For almost fifty years it seemed as though a large part of the ‘ruling classes’ of the United Kingdom had lost their collective backbone.These ‘Establishment’ figures appeared to dismiss and squander the hard-won victories of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations over totalitarian and despotic regimes in continental Europe. Not only that but they were – and still are in many cases – content to hand over the running of the country to the unelected successors of those whom their forebears had either defeated in battle or liberated from conquest and occupation. With the exception of the years of the Thatcher revolution, it seemed as though the British lion had forgotten how to get to its feet, roar, and stand proud. In that exceptional decade, despite much civil unrest, the Falkland Islands were retaken from the Argentinian dictatorship, British trade union power was made more proportionate, and the Soviet bear was finally defeated in the Cold War. Then for decades we saw the defeatism of the Establishment return… until something rather remarkable happened in 2016.
Oct 2021. Tories need to be Conservative
