[…] 157) There are two ‘perfects’ and a ‘rational’ in that sentence. I have never met a ‘perfect’ where human arrangements were concerned (and little rationality); nor have conservative thinkers. Theirs is a generally pessimistic view of human potential: that we’re flawed and likely to mess things up and the best we can hope for […]
[…] of the mid 1970s – control the money supply and you can control inflation – appealed because it was so simple. It took hold, particularly in the Conservative Party, where what became the Thatcherites adopted it and wrecked the British manufacturing economy with it between 1980 and 1984. Margaret Thatcher was a politician who […]
[PDF file]: […] serve five years in prison for handling £440,000, allegedly part of a vast fortune stolen from Polly Peck International by her client Asil Nadir. Nadir was a Conservative Party donor who had fled to Northern Cyprus during his pre-trial hearing on theft and fraud charges before that very same Mr Justice Tucker. When it […]
[PDF file]: […] appears to map very roughly on to the political cycle: electability seems the preferred strategy of the far right during a Labour government and violence during a Conservative one. A fundamental issue in this kind of research is that the distance between the academics and what they write about often appears so huge that […]
[…] of the public services after 40 years of denigration from the right, but glamour? And on 2 September we had former Tory MP Matthew Parris on the Conservative government’s recent decision to allow house-builders to be excused from clearing up the polluting effects of more houses. Parris was outraged but did not mention that […]
[PDF file]: […] Review of Books: ‘Real-term wages in Britain today are no higher than they were in 2005. Since the global financial crisis of 2008, a succession of mostly Conservative politicians has sought to assure the British people that once the difficult bit (first austerity, then Brexit, then Covid) is behind us, the good times will […]
[PDF file]: […] Sykes, bizarrely, appeared twice on the list: the first time receiving two ticks, the second time four hearty ones. Also somewhat bizarrely (considering he is now a Conservative peer) Sebastian Coe received a question mark. 9 Thatcherism: The Final Solution . . . .’ 10 This is Hill’s entry: ‘Ingenious: individual choice must be […]
[…] of the public services after 40 years of denigration from the right, but glamour? And on 2 September we had former Tory MP Matthew Parris on the Conservative government’s recent decision to allow house-builders to be excused from clearing up the polluting effects of more houses. Parris was outraged but did not mention that […]
[PDF file]: […] ‘In her 2021 article ‘The Big Money behind the Big Lie’, Jane Mayer provides the evidence to conclude that a tide of money – mostly funneled through conservative interest groups such as the Bradley Foundation, Turning Point USA, True the Vote, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and others – are doing for election […]
[PDF file]: […] civil servant, Mrs Pat Middleton, but ruled in 2008 that her complaint about telephone tapping lay outside their jurisdiction. Mrs Middleton, 61, former treasurer of a Manchester Conservative club, has now discovered that the private investigator had previously worked for the News of the World and had just served a prison sentence. After seeing […]
