2,295 words
“Stern and unbending Toryism has never paid dividends to the Conservative Party, nor in practice when in office has the party ever taken that line.”
— Robert Norman William Blake, The Conservative Party from Peel to Major (2011)
The Conservative Party, founded back in 1834, has held power in Britain for most of the last half-century — yet they have utterly failed to conserve anything of real value. Their electability is owed more to the party’s well-oiled constituency machinery, opportunistic political expediency and the leadership’s downright duplicity, rather than any claim to their being the torch-bearers for Edmund Burke’s philosophical legacy.
Some of the more egregious examples of their long retreat from the traditions of their forebears, recorded very eloquently in Ed West’s Small Men on The Wrong Side of History (2020), include the constant questioning of the conventional wisdom that the heterosexual family is the bedrock of a civilized society; the promulgation of same-sex marriage; the sacrifice of centuries-old custom and practice on the rainbow flag-shrouded tabernacle of multiculturalism; the negation of national pride and the elevation of internationalist corporate trade; the facilitation of large-scale immigration from incompatible cultures to ensure low labor costs for their business sponsors; and the party’s abject surrender to the “equality and diversity” agenda.
This litany of dissolution is epitomized by Margret Thatcher’s aping of Ayn Rand’s dictum that there is “no such thing as society.” In society’s place, the Thatcherite New Right wing of the party put blind faith in a concocted credo called Monetarism, laced as it was with mythic Randian philanthropic individualism and garnished with the vagaries of all-knowing and all-seeing Market. These ideological forces were originally set in motion by Jewish-American thinkers like Milton Friedman and were later adopted through the myopic lens of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) by Judaeo-British hybrids like Lord Sieff of Brimpton, Sir Alfred Sherman, Malcolm Rifkin, Keith Joseph, and Nigel Lawson. These same people founded the Centre for Policy Studies in partnership with Thatcher in 1974, then remained close to her as she deposed Ted Heath in a fractious leadership contest and became Prime Minister in 1979. Rallying to the mantra of “roll back the State,” they cut welfare programs, privatized key utilities, and sold off public housing as part of the “cult of the market.” This sugar rush delivered, along with the Falklands War, the temporary highs of the 1983 and 1987 electoral victories. The writer Robert Philpot even went as far as to name a book he wrote in 2017 Margaret Thatcher – The Honorary Jew.
Thatcherism was a far cry from the Conservatism of Peel, Salisbury or Balfour, the genteel little ‘c’ catholic conservatism of Newman’s Oxford Movement, the mystical patriotism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s belief that “people are not things,” and Thomas Carlyle’s vision of an organic society based on “honor, youth, and tradition, rather than the atomistic one based merely on the economy.”
Thatcher and her mentors consciously decided to operate in the diametric opposition to Burke’s precept of true conservatism as set out in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790): “A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.” Instead, taking advantage of the parlous state of affairs left behind by the Wilson and Callaghan old Labour administrations, Thatcherism, under the guise of fiscal responsibility, set out to plunder what remained of the economy, as well as the unforeseen boon of North Sea oil and gas, in a more subtle but no less damaging way than the Russian oligarchs were to do later in the post-Soviet Yeltsin era.
The Thatcher Revolution threw up excesses that flew in the face of the more traditionalist conservative views held by scholars like Roger Scruton, who along with Hugh Frazer, Jonathan Aitken, and John Casey, formed the Conservative Philosophy Group, edited The Salisbury Review and authored The Meaning of Conservatism (1980).
Francesco Giubilei, in his book The History of European Conservative Thought (2019), emphasizes the following regarding Scruton’s critique of the nihilistic errors of Western Civilization: “the failure to adjust immigration policies to the goal of integration, our acceptance of multiculturalism, the habit of denigrating the real national and political culture, our commitment to “Free Trade” as the World Trade Organization defines it, and our easy acceptance of the multinational corporation.”
