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Common Ground Conservatism
How can the Conservative Party recover from electoral catastrophe? Following an extensive programme of quantitative and qualitative research led by James Frayne, the CPS argues that the party needs to return to the ‘common ground’ first identified by Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph in the 1970s.
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The Giant with Feet of Clay: The British Steel Industry 1945-1981
The history of the British steel industry over the last 35 years is a chronicle of industrial activity being hindered by government interference. The industry has been subject to two nationalisations with all their consequent upheaval.
The Economic Adviser’s Role: Scope and Limitations
There is not much mystery to the job description for an economic adviser. He is expected to give advice on economic matters. But most job descriptions it conceals more than it reveals. Unlike the Emperor, the economist does have clothes of sorts – although views differ as to whether the garb is that of a dunce, a fool or an undertaker.
Second thoughts on regional Policy
To read a book which begins ‘The first sound in the morning was the clumping of the mill-girls’ clogs down the cobbled street’ and then goes on to complain about unemptied chamber pots, is to evoke a vanished world.
The Inner London Education Authority: A Case for Reform
The Inner London Education Authority was set under the London Government Act of 1963. Although it is a “special committee” of the Greater London Council, in practice it is autonomous. Its only contact with the GLC is to inform it once a year what sum to include it in the Money Bull to meet estimated capital expenditure, and to advise on the size of the levy to be raised from inner London boroughs to meet estimated expenditure.
Crisis in the Sixth Form
Increasingly Education Authorities are finding their sixth-forms are not viable.
British Leyland: A Viable Future?
An all-out strike and consequent break-up of BL have just been averted. But this closely argued and thoroughly documented study suggests that so long as BL exists as a single state-owned entity, subject to cross subsidisation, the weaknesses which have made it a burden for the economy and a focus of political contention will remain irremediable.
Against Import Controls
The Prolonged world-wide depression in which we are living is a symptom of profound economic, social nd political change, presenting a challenge of survival and growth to us all.
A Bibliography of Freedom
In his major work of scientific historiography, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S Kuhn argues that scientific progress is not a linear, ever-upwards process in which the more valid theories replaced the less so in an objective, open-minded fashion.
The New Conservatism
It is now a little more than a year since the first woman ever to lead a British political party led the Conservatives to a remarkable election victory, becoming in the process the first woman Prime Minister of any western democracy.
Land in a Free Society
Land is one of the prime factors in economic production and a basic resource on which all economic activity depends. Policies primarily concerned with economic and social matters can, and invariably do, ultimately affect the ownership and use of land; conversely state policies to control the use and ownership of land cannot but affect the economy and the social ordering of society.
Measuring Money: The Inadequacy of the Present Tools
The belief that the control of the money supply is a necessary if not sufficient condition for the control of inflation has become same thing of an orthodoxy. But a doctrine by itself is unsatisfactory if there is a lack of tools to apply it.
The Challenge of a Radical Reactionary
Although I sit on the cross-benches in the Lords, I am delighted to appear on a platform sponsored by the Centre for Policy studies. As I understand it, the Centre’s purpose is to enliven the pragmatic Conservative tradition by exposing it to intellectual fermentation. If you think some of my strictures rather pointed, don’t take them too personally. Imagine I am addressing some high Tory paladin to whom I might refer from time to time symbolically as, say, Perry.
The Conservative Tradition and the 1980s: three Gifts of Insight Restored
If as we enter the 1980s, Conservatives are everywhere questioning, with increasing insistence, ideas that post-war conservatism took for granted, it is not because we have read a few books – Adam Smith, Hayek, Friedman – and have been converted. It is because the certainties of the past thirty years can no longer be taken for granted. It is because things have not worked out as we were promised they would.
Evidence Presented into the Value of Pensions
Widespread public concern at the economics and equity of the index-linked pensions and terminal gratitude’s granted to civil servants and other categories of public employees found expression in the Prime Minister’s recent appointment of an independent inquiry into the real cost to the taxpayer of these pensions.
The Litmus Papers: A National Health Dis-Service
For the radical reforms that are long overdue in the NHS to be expected and welcomed by the public, better understanding of its defects is a first essential.
National Enteprise Board: A Case for Euthanasia
To the socialist mind a State holding company is both natural and a necessary concept. Since individual acts of nationalisation need both a Parliamentary majority and parliamentary time, it is the simpler route to control of the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy. Better still, once there is a State company it gathers its own momentum and supporters whichever party rules at Westminster.
