The Rock Blog

Oliver Cooper is the new Area Chairman for London North West & President of the University College London Libertarian Society.

It is fair to say that none of the major political parties quite lives up to its name. Labour is clearly no longer a representation of labourers’ interests, the Liberal Democrats have been downright illiberal in their economic opinions, whilst the Conservatives have been probably the most reforming party in this country’s history.

That’s mostly because the Conservative Party membership is not formed exclusively by conservatives any more than Labour is formed by labourers. Since the Conservative Party’s foundation, we have always accepted a wide range of political views and embraced people holding all centre-right persuasion: fiscal conservatives; social traditionalists; Unionists; and the group to which I belong, libertarians.

Libertarianism, including classical liberalism, is the belief in small government, low taxes, and civil liberties, and has as a long history within the Party. Sir Robert Peel, whose 1832 Tamworth Manifesto marks the birth of the modern Conservative Party, was a noted classical liberal.

Today, there are many prominent Conservatives that proudly call themselves libertarians. Alan Duncan’s book Saturn’s Children ranks as one of the most libertarian books ever written in the UK, and Douglas Carswell, founder of Direct Democracy, spoke to the UCL Libertarian Society last term. Two of the highest-profile MEPs, Daniel Hannan and Syed Kamall, are also prominent libertarians.

The number of libertarians in high office within the Party is testimony to the wide range of opportunities available to young, budding Milton or Rosa Friedmans, both in this country and abroad, in the form of seminar course, think tanks, pressure groups, and student societies.

The United States has a long history of running libertarian seminar courses and retreats at which young libertarians can meet, learn, and discuss their ideas. British libertarians have been slower to adopt this model, but we have now, and – unsurprisingly – it’s spearheaded by Conservatives. Freedom Week, held in Cambridge every year, is run Jean-Paul Floru, a councillor and European Parliament candidate, and has helped generate interest in university libertarian activism across the UK.

By contrast, one trend that America learned from the Old World is that of think tanks, which are disproportionately libertarian in outlook. The UK’s first independent think tank was the IEA, a libertarian organisation that pioneered Thatcherism before Thatcher came to power. Other classical liberal groups include the Adam Smith Institute, Civitas, the Globalisation Institute, and Reform. Libertarian pressure groups also loom large in centre-right and Conservative politics, and the Freedom Association and the Taxpayers’ Alliance are two organisations that are rarely out of the newspapers for long.

This is mirrored at universities across the UK, where libertarians are well-represented. In addition to the Libertarian Society at UCL, there are Libertarian Societies at Cambridge and Nottingham, and Hayek Societies at LSE and Oxford, which all influence student politics more than any other non-party political societies, and work in tandem with the Conservatives to achieve their shared aims.

In recent times, libertarianism has re-established itself as a core part of the Conservative philosophy, and rightly so. For libertarians within the party, there are now countless opportunities to get involved and get ahead. That goes doubly for CF members, for whom there are now more outlets than ever for their enthusiasm for liberty.

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