All of the above are the direct consequence of the dash for cash, to which Thatcher fired the starting gun. This has continued ad nauseam under water-carrier Prime Ministers like Major, Cameron, and May — all of whom, like the failed leadership contenders back in the early 2000s — spuriously lay claim to the notion of being One Nation Tories. This is itself a dubious concept, having been an expression coined by the notoriously flamboyant Benjamin Disraeli while part of the Young England Movement and forming the central themes of his famous Manchester and Crystal Palace speeches of 1872.
A very interesting anecdote! Especially considering Lord Kilmuir’s dictum that loyalty was the Conservative Party’s “secret weapon.” This “loyalty” can easily be interpreted as loyalty to foreign interests, as can readily be seen in statements like that made by David Cameron while speaking to Jewish lobbyists in London in 2007: “I am a Zionist. I’m not just a good friend of Israel but I am, as you put it, good for Jews.” This came at a time when he was being financially backed by persons like Lord Steinberg, hedge fund owner Stanley Fink, the retail outlet Next’s CEO Simon Wolfson, and Carlton TV boss Michael Green. This pattern predates the rabidly pro-Israel Lord Pickles, former Chairman of the Conservative Party and a leading figure in the influential Conservative Friends of Israel Group that is said to comprise 80% of all Tory MPs. The group received congratulatory accolades from Lord Polak, as well as from Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a recent Westminster reception.
Back to the lackluster Theresa May. Here’s the fulsome praise she received upon her resignation from the Board of Deputies of British Jews, from President Marie van der Zyl, as reported in The Times of Israel on May 24, 2019:
We sincerely thank Theresa May for being a true friend to the Jewish community during her time in office. Her government has adopted the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism; marked the Balfour Centenary; banned terror organization Hezbollah; increased security funding, and opposed anti-Israel bias at the UN Human Rights Council.
We will always appreciate her friendship and support as a champion of British Jewry.
And what sort of community are we dealing with here? Is it the one that stridently pushes its own agenda, is massively overrepresented in various walks of public life, influences weak and overambitious Home Secretaries like Amber Rudd to proscribe people holding negative opinions of Jews as terrorists, and is composed of people who knew in advance of the plan to bomb the King David Hotel that killed 91 innocent British servicemen and their families in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946? Is it the same one that sheltered an Irgun commando who left a bomb comprised of 24 sticks of dynamite at the Colonial Office in London and conducted a letter bomb campaign in 1947 that came close to killing Sir Stafford Cripps and Sir Anthony Eden? A people whose Rabbis relentlessly pursue the idea of open borders for European countries while insisting upon building a wall around their own cherished homeland? Those who aid migrants across the Mediterranean while they deport refugees from Israel? Could it be the one that reminds us on a daily basis of the dangers of ethnic cleansing while removing Palestinians from their own land and adopting an illegal settlement strategy that is universally condemned by all Right-thinking people?
This community finds a natural ally and a mutually beneficial co-dependency with a Conservative Party led by Wailing-Wall attendee, Boris Johnson, and his erstwhile deputy Dominic Raab. Raab even co-authored a book in the tradition of Ayn Rand entitled Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity (2012) with neoconservative radicals like Priti Patel, Kwasi Kwarteng, Chris Skidmore, and Liz Truss. These folks coalesce all too easily with people like Jacob Rees-Mogg, Leader of the House of Commons, whose company Somerset Capital Management was recently accused of attempting to benefit from the economic downturn resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic by buying into struggling businesses whose valuations had fallen. Other friends include Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, a man intimately involved with Jewish hedge-fund billionaire, Chris Hohn, who, like David Cameron, is implicated in the off-books accounting practices on the Cayman Islands; and James Brokenshire, who served in Theresa May’s government as Communities Secretary and sacked the aforementioned Roger Scruton for simply daring to question the motives of George Soros’s anti-Viktor Orban interventions in the elections in Hungary and expressing concerns over the impact of the increasing Islamification of the West. This dismissal was warmly welcomed by Tory MP Johnny Mercer, who has himself been investigated by the Crown Prosecution Service and criticized by the Taxpayer’s Alliance over his expense claims.
