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.

 

Rt Hon David Howell MP - Monday, 27th October, 1980