Conservative Party

Margaret Thatcher was one of the most controversial figures of modern times. Her governments inspired hatred and veneration in equal measure and her legacy remains fiercely contested. Yet assessments of the Thatcher era are often divorced from any larger historical perspective. This book draws together leading historians to locate Thatcher and Thatcherism within the political, social, cultural and economic history of modern Britain. It explores the social and economic crises of the 1970s; Britain's relationships with Europe, the Commonwealth and the United States; and the different experiences of Thatcherism in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The book assesses the impact of the Thatcher era on class and gender and situates Thatcherism within the Cold War, the end of Empire and the rise of an Anglo-American 'New Right'. Drawing on the latest available sources, it opens a wide-ranging debate about the Thatcher era and its place in modern British history.

This dissertation reviews the Profumo scandal of 1963 in order to ascertain the factors that turned the affair into a damaging crisis which helped cause the premature resignation of the Prime Minister and contributed towards the Government’s defeat in the 1964 General Election.

Abundant source material is available yet, given the nature of the subject, much has been sensationalised and is clearly inaccurate. The work uses several source categories in order for conclusions to be drawn; these are: biographies and memoirs of contemporary observers of the affair; public records from the National Archives – notably 1963 Cabinet and Prime Ministerial papers; contemporary newspapers and periodicals; published official documents (particularly Lord Denning’s Report and Hansard); public opinion research data retrieved from the Conservative Party Archive. In addition, several early-1960s published reactions to the Profumo scandal have been used – their value lying in the freshness of their observation at a time of turmoil.

The dissertation tries to determine why a personal Ministerial lapse and resignation evolved into a major crisis for the Government and concludes that the accepted general themes of ‘immorality’, ‘deceit’, ‘incompetence’ and ‘security risk’ embraced wider failings of leadership, administration and class-induced complacency – such Government shortcomings being subjected to merciless exposure and criticism. Thus, the work also examines the crucial roles played by the official opposition, the press and the judiciary and contextualises the affair within the volatile political mood of 1963.

In late November 1917, Lord Lansdowne, one of the most senior of British Unionist politicians, wrote a letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph. The letter asked for the war aims of the Entente and the USA to be “coordinated” and suggested that a moderate revision of war aims might bring a negotiated peace nearer. The letter appeared to ally Lansdowne with the British Radicals, who had been close to President Wilson (until April 1917), and had argued for a negotiated peace to end the war since the autumn of 1916. The letter was ferociously denounced by the Northcliffe press, and by many of Lansdowne’s Unionist colleagues. It was suppposedly a “plea for surrender” and “a national misfortune”. Nevertheless, it touched off a series of new departures in the search for a negotiated settlement: House’s visit to the inter Allied Conference in December, the Labour War Aims Memorandum, Lloyd George’s Caxton Hall speech, Wilson’s Fourteen Points Address, and the beginning of a public parley with the Central Powers in the replies of Hertling and Czernin in January 1918. The paper examines the possibilities for a negotiated peace during the winter of 1917-1918, that is, in the period between the publication of Lansdowne’s famous letter and the sudden Versailles “Knockout Blow” Declaration of February 1918, which rejected out of hand any prospect of negotiation. The paper examines Wilson’s ambiguous position in this debate, and in particular the evolution of moderate opinion inside Germany in reaction to these events. The paper suggests the unfortunate enfeeblement of moderate opinion in Germany in the face of the apparent triumph of “knockout blow” opinion in the Entente camp.

This article investigates the emergence of neo-liberalism in Britain and its intellectual relationship with each of the three main British political ideologies. The article distinguishes between different currents of neo-liberalism that have been absorbed into British political thought, and shows that this process to some extent pre-dated the electoral success of Thatcherism in the 1980s. The article further suggests that labelling recent British political discourse as unvarnished ‘neo-liberalism’, while at times analytically useful, simplifies a more complicated picture, in which distinctively neo-liberal ideas have been blended in different ways into the ideologies of British Liberalism, Conservatism and even Labour socialism. The article therefore turns the spotlight on a more obscure aspect of the making of British neo-liberalism by exploring how politicians and intellectuals of varying partisan stripes generated policy discourses that presented neo-liberal ideas as an authentic expression of their own ideological traditions. Perhaps the most surprising finding of this article, then, is that neo-liberalism, although frequently characterised as rigid and dogmatic, has in fact proved itself to be a flexible and adaptable body of ideas, capable of colonising territory right across the political spectrum.