The Conservative Party’s membership has fallen to around 250,000 with an average age of 60 and is increasingly in financial and ideological lockstep with groups that do not have the best interests of the native British at heart. A Tory can barely point to an indigenous English, Scottish, Welsh, or Irish representative on his front bench in Parliament. Their electoral footprint is also out-of-touch with the newly ascendant Generation Z of young graduates, ethnic minorities, and LGBT activists who would have delighted in a Corbyn-led government. The youth now look for guidance from the new Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer, who is married to Victoria Alexander and whose children are being brought up in the Jewish faith and attend Shabbat dinners.
The Conservatives’ tepid doctrine has crumbled before the omnipresent Left’s Gramsci-like Long March through the Institutions. The Tories have proved impotent in the face of, or have even collaborated with, the non-compliant Civil Service mandarins and the BBC over the EU Referenda outcome. They’ve also fumbled and lied over reducing immigration, deporting failed asylum-seekers, and ending the ridiculous debate over reparations for the supposed Windrush Scandal once and for all.
The truth, of course, is that the Conservative Party has endlessly maneuvered to undermine any attempts to establish a real patriotic movement to its own Right. This is epitomized by its sabotage of the anti-immigration and pro-Rhodesia Monday Club’s growing alliance with the National Front in the 1970s, its interference with the Club’s semi-autonomous constitution in 1982, and severing all links with it by 2001 — in effect, symbolically emasculating their own Right wing.
In some ways, this led to some of the civic nationalist elements of the Conservatives splitting away to form relatively short-lived single-issue parties — like UKIP and the Brexit Party. This fracture allowed the remaining rump of the Conservatives itself to become increasingly compliant to alien interests, utterly failing in its core duty to preserve and improve the homogenous community it claims to represent. Two of its key exponents, both unfortunately now deceased, Sir Enoch Powell and Roger Scruton, highlight that failure in their own eloquent ways.
Powell said as far back as April 20th, 1968, that the British people now “found themselves strangers in their own country. They found their wives unable to find hospitable beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighborhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated.”
Scruton attacked the current tendency towards oikophobia — the repudiation of inheritance and home — and support for supranational entities like the European Union in his brilliant A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism (2006): “The domination of our own national parliament by oikophobes is partly responsible for the assaults on our constitution, for the acceptance of subsidized immigration and for attacks on customs and institutions associated with traditional and native forms of life.”
But when will we hear the final death-rattle of this snake-like party that has just won a pyrrhic victory at the polls, its greatest electoral success since 1979? And who, in the end, will write its obituary? Mosley’s British Union, Tyndall’s National Front, Griffin’s British National Party, and Nigel Farage have all fallen short. Could the Patriotic Alternative, coming at a time of global uncertainty and a rising tide of national populism all across Europe and the USA, be the beneficiary of the wave of indignation against the corruption and moribund thinking of the comatose conservative political class? We must hope so. The illusionist’s trick of “now you see them, and now you don’t” that has been played for decades by the Conservative Party and Thatcher’s other bastard sons, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, has almost been played out. We must pray that our people can snap out of the mesmerizing torpor that has befuddled us for so long. If we do not, the next century will literally be hell on earth — a place where the wet-dream of former Guardian journalist, Martin Walker, author of the anti-nationalist text The National Front (1977) will become a reality: “I firmly believe that the human race in 5,000 or 50,000 years will be a uniform coffee-color with a pleasing tinge of yellow, and I lustfully believe in accelerating the process.”
Walker’s prognosis and timescales prove woefully inaccurate. At the current rate of immigration, it will be his grandchildren and not his great-great-great-grandchildren who will live to see Grandpa’s death wish fulfilled. And if there is no substantial turnaround in its program, the Con-servative Party will have played its full part in making such genocidal dreams come true.
