[…] there was not a single academic essay about it between its formation and 1980. Yet in its history it must have spent nearly as much as the Conservative Party. No account of British domestic political history in the 20th century can be anything but incomplete without incorporating the Economic League. Yet I have never […]
[…] patriotic nationalism served as the basis of fascist ideology throughout the inter-war years.’ The same concepts served as the basis of the ideology of much of the Conservative Party in this period. In 1927 it was not difficult see the ‘radical right’ as the continuation of the Tory Party; and the whole a part […]
[…] Barclays Bank, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group and Commercial Union Assurance. Another board member, Lord Poole, was a Tory MP from 1945-1950 and chairman of the Conservative Party organisation from 1955-57. The 1st Viscount Blakenham married a daughter of the 2nd Viscount Cowdray and held several positions of state, as well as being […]
[…] the shape of IRD. The only bits of interest are an entertaining account by Alan Sked of his career as a eurosceptic and this snippet from former Conservative MP Richard Body: ‘Carefully selected people were invited to luncheon and dinner ……..to hear speakers give what they claimed to be confidential briefings “off the record”. […]
[…] fifties his sympathies were very much with Labour until it fell into hands of what he regarded as Wilson’s gang of spivs. His subsequent support for the Conservative Party was somewhat qualified and he had utter contempt for Heath after his economic U-turn in 1972, his surrender to the miners and his kow-towing to […]
[…] was not the case. Not only did Parliament and The Focus give him a platform, in Parliament he could eventually count on the support of some forty Conservative MPs, the Liberals under Archibald Sinclair, and, after Munich, almost all of the Labour Party. Origins of The Focus The Focus was partly a dining club […]
[…] and the City of London and an expanding middle class … this hegemonic group, based at the popular and the political level on a fusion between the Conservative and pre-1914 Liberal parties, was committed to the defence of free enterprise and the limited state against the internal threat of socialism and the external menace […]
[…] view was put in words to them.’ Why did Kennedy decline to reveal his political persuasions? Did he have something to conceal? In 1964 Norris was the Conservative candidate at Orpington. With Ross and Kennedy he was probably a Conservative in 1958. However there is evidence which suggests that they also belonged to another […]
[…] found its intellectual advocates. Importantly this was not seen by its proponents as a shift towards conservatism. Bell stated: ‘The perspective I adopt is anti-ideological, but not conservative. repudiation of ideology, to be meaningful, must mean not only a criticism of the utopian order but of existing society as well.'(52) Not simply a CIA […]
[…] that the conspiracy theories of the subversive-hunters of the British right – Brian Crozier et al – had ‘captured’ a significant section of the leadership of the Conservative Party which had actually tried to use them to damage the elected government of the day. None of this is included in the Routledge biography of […]