The electoral landscape of 1922 must have had a very different feel to it than previous decades; Woman’s suffrage, fear of Germany and Ireland, so many of the pre-war political landmarks had either vanished or receded into the background . This feeling of unfamiliarity was only compounded by the Representation of the Peoples Act in 1918 and the growth of trade unions. Before the war, the Trades Union Congress had three million members; by 1920 its membership had risen to six and a half million . The vote was now the right of every man from the age of 21 and every woman aged 30. This new political voice was keen to have itself heard. This paper seeks to explore why it was the Conservatives who proved the greater beneficiaries of these electoral changes enabling their domination of the politics of the 20s and 30s .

Reviews

"Filled with new detail after new detail gleaned from a host of archives and first-hand interviews, this book tells the fascinating story of an iconic party leader and prime minister forced by events into making more concessions than she and her colleagues ever imagined possible. Required reading for anyone interested in the Thatcher era, as well as in the Troubles and the tortuous route out of them." --Tim Bale, Professor of Politics, Queen Mary University of London, UK

"A major subject, examined through the interrogation of very rich source material. A fascinating study of painfully evolving relationships." --Richard English, author of Does Terrorism Work? A History

Abstract

The first woman elected to lead a major Western power and the longest serving British prime minister for 150 years, Margaret Thatcher is arguably one the most dominant and divisive forces in 20th-century British politics. Yet there has been no overarching exploration of the development of Thatcher’s views towards Northern Ireland from her appointment as Conservative Party leader in 1975 until her forced retirement in 1990. In this original and much-needed study, Stephen Kelly rectifies this.

From Thatcher’s ‘no surrender’ attitude to the Republican hunger strikes to her nurturing role in the early stages of the Northern Ireland peace process, Kelly traces the evolutionary and sometimes contradictory nature of Thatcher’s approach to Northern Ireland. In doing so, this book reflects afresh on the political relationship between Britain and Ireland in the late-20th century.

An engaging and nuanced analysis of previously neglected archival and reported sources, Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative Party and the Northern Ireland Conflict, 1975-1990 is a vital resource for those interested in Thatcherism, Anglo-Irish relations, and 20th-century British political history more broadly.

This article exploits the developing political science literature on rhetorical political analysis (RPA) and applies it to one of the most controversial speeches of the post-war era in British politics. Alongside an analysis of the roots and impact of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech the article deconstructs Powell's rhetoric and oratory. In doing so the article moves beyond the traditional modes of analysing the speech, which focus on the reproduction of ‘new racisms’ and which are prevalent within the sociological and social psychology academic literature. By using RPA the paper considers the speech through the use of the rhetorical techniques of persuasion i. appeals to ethos – i.e., the persona of the speaker; ii. pathos - i.e. the range of emotions evoked; iii. or logos – i.e. the evidence that supports the arguments underpinning the speech. This type of analysis showcases how and why Powell’s speech made such an impact when just as inflammatory comments had been uttered by other Conservatives prior to 1968.

