Category: Tories
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Culture wars and moral panics in the history of Thatcherism
I originally posted this late last year on Patreon but have been working on this topic for the last few months and decided to post it here as well, following a Twitter discussion about the overlooking the social conservatism of Thatcherism in the historical narratives of the Thatcher years. The agenda of Boris Johnson’s Conservative…
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Guardian piece on the ‘war on woke’ and the ‘loony left’
A quick post to mention that last week The Guardian published a piece by myself on the Tories’ current ‘war on woke’ and its similarities with the right-wing attacks on the ‘loony left’ in the 1980s. You can read the piece here.
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Briefing Margaret Thatcher on punk and pop music (1987)
(picture from Buzzfeed) In early 1987, as Red Wedge was underway calling for young people to support the Labour Party, Margaret Thatcher conducted an interview with Smash Hits magazine. The interview was published in March 1987 and featured such exchanges about The Smiths and The Housemartins (who had both been vocal in their criticisms of Thatcher):…
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‘Who Governs Britain?’: The last time the Tories called a snap election…
In between the ‘hey-day’ of 1968-69 and the upsurge in trade union militancy and political radicalism of 1971-74, the 1970s began for the British left as a period of a political plateau, only shaken up by the unexpected election of the Conservatives under Edward Heath. Although Harold Wilson had faced several political problems in the…
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Policing football crowds and the aftermath of Hillsborough: What the new Thatcher papers reveal, pt 2
In my previous post looking at the policing of acid house parties in the late Thatcher period, I noted that the Home Office complained: No amount of statutory power will make it feasible for police forces to take on crowds of thousands on a regular basis. We cannot have another drain on police resources equivalent…
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Orgreave is not merely history, but an important historical incident that needs to be fully investigated
To Guardian journalist Simon Jenkins, just over thirty years ago is too far into the past for an inquiry into the events at Orgreave in June 1984, when the police reacted violently to striking workers in South Yorkshire and led to the arrest of 95 miners, as well as a number of people injured. Jenkins argues…
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Powellism and the advent of the British far right: The Communist Party response
48 years ago this week, Tory Minister Enoch Powell gave his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, in which he predicted dire consequences for Britain if further immigration from the Commonwealth continued. While criticised by many at the time, Powell’s speech opened up a political space to the right of the Conservative Party, mobilising around the…
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The Communist Party’s campaign for the Race Relations Act 1965
This month is the fiftieth anniversary of the introduction of the Race Relations Act 1965 by the Wilson government, the first piece of legislation dealing with racial discrimination in the United Kingdom. As I have argued elsewhere (here and here), a major part of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s anti-racist activism between the 1950s…
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‘Fortress Britain’ and the end of the Cold War
Timothy Garton Ash wrote in The Guardian this week that the walls and barriers that had fallen in 1989 were being rebuilt in 2015. A cartoon in the pages of Marxism Today published in December 1989 seems to have made the same argument – that while the West celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall,…
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‘By whatever means necessary’: The origins of the ‘no platform’ policy
Recently the concept of ‘no platform’ was in the news again when there were attempts to cancel a talk by Germaine Greer at Cardiff University. While there is no doubt that the use of ‘no platform’ has expanded since its first use in the 1970s, the term is bandied about in the media with little…
New Historical Express 