[…] More recently it has become clearer that the radical right in Britain was, at best, an ‘anti wet’ alliance between authoritarian/ nationalist and libertarian/radical traditions within the Conservative Party, (1) united by their opposition to the dominant, mainstream tradition within the Conservative Party. Once Thatcher’s position as party leader and then as Prime Minister, […]
A. J. Davies Little Brown and Co London, 1995, £20 Davies provides in equal measure a perceptive and comprehensive account of the modern Conservative Party which, hopefully, will lead to further reappraisals of Conservative history. In contrast to, for example, Lord Blake’s standard history of the Party over much the same period, We, The […]
[…] reform are no longer affairs for communists and socialists alone. It is this shift of priorities on the European Right towards neo-liberalism and towards an almost neo- conservative view on democracy that has made the recent Buttiglione affair so interesting. The idea that a Christian Democrat linked to the Church could credibly act as […]
[…] the Guardian or the Observer, and knew a little, simple economics, it didn’t take genius to notice that while the UK’s manufacturing economy was being decimated by Conservative Party economic policy, the City of London was booming. More interestingly, and less frequently commented on, the UK economy as a whole was becoming self-sufficient in […]
[…] Stokes). Buckmaster, Lord Owen Stanley Buckmaster, b. 1890. Committee of the London Stock Exchange. Advocate of negotiated peace. Club: United University. (Stokes) Butler, R.A., M.P., b. 1902. Conservative M.P. after 1929. Junior Minister 1932-38. Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs 1938-41. Supporter of appeasement, worked for negotiated peace 1939-41. Club: Carlton; Farmers’; Buck’s; […]
[…] the operations of a few die-hard anti-communist clericals in the immediate aftermath of world war are really only a footnote to the mayhem of the time. Most conservative Catholics were absolutely horrified by the revelations of atrocity that appeared soon after the War and were equally determined to share, with liberals and Jews, a […]
[…] funding from his brother James. James Goldsmith was also active in British party politics, supporting the manifesto that was discussed and adopted by Edward Heath and the Conservative Shadow Cabinet at their meeting in Selsdon Park in early 1970. This marked (at the time) a strong shift to the right and a significant move […]
[…] from ‘partial engagement’, participation in a British-determined integration process, to ‘significant engagement’, participation as determined by the original members, and ultimately to a decision by Harold Macmillan’s Conservative Government to opt for membership. Having made the decision, Macmillan set about swinging the Conservative Party and the Commonwealth behind it. Between the autumn of 1961 […]
[…] a ‘dash for growth’, but an attempt to rejig British capitalism in preparation for EEC entry. This was not widely understood at the time, even in the Conservative Party. Norman Tebbitt, for example, writing in the mid-1980s, looked back on the Heath ‘U-turn’ from the free market emphasis of Selsdon Man and saw ‘a […]
[…] began to write this. In the early 1980s it began to dawn on people on the left of British politics – including this writer – that the Conservative Party was in the control of people about whom, and about whose thinking, they knew almost nothing. The readily available sources of information on the Tories […]