"Se, durante os próximos anos, ou seja, durante o período com o qual os políticos práticos estão somente preocupados, um movimento contínuo em direção a um maior controle do governo na maior parte do mundo é quase certo, isso se deve, mais do que qualquer outra coisa, à falta de um programa real, ou talvez melhor dizendo, uma filosofia coerente dos grupos que desejam se opor. A posição é ainda pior do que a mera falta de programa implicaria; o fato é que quase em todos os lugares os grupos que fingem se opor ao socialismo, ao mesmo tempo apoiam políticas que, se os princípios em que se baseiam fossem generalizados, seria nada menos do que conduzir para o socialismo do que as políticas declaradamente socialistas." Friedrich Hayek2 Não é o propósito deste ensaio provocar uma controvérsia com qualquer conservador ou com qualquer cristão que acredita que o Conservadorismo é bom e mereça ser defendido. Este ensaio é sim um reconhecimento de um estado já existente de hostilidades entre o Cristianismo e o Conservadorismo-hostilidades iniciadas pelos próprios conservadores. Talvez seja uma surpresa para alguns leitores que existe uma distinção entre o Cristianismo e Conservadorismo – deixando de lado as hostilidades-só por isso este ensaio é necessário. Conservadorismo como não-Cristianismo O problema com o Conservadorismo é o mesmo problema com o Liberalismo: ele não é cristão. Se fosse para examinar o índice do clássico de George H. Nash, o The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America,3 ele seria duramente pressionado para encontrar um único cristão listado lá. É seguro dizer que dos vinte e quatro colaboradores para uma antologia do pensamento 1 1 Nota do Editor: Uma versão anterior deste ensaio apareceu pela primeira vez no The Journal of Christian Reconstruction em 1978. (Naqueles os dias, o Reconstrucionismo estava em desenvolvimento, e o movimento ainda era semibíblico). Os eventos atuais provocam a revisão e republicação deste ensaio. Apesar de ter sido escrito há quase 30 anos, este ensaio continua a ser relevante, pois pouca coisa mudou para melhor. Se mudou alguma coisa, os que professam ser cristãos são mais crédulos, confusos e comprometidos hoje do que eram há 30 anos. Por 50 anos cristãos na América foram enganados por Romanistas como Patrick Buchanan, William Bennett, e William F. Buckley Jr., para apoiar os seus programas anticristãos, candidatos e teologias. A ascensão da Direita Religiosa, da Maioria Moral de Jerry Falwell, Coalisão Cristã de Pat Robertson, Centro de Reivindicação pela América de D. James Kennedy, do Movimento Reconstructionista de Rousas Rushdoony, Gary North e Greg Bahnsen exacerbaram e não corrigiram a situação. Agora romanistas são convidados a abordar as conferências políticas de D. James Kennedy, e supostos protestantes endossam livros de romanistas devotos, e estão se tornando em romanistas e ortodoxos. E o Movimento Reconstrucionista, seus aliados e ramificações, se tornaram ferramentas da ação política romanista, pela substituição da ação política e cultural pela proclamação do Evangelho, substituindo escatologia pela soteriologia, substituindo a ação política e cultural para o anúncio do Evangelho, substituindo escatologia pela soteriologia, desconfigurando o próprio Evangelho, e assim, tornando-se instrumento da ação política romanista. As lições deste ensaio continuam sendo ignoradas. Tradução desta nota por Claudio Spilla.

This thesis is an examination of the causes of Conservative electoral decline in Liverpool, from the end of World War Two to the present day. This is an area of Liverpool’s political history, and of the history of the Conservative Party, which is understudied. This thesis counters the traditional argument that declining sectarianism, or the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, are the root causes of Conservative decline in Liverpool.

This thesis also discounts theories of local party organisational inefficiency, municipal electoral biases, demographic change, and population drain, arguing that generally these changes were too gradual to account for the sudden, dramatic decline of the Liverpool Conservatives in the 1970s. Similarly, many of these factors do not chime temporally with actual changes in Conservative vote share.

Instead, this thesis proposes a tripartite framework, which separates the periods of success (1945-197), decline (1973-1986), and irrelevance (1987 onwards). Each period can be explained by recourse to different phenomena. Conservative success in Liverpool can be primarily explained by the socialisation effect of Protestantism, boosted in years when the Conservatives were doing well nationally. Conservative decline is mainly a result of a perfect storm of unresponsive local parties, an energetic nascent Liberal Party, dissatisfaction with the Heath government nationally, and an all-out local election in 1973 (when all seats in council were up for election) triggered by local government reform. Finally, Conservative irrelevance is attributable to a change in Scouse local identity which took on an element of anti-Thatcherism/anti-Conservatism, and has persisted to this day.