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12 comments
Bioleninism is the final strategy of both Leftists and Con-servatives in the West:
https://www.culturecritique.com/environment-health/bioleninism-strategy-of-tyrants/
The Patriotic Alternative describes itself as “a new community based campaigning group that stands up for the interests of the indigenous people of these islands.”
But, unlike the populist For Britain Movement, it doesn’t claim to be a political party or show any ambitions to become an alternative in that way.
So, at least for the moment, it doesn’t seem very likely that it is PA that will benefit from the national populist wave in Britain.
Dear Briedablik,
Time will tell…We need white advocacy very badly (and of the correct sort!)
Best
FS
Fenek Solère: You do well to name these British heroes:
“Mosley’s British Union, Tyndall’s National Front, Griffin’s British National Party, and Nigel Farage.”
These men all fought the traitorous, duplicitous, snake-like Tories; they all paid a heavy price but never complained, but bravely undaunted kept the flag flying, till we reached the present “interesting” juncture of Boris Johnson’s pyrrhic victory (I do hope so) combined with a time of coming global uncertainty and a rising tide of national populism all across Europe and the USA.
Remember there are still those seventeen million British patriots who won the Brexit Referendum but not yet been given satisfaction. In the four years since, we have had Cameron, May and now Johnson and we are still waiting.
Keep writing Fenek Solère.
A fine essay.
I’ve never been to Britain, nor am I any kind of specialist in modern British history or politics. I have read about Britain (I was a long time subscriber to both The Salisbury Review and Derek Turner’s Right Now!; I used to peruse back issues of The Spectator on visits to a local library, and an office copy of The Economist; I regularly read online the neoconnish but often still interesting Standpoint) over many years, however, including all through the Thatcher period, and did have an intelligent British foreign-student friend in the 80s. This post contains much truth, but also some misleading and unfair statements – typical of serious ethnonationalists whenever they take to discussing Thatcher or her era’s fellow conservative, Reagan. Both were very disappointing (Reagan more so), but, on balance, positive for their nation’s true peoples (esp compared to their odious Labour and Democratic opponents).
WRT the Tories, as described in the post’s second paragraph, would Labour have been any better – or much, much worse? ALL Western societies have been marching in postwar lockstep down the paths of antiracism, sexual libertinism, moral disorder, socialist parasitism, and mass-cultural decline. Political parties ideally should stand for certain principles. But they first must compete and win within democratic environments not of their making. Even if Trump were a 100% white preservationist at heart, he could neither win nor govern on an openly white nationalist platform because most Americans are racially and ideologically hostile to our position (this does not excuse his many deviations from those areas – like patriotic immigration enforcement, reduction, and border enhancements – where he could have gotten more had he really fought).
And aren’t many of these instances of betrayal of core conservative principles more to be laid at the feet of Thatcher’s successors than of the Iron Lady? Thatcher was not a proponent of large scale immigration (she, alas, just didn’t do much to try to reduce or end it – a fatal flaw, which I said at the time; ditto for Reagan [I can still recall my rage back in the fall of 1986 when I first read that Reagan had signed the Simpson-Mazzolli treason amnesty]). She was not an enemy of the Western and Christian family, nor (this is funny) did she ever defend “same-sex ‘marriage'”.
She was absolutely correct to try to roll back the socialist/parasite state (somewhat; like Reagan, she mostly failed; the state, with the exception of border controllers, should be rolled back 100x as much as they ever even attempted). I recall my British friend remarking to me in the early 80s about how much wealthier the US was compared even to England, let alone Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, all much poorer. The British economic doldrums, as Thatcher sagely understood, were absolutely caused by socialism in all its many forms, from excessive, sloth-inducing ‘benefits’ (“welfare”); to entrepreneurship-crushing high marginal tax rates and hyper-regulation; to grossly inefficient public ownership of entities which SHOULD be run privately under market discipline; to militant, out of social control, Marxoid (and often nationally treasonous, Soviet-propagandizing) trades unions which needed to be brutally suppressed as a matter of national survival.
