Each year the centre-left thinktank Policy Network holds its Progressive Governance conference, which habitually attracts prime ministers, former leaders and senior social democratic politicians from across the globe. There has never been a rightwing counterpart but this month’s Margaret Thatcher Conference on Liberty, organised by the Centre for Policy Studies, looks set to be it. Thatcher was the CPS’ first ‘deputy chairman’ on its foundation in 1974 and the tank is often regarded as the intellectual engine-room of emergent Thatcherism throughout her time as leader of the opposition.
Like Policy Network, CPS can boast a clutch of former premiers at its conference, including former Australian leader John Howard; François Fillon, prime minister under Nicolas Sarkozy; and current Polish minister of foreign affairs Radek Sikorski. The line-up has a curiously French feel to it, with former French government adviser Guy Sorman also in attendance alongside, most intriguingly, one of François Mitterrand’s prime ministers, Michel Rocard. His inclusion is perhaps down to Thatcher’s now largely forgotten but hugely undiplomatic comments to the French newspaper Le Monde on the occasion of the bicentenary celebration of the French Revolution in Paris in 1989 when she argued that human rights did not begin with 1789, attributing greater importance instead to the ‘Judeo-Christian tradition which proclaims the importance of the individual’ and to ‘our Glorious Revolution when parliament imposed its will on the monarchy’. She went on: ‘We, moreover, celebrated this event last year, though discreetly’, taking the time to point out that ‘there were only seven prisoners in the Bastille when it was stormed’. At the time Associated Press reported that, ‘The response on both sides of the English Channel has been loud and angry with boos for Mrs Thatcher as she arrived in Paris, criticism from French premier Michel Rocard and claims from one opposition British politician [Gerald Kaufman] that she’s “gone mad”’ and that ‘she would do well to seek urgent psychiatric help.’
Back in 2014, serving Conservative politicians are noticeably few and far between in the line-up of the conference, which otherwise is set to host a range of figures from the broader international right, including academics Niall Ferguson and Roger Scruton, former Thatcher adviser Charles Powell, and climate change sceptic Pat Michaels of American thinktank the Cato Institute, which describes itself as a thinktank ‘dedicated to the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace’ and which ‘owes its name to Cato’s Letters, a series of essays published in 18th-century England that presented a vision of society free from excessive government power.’
This month again sees Policy Network revisit its now-regular yearly conference on the European Union, also boasting a first-class line-up including Peter Mandelson and thinktankers Loukas Tsoukalis of the Hellenic Foundation of European and Foreign Policy and Heather Grabbe, director of the Open Society European Policy Institute, part of the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations network.
On more purely domestic issues, IPPR is set to launch the final report of the tank’s childcare programme, itself a major contribution to its Condition of Britain project which ‘is seeking to better understand the pressures facing people in Britain, the potential we have to overcome these challenges together and what this means for the priorities and practices of centre-left politics’. The project consciously references IPPR’s early 1990s Commission on Social Justice which, it claims, ‘redefined the mainstream political response to core social policy questions’. IPPR will present a series of proposed tax cuts and reforms which would enable a ‘radical extension of universal and affordable childcare’ in the next parliament. The report argues that £750m could be saved in extra taxes and lower benefits by 2020 as the new system helps around 150,000 mothers into work. It also marks an express preference for these services to be delivered through ‘children’s centres, nursery schools and other local institutions shared by parents and communities, rather than through cash benefits or tax reliefs’. IPPR has played host to its own array of former foreign ministers and, no doubt, future prime ministers. The secretary of the Commission on Social Justice was David Miliband; a major event later this month will bring the Condition of Britain project, which is feeding in to Labour’s policy review, to a close, and will be headlined by none other than Ed Miliband.
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As the aged Roy Jenkins existed between New Labour and the upper echelons of the Lib Dems, or as certain figures used to exist between a section of the Labour Left and a section of the Communist Party, so Daniel Hannan seems to exist between UKIP and the Conservative Right. He is of course quite correct that Margaret Thatcher remains the de facto Leader of both of those parties.
Even though she is dead.
They are like something out of North Korea. A plain and simple cult. Hardly any remaining Conservatives are not members of it. No one would join UKIP for any reason other than membership of it.
The belief that it is theologically impossible for anyone ever to equal, still less to surpass, a now-dead Prime Minister whose every successor’s only proper role is to preserve her dogmatically defined legacy, is the stuff, not of politics, but of religion.
It is strikingly similar to the basis of Shia Islam. Might there be people who believe that Margaret Thatcher is merely occulted, so that She will appear again at the End of Days?
In UKIP, quite conceivably. That party has now noisily predicted its victory at three by-elections caused by scandal, in two cases leading to imprisonment. But the Conservatives held Newark, the perfect UKIP seat at the perfect UKIP time. Labour held Rotherham. The Lib Dems held Eastleigh.
The Lib Dems are expected to come to a settlement in relation to the MP for Portsmouth South. Look out for the predictions of a UKIP gain. There will not be one.
But, as with the many promised and undelivered dates of the Apocalypse among those who seem to have missed the bit about knowing not the day nor the hour, that will not concern the Elect. Or, as it were, the Unelect.