In the mid-1930s a number of British aristocrats made private visits to Germany to meet with leading Nazis and discuss Anglo-German relations. The Nazis encouraged this amateur diplomacy, believing that the aristocracy exercised a powerful influence over the British government. Once the futility of this was realised Germany concluded that Britain without an alliance was likely to be the Reich’s main enemy. Despite this, the Nazis continued to use sympathisers to voice their grievances. Chamberlain also used informal diplomatic channels, and for a while the amateur diplomacy of Lord Londonderry, a former Cabinet Minister, was useful to Berlin, London, and his own sense of duty. In the process Londonderry became an arch advocate of appeasement and an apologist for Nazi Germany. Londonderry’s undefined role in this period was a product of the misunderstandings at the heart of appeasement, a difficulty, despite his intentions, that he only served to exacerbate.

The article explores the history of the way the idea of ‘sexualization’ has been problematized – situated as an object of concern – in the USA and UK. My focus here will be on media discourses, having analysed policy and sociological discourses on sexualization elsewhere. I document that, from the early 1980s in the USA, the term ‘sexualization’ came to describe a mal-socialisation which causes the precocious entry by the child into adult forms of sexual subjectivity and desire. I will argue that the media problematization of sexualization has been the result of a ‘discursive coalition’ between a number of conservative and feminist commentators, who for quite different reasons wished to justify measures to protect and regulate the sexuality and morality of young women. Underpinning this coalition is an inadequate account of sexual and commercial choice, as either simply present or absent for young women.

En l'espace de quinze ans, la fédération européenne de partis qui rassemblait les formations démocrates chrétiennes – le parti populaire européen (PPE) – a vécu une mutation politique, idéologique et organisationnelle fondamentale. Centré à l'origine sur les formations démocrates chrétiennes, le PPE s'est ouvert à des partis aux sensibilités conservatrice voire libérale ou nationaliste dans les pays de l'Union européenne et dans les Etats qui sont amenés à la rejoindre sous peu. L'objectif de ce livre est d'examiner cette problématique à l'aune des mutations de la démocratie chrétienne et des partis démocrates chrétiens, d'une part, à celle du conservatisme et des partis conservateurs, de l'autre. A-t-on affaire à une simple opération de stratégie politique configurée au système politique européen ? Est-ce le reflet d'une indistinction de plus en plus manifeste entre démocrates chrétiens et conservateurs ? Ou, de manière plus radicale, assiste-t-on à l'extinction d'une famille politique – la démocrate chrétienne – ou à son absorption par la famille conservatrice ? Pour aborder ces thématiques, l'ouvrage rassemble des contributions de spécialistes internationaux. Ils retracent l'histoire de la démocratie chrétienne et du conservatisme et en analysent les caractéristiques et les évolutions.

Following three severe election defeats, the Conservatives elected David Cameron as leader on an explicitly modernising platform. His agenda for change encompassed revitalising the party image through a concerted effort to rebrand the party, an extensive review of policy, and ideological repositioning towards the centre-ground. While these three strands are of course intertwined this chapter will focus on the latter, namely the attempt to distance the Conservatives from the legacy of Thatcherism and cultivate a new form of conservatism with wider electoral appeal. This is examined in relation to the period of opposition under Cameron’s leadership (2005-10) and during his tenure as Prime Minister as leader of the Coalition government between 2010 and 2015.

The chapter argues that despite some rhetorical distancing from the Thatcher era, Cameron largely failed to alter the trajectory of contemporary conservatism, which remains essentially neo-Thatcherite. Ultimately this has undermined the modernisation project that he hoped would define his leadership, limiting the effectiveness of his rebranding strategy and shaping the policy agenda that his government has been able to pursue. While forming the Coalition provided the Conservative leader with significant freedom of manoeuvre in statecraft terms (Hayton, 2014) it conversely limited his scope to radically alter his party’s ideological core, as he increasingly needed to balance the demands of his Coalition partners with those of the right of his own party. While significant political capital was expended on the totemic issue of equal marriage for gay couples, few other issues have pushed the boundaries of conservatism beyond its Thatcherite comfort zone. In short, after a decade of Cameronite leadership the construction of a coherent new conservatism remains largely unfulfilled.