Every Englishman should thank God for Margaret Thatcher! Even if we agree that she was no Enoch Powell. England would have devolved to Third World status – economic as well as racial – had Thatcher not been able to enact some crucial propertarian and free marketist reforms.
Fenek Solere wants to have it both ways. He tries to cast doubt on what good Thatcher did do – reduce socialist corruption and inefficiency – based on what she crucially did not do – end the Third World immigration invasion. In fact, both sets of reforms were and are necessary.
Thatcherism absolutely was within Burkean parameters. Adam Smith famously averred that he had nothing to teach Burke, so closely did they agree (about the vital necessity of private property and free enterprise as bulwarks both of national prosperity and national power AND high civilization). Solere quotes Burke on a “disposition to preserve”, without seeming to understand what sorts of things Burke wanted to preserve. Burke was talking about traditional morality; the Church (the rightly ordered relationship between God and man); the family and other “little platoons”; the noble traditions of the great and the folkish habits of the plain, all of which together create the “unbought grace of life”. Solere seems to imply that the socialist Beveridge ‘deforms’ (the welfare state; NHS; nationalization of utilities and railways) of the immediate postwar Attlee government are somehow one with the ancient folkways of Britannia! As if one is a ‘radical’ for wishing to do away with the nation-killing burdens imposed by the true radicalism of earlier times!
Solere does not understand conservatism at all.
Of course, the Tories may well be like the GOP, simply too corrupt in its mandarin class ever to be reformable. Certainly, Thatcher and her successors have been way too ingratiating towards Jewish interests (though just because some thinker is a Jew, doesn’t mean his work must automatically be suspect: Milton Friedman has a great deal of wisdom to convey, just as V.S Naipaul was a great novelist – doesn’t mean I want either of them marrying my sister, or dictating immigration policy).
I think what the UK needs is a single-issue anti-immigration party. That would not fly in the US, as there are both so many other issues here, and there is still so much land (even if, from a technical carrying capacity standard, the US is already overcrowded; that is not, however, how even most conservative Americans understand matters). In Britain, however, this argument, I think, could work, esp for a ‘third party’. The SNP takes positions on matters beyond Scottish independence, but that issue is understood to be its raison d’etre. The same could be done for an anti-immigration party – one would think. How much more overpopulated do Britons wish to become?
Nothing will ever happen until immigration is halted. That is the sine qua non for any nationalist movement. It’s something (unlike the JQ!) that the British man in the pub can readily understand. I hope a patriotic Englishman will start up a single-issue anti-immigration party. But if he does, he will have to eschew much that nationalists otherwise are exercised about. The focus should be on immigration alone. Once the invasion is finally stopped, a world of possibility will slowly open up. The end goal must always be remembered: the total expulsion of all nonwhites (including Jews and Roma) from residence on British soil or citizenship in the UK. But getting there will involve a series of gradually escalating incremental steps.
Dear Richard,
I will most certainly keep writing and will endeavor to pay homage to those who have stood up for British interests in the past and those who will do so in the future.
Best wishes
FS
Dear Lord Shang,
I am a British citizen who has lived in the UK for the vast majority of his life – I watched (not read in mainstream texts/newspapers from afar) while Thatcher and Joseph enacted their plan to manage British decline, especially in the key sectors like coal, steel and the urban centres like Liverpool in the north west. I saw and felt the consequences of what they did (and if you read the article carefully and know anything about my views from my other writings you will clearly see I am no apologist for the Labour Party).
To say I know nothing about Conservatism is completely incorrect – with postgraduate qualifications in both Government and Politics and History from highly reputed British universities I can rightfully argue that I fully understand the history of conservatism in my land.
To say – “every Englishman” should be grateful for Margaret Thatcher is clearly the thinking of someone who has only read the hagiographies produced by mostly Jewish publishing houses and does not know how after failing miserably to gain a seat in Dartford in Kent, Thatcher, with the help of the Finchley Jews, suddenly became taste of the week in some conservative circles – Britain’s subsequent descent into a Third World hell-hole was speeded up by Thatcher and her erstwhile successors, Major, Cameron and May. All of whom have either maintained or increased traitor Blair’s policy of mass immigration.
