The Conservatives’ defeat in the October 1974 General Election served to strengthen the resolve of those who believed that a new ‘ideological’ and policy direction was needed in order to restore the fortunes of both the party and the nation. This chapter will explore the emergence of the neo-liberal Conservative alternative as the influence of One Nation Conservatism and the technocratic modernisation approach that had been adopted under Edward Heath waned. The apparent failure of Keynesian-style interventionism to provide economic and social stability gave neo-liberal Conservatives the opportunity to press their claims for a more ‘radical’ alternative to the previous strands of post-war Conservatism. This took the form of both a ‘counter’-revolution in the sense of returning to a position prior to the ‘suffocating’ embrace of post-war social democracy and a revolution in the sense of moving swiftly to the creation of a more individualistic, entrepreneurial, property-owning society in which any remaining embers of socialism would be extinguished.

The seeds of discontent

The perceived failure of the Heath government to move in the neoliberal Conservative direction outlined in the 1970 General Election manifesto led many of those on the right to campaign more vigorously for the party to abandon the post-war drift towards collectivism. Indeed, even before the infamous ‘U-turns’ in policy undertaken by the Heath government, there were signs of growing discontent on the right of the party. For example, Rhodes Boyson, Ralph Harris and Ross McWhirter1 had set up the Constitutional Book Club in 1970 in an effort to bolster the neo-liberal cause. They published a series of pamphlets and books including Right turn (Boyson, 1970), Goodbye to nationalisation (O’Sullivan and Hodgson, 1971), Must history repeat itself? (Fisher, 1974) and Rape of reason (Jacka et al, 1975).

The lack of neo-liberal direction in the government's economic policy led Nicholas Ridley, Jock Bruce-Gardyne and John Biffen to establish the Economic Dining Club2 in 1972, which became a forum for monetarist and supply-side ideas. Subsequently, a more wide-ranging organisation – the Selsdon Group – was formed in the summer of 1973. This group, which included Lord Coleraine, Nicholas Ridley and Ronald Bell, published the ‘Selsdon’ manifesto at its first official meeting at the Selsdon Park Hotel in September 1973 (The Selsdon Group, 1973).