This article provides the first systematic examination of the voting motivations of Conservative MPs in the final parliamentary ballot of the Conservative Party leadership election of 2016. We identify the voting behaviour of each Conservative parliamentarian as part of a unique dataset that we use to test, through the use of multivariate analysis, a series of hypotheses based around social background variables (i.e. gender and education); political variables (i.e. parliamentary experience, electoral marginality, the electoral threat posed by UKIP, and ministerial status); and ideological variables (i.e. attitudes towards same sex marriage and Brexit). Our findings demonstrate that ideology did matter in terms of voting. Attitudes towards Brexit were central to the appeals of both May (to Remainers) and Leadsom (to Leavers). We also demonstrate that in terms of support for Leadsom, Brexit was not the only significant driver as opinion on same sex marriage, year of entry and ministerial status also influenced voting behaviour.

This paper will argue that Churchill, as a representative of the ruling capitalist class, embodied a militant expression of British ruling class fears of, and reaction to, the Bolshevik Revolution and the prospect of communism spreading throughout Europe and Britain. Churchill’s attitude and policies during this time convey how ideologically polarised politics had become in Britain and Europe–due in large part to the effects of the Russian Revolution–and reveal the some of the seeds that sowed the growth of fascism throughout Europe.

ARRANGING In the prelapsarian spring of 1968, one of the authoritative ve main polling companies reported that 'the Government has broken all records for unpopularity', while the Conservative party had achieved, at 23.4%, the largest lead ever recorded. 1 By the autumn, the Conservatives had settled on their campaign strategy, one made possible by a party machine much larger and better funded than that of the government: there were over 400 salaried professional agents, halls were already booked and printing presses 1

This article argues that the Brexit campaign and subsequent rise of Boris Johnson to Prime Minister has seen campaigns and assumptions (such as anti-immigration and anti-multiculturalism) that were previously associated with far-right groups and parties enter the mainstream political discourse. It suggests that this has been due to an organic crisis that has been prevalent within British political civil society since the Brexit vote. A crisis that has seen socialist, free market and popular nationalist projects all stake claims to develop competing visions of post-Brexit Britain and which has been intensified by the success of Celtic nationalism. This article will suggest that Boris Johnson's government is attempting to co-opt such right-wing forces by engaging with much of its rhetoric as he attempts to construct his own post-Brexit reality that is fraught with inconsistencies and contradictions.

The history of the Conservative Party was once relatively neglected in comparison to the breadth of work on other British political parties. No more. Over the last twenty years scholarship on the Party has undergone a remarkable renaissance. This article traces the reasons behind this; linking it both to the need to understand the development of Thatcherism as well as a concerted attempt to create archival and institutional structures of support for scholars. Through an analysis of four of the most important recent books published on the Party — between them embracing perspectives from political science, political history, studies of ideology, and biography — the article explores the current state of the field and what has been lost as well as gained during this recent revival. The article concludes that if the field is to retain its vitality it should look backwards to work published on the Party in the 1950s. By once again closely examining the lives and practices of individual Conservatives in a dynamic of inter-party competition historians can escape the dangers of viewing the Party in isolation as well as meet the challenges of connecting Conservatism’s pre and post-war pasts and drawing out its transnational elements.

Enlosed is a letter I have posted to Bloomsburg University students in response to an announcement that Turning Point USA-BU Chapter will be having their 2018 Spring Semester recruitment meeting. For my colleagues:

if this letter or a suitably modified version of it fits your efforts to discourage Turning Point membership on your campus, please feel free to use it.

