Timothy Evans
Oxford and Providence (USA): Berghahn Books, 1996, £10, h/b
Why review a book published in 1996? Well, I received this recently, assumed it was current and didn’t notice the publication date until I 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 were then slight: in practice, there was Searchlight and Labour Research. Pursuing its aim of amplifying the fascist ‘threat’ to bolster support for and the legitimacy of, the state of Israel, Searchlight was then pushing the idea that the Tories had been infiltrated by a barely disguised group of semi-fascists. This climaxed with the ‘Maggie’s Militants’ edition of the BBC’s flagship documentary programme, Panorama, in 1984, based on Searchlight’s research, which led to successful legal action against the BBC.
As it turned out, the significant infiltration of the Tories was coming not from some continuation of the 1970s ‘bridge’ between the Tory right and the fascist/authoritarian right, symbolised by the late George Kennedy Young, but from the other direction entirely, the libertarians, mainly those associated with the Libertarian Alliance, who were not only anti-fascist but anti-state. Searchlight didn’t bother with these trifling distinctions and tried to smear Libertarian Alliance director, Chris Tame, as an anti-semite. If it had one at all, Searchlight’s view – and, in truth, the view of much of the left at the time – appeared to be: if they’re on the right they’re all potential fascists and fair game.
‘On the right’: this is where the difficulties arise. Anarcho-capitalists like the Libertarian Alliance are neither on the right nor the left. They are in another space entirely, with some positions traditionally associated with the left: a liberal attitude to personal behaviour and morality; others from the conservative right: the preeminence of private property rights and laissez faire economics; and others from the anarchist tradition: dislike of the state. The author, an LA supporter, makes these distinctions clear but also, I presume as a convenient shorthand, refers to the libertarian faction as ‘the New Right’. In his introduction he writes:
‘…the rise of the New Right almost exactly parallels the slightly earlier rise of the New Left within the Labour Party….. parallels have been enhanced by a conscious adoption by the New Right strategists of the same “entryism” made famous by the Trotskyist militants of the 1970s.’
The parallels are really rather close: like the Revolutionary Socialist League (Militant Tendency) in the 1970s and the Socialist Labour League in the 1960s in the Labour Party, (1) the libertarians took over the youth wing of the Tory Party. They did this with the usual methods of those for whom democracy is not an end in itself: disrupting meetings, ballot-rigging, faking membership and branches (pp. 26/7, 92-4). There was resistance from other factions and from Conservative central office which really didn’t want to have its youth wing advocating the legalisation of drugs, for example, and risking the creation of a ‘loony right’ to balance the ‘loony left’ of the Labour Party which the central office and its supportive media were working hard to manufacture in the 1980s.
The young anarcho-capitalists who took over the Fellowship of Conservative Students detested socialism and communism and shared the Reagan administration’s view of the Soviet Union as ‘the evil empire’. They thus became useful, minor foreign policy propaganda assets for the Reagan administration. Supporting any movement which was perceived as anti-socialist/communist, the FCS became cheerleaders for whichever bunch of murderous thugs happened to be getting support from Washington: Renamo and the Contras come to mind. About Mozambique or Nicaragua, they knew the best part of fuck-all; but they didn’t need to: if X was fighting a socialist government, X deserved their support. The author tells us the FCS libertarians had wide overseas contacts but does not spell out the details beyond the much publicised jolly to hang-out with the Contras taken in 1985 by FCS Vice-Chair David Hoile and a trip in 1986 to the Heritage Foundation for 11 FCS activists.
Although there are still libertarian strands within the Tory Party, David Hoile and his colleagues were on the good ship Thatcher, and when she went down, so did they. (For a while they seemed to genuinely believe that Mrs Thatcher was a libertarian; a bit like believing that Blair and Brown are socialists. )
The book’s title is slightly misleading: the sociology takes up only a small section at the end. This is basically a history – the first one to my knowledge – of a very striking episode in the long-term decline of the Conservative Party; and a case study of political entryism. Would that someone on the entryist left would write an account so candid!
Notes
1 I came across the SLL take-over in the 1964 or 5 when I joined a branch of the Labour Party Young Socialists in Edinburgh. I attended one meeting before the Labour Party disbanded the Young Socialists because of SLL penetration.