From: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc
Subject: Re: libercommunism the new quick fix
Date: 26 Jan 93 15:34:39 GMT
Reply-To: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Organization: COMANDOS Project, Glesga Yoonie

rich@genie.slhs.udel.edu (Rich Schwartzman) writes:
> Hallam@zeus02.desy.de writes:
>> I have several internal documents from the Monday Club including a list of
>> candidates for election, this list contains several members who are members
>> of the Libertarian faction. [... later reply ...]
>> I am asserting that many of those representing themselves as Libertarians
>> are humbugs and frauds.
> Without knowing any of the principles or policies of either the Monday Club
> or the British Tory party, I cannot address your charges against them.

Brief recap of who the soi-disant "libertarian" right in the UK are.  There
is one very small organization with no formal links to the Tory Party: this
is the Libertarian Alliance, lead by Chris Tame, a publicist for the
tobacco industry whose main activity is writing letters to newspapers
saying that cigarettes don't cause cancer.  The organization appears to be
Tame and his dog: I have never heard of any activity that hinted at mass
membership.  Tame has informal links with the "libertarian" wing of the
Tory Party, whose moment in the sun seems to have been the early 80s when
they mostly controlled the Federation of Conservative Students,
particularly in Scotland, in much the same way that the Trotskyite Militant
Tendency controlled the Labour Party's youth organization.  Their policies
included the usual stuff the US Libertarian Party puts forward (legalizing
heroin and the like), and also included support for the Protestant
paramilitaries in Northern Ireland and several rightist terror groups in
the Third World, notably RENAMO and UNITA (support for UNITA was more
widespread among the Tories than just them, but I don't think anyone else
save the neo-Nazis openly backed RENAMO; partricularly since the British
Army was providing low-level military training to the Mozambican FRELIMO
regime right through the Thatcher years).  The American links of both these
include funding by David Hart, a US millionaire, and some sort of tie-up
with the Reason Foundation, who seem to act as their main intellectual
mentors.

The FCS was subsequently shut down by the order of the then party chairman,
Norman Tebbit; this followed a few episodes that the mainstream party
regarded as extremely bad publicity.  The Glasgow Polytechnic branch
advocating the reintroduction of the death penalty under private enterprise
financed by the sale of videos of executions might have been survivable,
smashing up hotels in a couple of drunken sprees wasn't.  (Tebbit himself
is associated with Tory Action, also a fraction of the Monday Club, but
more linked with David Irving and the neo-nazi right than with the laissez-
faire mob).  Most of the better-known ex-FCS people have since found
ratholes within the Thatcherite-nostalgia tendency of the Tory Party.

-- 
--  Jack Campin    room G092, Computing Science Department, Glasgow University,
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