Wendy Lynne Lee

This article addresses the reputation of Edmund Burke and his transformation into the ‘founder of modern conservatism’. It argues that this process occurred primarily between 1885 and 1914 in Britain. In doing so, this article challenges the existing orthodoxy which attributes this development to the work of Peter Stanlis, Russell Kirk, and other conservative American scholars. Moreover, this article historicizes one aspect of the construction of C/conservatism as both an intellectual (small-c) and political (capital-C) tradition. Indeed, though the late-Victorian and Edwardian period saw the construction of political traditions of an entirely novel kind, the search for ‘New Conservatism’ has been neglected by comparison with New Liberalism. Thus, this study explores three main themes: the impact of British debates about Irish Home Rule on Burke’s reputation and status; the academic systematization of Burke’s work into a ‘political philosophy of conservatism’; and, finally, the appropriation of Burke by Conservative Unionists during the late-Edwardian constitutional crisis. The result is to show that by 1914 Burke had been firmly established as a ‘conservative’ political thinker whose work was directly associated with British Conservatism.

The victorious conclusion of the war coupled with a great democratising reform created a sense of expectation that the parliament that was elected in December 1918 could not more starkly have disappointed. There was shock at the overnight transformation of party politics, and general confusion. To the central criticism that that 1918 Reform Act had provided for a deeply unrepresentative and therefore undemocratic House of Commons, came complaints that the legislature had become merely an appendage of the executive, and parliamentary government had been supplanted by party government. Many observers opined that the authority of the House of Commons had been undermined. This article considers how the implications of the act were envisaged, and how they were experienced and reported. It will look at the legislature that resulted, its members, and how they adapted to and changed its procedures and conventions. Lastly it will reflect on the politics of the impact of the Reform Act, on the parties, on their policies, and on a new political environment. Through their writings at the time and their reflections subsequently, those who were Members and those who were observers of Parliament testified to how they felt the House of Commons had changed as a result of the impact of the 1918 Reform Act.

Facebook might act as an online bridge, providing a route back for some Ukippers (those that were once disaffected Tories) and facilitate their subtle reintegration into the Conservative fold.

(See page 75 of the UK Election Analysis Report 2015)

Boris Johnson knows no political shame. Common decency and indecency is equally absent from his personal code of conduct. He shores up his reputation as a compulsive liar in the dangerous aggressive drift of post-Brexit English nationalism. Anti-Europeanism, which he represents, culminated in the minimal vote to leave the EU in the referendum of 23 June 2016. To counter his unpopularity, and to keep his celebrated binge-drinking as premier for the next two and a half years, BoJo will resort to confrontation with the EU. It is the old 'external enemy theory' playbook. Brussels will be blamed for Britain's domestic ills, and will confront the EU authorities to overcome its political difficulties and those of its dwindling Tory Party supporters.

Britannia's Zealots, Volume I opens the first longitudinal study to examine the Conservative Right from the late-19th century to the present day. British Conservatism has always contained a significant section fundamentally opposed to progressive reform. A permanent minority in Parliament, dissident right-wing Conservatives nevertheless had allies in the press and sympathy among grassroots party members enabling them to create crises in the media and at party meetings.

It charts the evolution of reactionary politics from its preoccupation with the Protestant constitution to its fixation with the prestige and strength of Britain's global empire. He examines the overlooked ways in which Conservative Right parliamentarians shaped their party's policies and propaganda, in and out of office, and their relationships with the press and ordinary activists. He seeks to demonstrate that this influence could be circumscribing, and on occasion highly disruptive, with consequences which remain relevant for today's Conservative party. Britannia's Zealots, Volume I will be of great interest to academics and students of British history, right-wing politics, imperialism, and 20th century history.

In January 2009 David Cameron announced that the ‘underlying philosophy’ of his government would be progressive conservatism. Despite the ambiguity about this term, it was generally interpreted as a signal that Cameron was moving his party to the left. To some commentators, Cameron was allying with the progressive ‘one nation’ strand of conservative thought. To others, particularly in the media, he was drawing on the more immediate influence of Phillip Blond's ‘Red Toryism’. However, the focus on the market (as opposed to state or community) found in both Cameron's speech and subsequent policies sits uneasily with both of these interpretations. Cameron's progressive conservatism has more in common with Thatcherism – an earlier conservative modernising project – than it does with centrist forms of conservative progressivism. Cameron's progressive conservatism is progressive, but only in particular, less commonly used, ways – not as a rediscovery of social justice.

