Word.ws English Dictionary

one-nation conservatism

one-nation conservatism noun: a pragmatic paternalistic form of conservatism, conscious of working-class issues.

Noun

one-nation conservatism (uncountable)

  1. (UK) A pragmatic paternalistic form of conservatism, conscious of working-class issues.
    • All this links Johnson firmly with his predecessors – Margaret Thatcher, John Major, David Cameron and Theresa May. So does (with Thatcher as the exception that proves the rule) his eagerness – on full display in his remarks in Downing Street on Friday – to employ that emptiest of empty signifiers...[2019 December 14, Tim Bale, “The real Boris Johnson: one-nation Tory or raging populist?”, in The Observer, →ISSN

Synonyms of one-nation conservatism

Origin of one-nation conservatism

Refers to the fact that all classes are part of the same nation.

Questions about one-nation conservatism

What does one-nation conservatism mean?
One-nation conservatism means a pragmatic paternalistic form of conservatism, conscious of working-class issues.
What part of speech is one-nation conservatism?
One-nation conservatism is a noun.

Words near one-nation conservatism in the dictionary

  1. one-minute men
  2. one-minute stand
  3. one-minute stands
  4. one-minute warning
  5. one-minute warnings
  6. one-nation conservatism
  7. one-nation conservative
  8. one-nation conservatives
  9. one-nationism
  10. one-night stand
  11. one-night stands

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: one-nation conservatism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “one-nation conservatism.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/one-nation_conservatism. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.