I’m old enough to remember when the libertarian right in the Federation of Conservative Students (FCS) sang Tomorrow Belongs To Me. At the time it seemed all of a piece with the Hang Nelson Mandela posters and their other leftie-baiting antics. It’s only with the benefit of hindsight that we can see just how much tomorrow really did belong to them.
By the mid-1980s, the libertarians in the FCS had vanquished the other two factions, the moderates (or ‘Wets’) and the authoritarians, the traditional Powellite Monday Club right. Their combination of free-market economic policies and a degree of social liberalism was very much in tune with the zeitgeist. Despite some traditionalist authoritarian rhetoric, the main emphasis of Conservative policies during the 1980s and 1990s was economic; deregulation, privatisation and weakening the unions. The period since has been characterised by what David Goodhart called the victory of the Two Liberalisms. George…
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sdbast 