This article explores the Conservative party crisis over India to examine the relationship between diehard Conservatives and Britain’s emerging democracy. Far from rejecting democracy outright, diehard rhetoric and mass communication demonstrates how they adapted to it and utilised it in pursuit of their objectives. The accommodation of diehard Conservatism within the Conservative party was a necessary and mutual embrace. Contrary to popular image, it promoted Conservative unity and contributed to the party’s remarkable electoral success. Unable to exact decisive victories, the capacity of diehard Conservatives to generate party crises over imperial questions, among grassroots and backbench Conservatives, ensured they had a role in shaping the presentation and content of party policy. This had implications for leadership efforts to liberalise the party, and also popular perceptions of British imperialism and the feasibility of democracy in India.

On the afternoon of 10 April 2013, both houses of Parliament met to mark the death of a Member. It was a long-established convention for MPs and Peers to recognise the passing of a Prime Minister, but the scale and substance of the proceedings as regards Margaret Thatcher were, like so much else about her, extraordinary. They may be seen to stand as a testament to Thatcherism in the twenty-first century.

In the following paper, I evaluate the rise of the American Alt-Right, particularly as it's personified by Turning Point USA's Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk, in terms of the mercenary "ends justify the means" logic deployed to justify some of the misleading, distorted, or manifestly false claims organizations like this depend on to advance their white nationalist agendas.

The paper ranges widely over gun control, Kanye West's outrageous comments about slavery, Owen's illiteracy about contemporary feminism, and Kirk's theocratic aspirations. But the message is a simple on: TPUSA is the Alt-Right, and their offering of the Red Pill, or in Owens' case the RedPillBlack, is intended either as a narcotic to make us forget that the past can be a prologue to the future, or an hallucinogen to entrance us into believing--especially if we're black, female, poor, or indigenous--that there's no such thing as oppression in America.

Both are false, and both threaten to seduce us into complacency about the justice for which we must continue to struggle, not only in light of the inequalities of class, sex, gender, or race, but for the sake of preserving respect for the truth--the most endangered potential casualty of TPUSA's vision of "Western Civilization," that is the theocratic, heteropatriarchal ethnostate.

I have also divided the piece into three parts, for easier reading and digestion. The Bibliography is in Part 3.

Historians have tended to examine right-wing British responses to Adolf Hitler on the basis of a supposed admiration or political affinity for Nazism. This article argues that the dilemma which actually split diehard Conservatives was between challenging Germany before it was too late, and a conviction that Britain lacked the means to do so. Both positions were predicated in a belief that Britain needed to accelerate rearmament, and that Nazi Germany posed a direct threat to British power. Ideology is not irrelevant, but the public statements and actions of diehard MPs reveal that their primary motivation was to resist internal and external threats to Britain’s position as a world power. This resulted in an unprecedented division in diehard ranks over Neville Chamberlain’s foreign policy, though diehard unity on colonial appeasement recalled an older tradition of working together in defence of the empire.

