earl of Derby) and others; the modern party descends from the Protectionists who broke with Peel. Derby and Disraeli widened the franchise with the Reform Act 1867, and under Disraeli the party dominated politics at the height of the British Empire.
In 1886 it formed an alliance with the Liberal Unionists, who opposed Irish Home Rule, and under Lord Salisbury and Arthur Balfour held power for all but three of the next twenty years, until it split over free trade and was heavily defeated in 1906. It merged with the Liberal Unionists in 1912. It dominated the coalition government during the First World War, and in 1922 Bonar Law and Stanley Baldwin broke up the coalition and governed alone. After the Labour government collapsed in 1931 it led a Conservative-dominated National Government, and from May 1940 Winston Churchill led the wartime coalition, but the party lost the 1945 election to Labour in a landslide.
Its Industrial Charter of 1947 accepted the mixed economy and labour rights, and after regaining power in 1951 it kept most of Labour's welfare state as part of the 'post-war consensus'. The Suez Crisis of 1956 was a humiliating defeat for Anthony Eden. Margaret Thatcher, leader from 1975, came to power in 1979 and pursued the sale of state-owned industries and the reduction of trade union power. Having governed from 2010 to 2024 under five prime ministers, the party lost the 2024 general election to Labour with its lowest vote share ever and became the official opposition.