I could go on but I suggest you need to look once more into your heart and ask yourself if Thatcher was a heroine or a catalyst of decay…
Best
Fs
Fenek Solere,
I am not an expert in British industry, but I know a fair amount about American business. I am a long time reader of the Wall Street Journal. That (((neoconservative paper))) is simply atrocious on immigration, and I oppose their ceaseless support for “free trade” (trans: “economic globalization”; further trans: “shipping American industrial jobs to cheaper-labor foreign places”). But they are often excellent in their recounting of facts, as well as in their core business analyses, esp in their analyses of the economic effects of past laws, and the likely ones of proposed legislation. I have had reason to verify this a number of times over the decades wrt areas I am familiar with.
Why mention this? Only to say that, making due allowance for their neoliberal biases, I have found the WSJ to be quite solid in its reportage. I trust their recitation of facts. You mention how Thatcher and Joseph planned to “manage British decline” wrt sectors like coal and steel. I don’t recall any analysis of steel. I distinctly recall the WSJ analyzing the miners’ strike back in 1984 (?), as well as discussing that period when eulogizing Thatcher after her death. They made perfectly clear, with facts not mere assertions, just how terribly economically unviable the British coal industry was by that point, as well as how utterly irrational in light of larger economic realities the (Marxist) miners’ demands were. Are you saying the WSJ was lying? That UK coal mines were prosperous and viable enterprises without massive continuing state subsidies (which ultimately are paid by financially sustainable enterprises, and which thus lower the profitability of the latter)? I confess I have never heard that POV expressed outside of economically clueless Far Left environs.
I do know that, in dozens of different ways, and as with the US economy pre-Reagan, the UK economy pre-Thatcher was a socialist mess, and that by every metric, it was dramatically improved after her. Indeed, I believe I have read in trusted sources that she did more to restore economic rationality to British law and policy than Reagan did here. From all I have heard and read, Britain is considerably more prosperous today than in 1980, and this despite 40 years of what I assume has been mostly financially burdensome (as well as ethnonationally undesirable) nonwhite immigration. This is due to the general free market reforms of the Thatcher era (which went far beyond facing down the miners, just as Reagan did more than merely cut marginal income tax rates, necessary as that was).
I have a well-developed understanding of (real) conservative political economy, and I know that free market policies are the most economically rational (assuming national prosperity is the goal). This does not necessitate an embrace of neoliberalism, which I define as social (moral and racial) liberalism combined with qualified support for international capitalism. I am a National Capitalist insofar as I reject globalism, including ‘free trade’ when it jeopardizes national security or otherwise excessively dislocates settled (and rightist-voting) communities. Of course, while this means I do not support allowing basic industries in the heartland to shut down operations here, only to reopen them in lower cost foreign countries (esp when such countries are long-term enemies like China), it also means I think it wrong as well as bad national policy to force taxpayers to have to subsidize clearly no longer market-viable industries like UK coal circa 1984. Thatcher was courageous to face down Kinnock and the Marxists, and the true British national interest (at least, if one has an authentic conservative and not merely geographically parochial understanding of it) was furthered by her having done so.
My comment was quite clear as to why I don’t think you understand conservatism (by which I meant the intellectual tradition of such; of course, you undoubtedly know more than I do about Conservatism, ie, the modern Tories). Nothing you have stated in rejoinder has disabused me of my contention. You seem to think – whilst quoting Burke! – that de-socializing an economy is un-conservative. That is nonsense (except in the sense, to be precise, of equating “conservative” with a mindless defense of any given status quo, as when old time Stalinists in the CCCP were labelled “conservative” as against reformist types), as I spelled out above. Burke would have hated the communist miners, the state-monopolist NHS, the liberal benefits-state, and all the rest of modern British social(ist) democracy (that he would have also had choice words for immigration insanity does not make him a retroactive Big Government supporter).