Objetivo/Contexto: a través del caso de la coalición argentina
Cambiemos, dominada por el partido Propuesta Republicana (PRO), en este artículo se analizan los límites del “giro a la derecha” en un contexto de debilidad histórica de las fuerzas de tal facción política. Se estudia la relación entre las características del proceso de construcción partidaria de PRO y los alcances del desempeño reformista pro-mercado una vez en el gobierno. Metodología: Los datos provienen de una investigación sociopolítica de largo aliento que, en diferentes etapas de trabajo de campo, utilizó métodos mixtos sobre la construcción partidaria de PRO —en términos organizativos, sociológicos y programáticos— y su transformación en los años recientes, así como sobre el desempeño del gobierno de Cambiemos. Dicha investigación incluyó la realización de dos encuestas por cuestionario a cuadros partidarios, entrevistas en profundidad a una muestra de esos dirigentes, el análisis de materiales de prensa y de documentos de partido, así como la observación de actos y reuniones internas. Conclusiones: En el artículo se muestra que los bajos resultados reformistas del gobierno de Cambiemos están asociados a condicionamientos que debió enfrentar PRO para construir una fuerza competitiva en un país con derechas partidarias históricamente débiles. Estos condicionamientos son de dos tipos: internos, relativos a la estructura de la coalición política; y externos, asociados a las condiciones de origen y de desempeño del gobierno. Los primeros, observados a partir de las divergencias programáticas entre los miembros de la alianza de gobierno. Los segundos, a través de la estructura de intereses ligada a los policy legacies del período anterior; y a la debilidad del poder electoral y legislativo de Cambiemos. Originalidad: El artículo propone un esquema teórico producto de un estudio de caso, para explicar la relación entre construcción partidaria y desempeño gubernamental en casos de giro a la derecha comandados por partidos de reciente creación.

At first glance, there could be few countries more diverse than Britain and Italy: one the cradle of democracy, a model for most other parliamentary systems; the other a young nation and the essence of political instability. Yet despite the differences, from the mid 1970s London and Rome shared a common destiny of struggle against the crisis which eventually led them to a new “renaissance” by the early 1980s. Drawing on a wide range of sources, this volume fills an important historiographical gap, casting new light on the unexplored relations between Britain and Italy during the Cold War.
The “Italian case” concerned all the major Western powers: Italy was generally perceived as the great “sick man of Europe”, and her very democratic solidity appeared to be challenged, while also seemingly threatening the stability of the continent and the East-West balance of power. Yet there was another “sick man” in the Old Continent: in those years, Britain was to face a severe economic and monetary crisis which weakened her international stance and forced her to play the double role of “doctor” of the Italian disease while being a “patient” herself. It is a tale of two crises, and two ways out of them.

‘Statecraft’ theory, with its focus on politicians’ strategic, electoral choices, has undergone a revival in recent years. This is a reply to those authors who have used ‘Statecraft’ in their analysis of the Conservative Party under David Cameron [notably Hayton (2014) Parliamentary Affairs 67, 1; Gamble (2014) Parliamentary Affairs]. Statecraft theory raises various questions and contains implications—ontological, epistemic and methodological—that need to be dealt with by its contemporary advocates. I conclude that while the contributions discussed here are a valuable reminder that strategic thinking is an important part of what any politician does, strict adherence to the Statecraft model is a straightjacket to our understanding of British politics.

The result of the election of 1945 was surprising to those who paid little attention to the evolution that had come about in the minds and priorities of the British people. After two devastating world wars, the British public were tired, hopeless, and full of disbelief with regards to the sincerity of those holding office. Yet, attributing Labour’s victory in 1945 to exhaustion or boredom would be a major mistake as a series of events dating back to the end of the Great War had already paved the way for Labour to be considered as a feasible alternative.

Recently, James Alexander has proposed a ‘dialectical definition’ of conservatism which, he believes, goes beyond ‘dispositional’ definitions, such as those proposed by Brennan and Hamlin, and by Martin Beckstein, which are ‘incomplete’. Alexander argues that, by focusing on conservative responses to ‘ruptures’ of continuity, his expanded account exposes the ‘fundamentally contradictory’ nature of conservative thought. This article offers a critique of Alexander’s ‘dialectical definition’ of conservatism, highlighting its inconsistency with the ideological content long agreed by conservative political thinkers, and with the historical realities of conservative political practice. But it also shows that there is a valuable and rightful place for a political ‘dialectic’ as part of a theory of conservatism that is more consistent with the history of conservative thought and practice. It is a dialectic with many historical precedents in political theory, two of which are examined in detail: (1) the earliest, found in Plato’s Statesman; and (2) an innovative and particularly useful formulation of it to be found in the political philosophy of R. G. Collingwood.