Demonstrate that you do understand the Anglo-American conservative positions on the rule of law, property, free enterprise, and liberty, and I will amend my judgment. But based on the post and your response to me, I continue to think that you do not grasp conservatism as applied to political economy (your understandings of the conservative views on race, nationality, morality, sexual relations, crime control etc, may be altogether other matters). Thatcher may or may not have sold out to the Jews, but shutting down profitless coal mines, privatizing inefficient state industries, trimming benefits, and encouraging thrift, personal responsibility and other bourgeois virtues, are not examples of it.
Dear Lord Shang,
Happy St George’s Day and thank you for your continued interest in my article.
Unfortunately, it seems from your latest post, that you have a somewhat distorted view of both the content and intent of the article. Hopefully I can correct your misconception.
You also imply I have a parochial viewpoint on Conservatism, capitalism and enterprise?
Let me disabuse you of the latter assertion first. I have in the course of my professional life been elected a President of a top 10 Chamber of Commerce in an open election with thousands of members including sole traders, SME’s and large corporations like BAE Systems participating; I have overseen the take over of companies including conducting due diligence exercises; led trade delegations to the Baltic, Russia, The Middle-East and the USA; been selected to debate ministers live on TV on the potential impact of road/rail projects on regional business’s short/long term viability; overseen large scale expos and chaired judging panels on several different small business award competitions; spoken at Rotary dinners and been a guest speaker both in Germany and Lille in France, where I negotiated substantial deals relating to freight, storage and training in Nord Pas de Calais.
Hardly then someone uninformed or antagonistic to free trade or enterprise, having spent 3 years in such a role (in addition to my paid work) and writing hundreds of articles that were published in discerning business journals in/around London.
Now – regarding the article! the intent was to make clear the betrayal of the indigenous white British by Thatcher and her disciples. To start with – the consequences of her privatization policies have not led to the ‘citizen stakeholder’ but to the wholesale transfer of essential utilities to corporations who ‘in the main’ have (like failing banks during the 2007/8 financial crisis) passed on the debts/costs of their under-investment and often poor decision-making to the British taxpayer while creaming off the profits! I did not argue that the nationalized industries were ‘good’ or ‘perfect’ – I referred to the ‘parlous’ state they were left in by the Labour government. I am no friend to Marxist or leftist ideologues like Scargill and Len Murray. But neither am I foolish enough to believe the (((Saatchi&Saatchi))) PR myth-making that characterized the Conservative leadership once this group of aliens were brought in to glam-up their image.
Regarding the ‘trimming of social security etc’ – The burden as grown exponentially in the UK since the advent of mass migration since the Heath Prime Ministerial period – but it is not necessarily the white working class, many of whom were the real victims of Thatcher’s ‘greed is good’ (to borrow a phrase) that have caused this – the burden is the direct result of the flooding in of dependents of the cheap labour Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May and Johnson epochs have facilitated.
I have also quoted Powell on the race issue, Scruton on culture, community and traditional identity and Pitchford, an Oxford and University College London scholar on the way the conservative party undermined its affiliated Monday Club – in effect its own right wing, in order to fulfill its objectives.
I hope this goes some way to explaining why I believe Thatcher and her associates ‘hijacked’ the Tory party and the damage it has wrought both to the public realm and the confidence of this still great nation (which continues to languish under poor rule!)
Best Wishes
FS
The article was explaining the way that the so-called Thatcher Revolution had betrayed the Conservatism of Burke’s ‘gradualism’ (no one can say Thatcher “the snatcher’s” rush towards monetarism was gradual).
I have quoted Powell and
I never said or implied that the coal mining industry or indeed steel etc were profitable or efficient under the Wilson/Callaghan Labour regimes of the 70’s.
Yes, all I needed to get the point was to read the “con servative” part and look at the picture of Thatcher.. How many ways can you fool ……etc.etc.etc.
Dear Bobby,
Precisely !
Best
FS
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