Читать книгу These are the British онлайн

82 страница из 108

Conservative Party policy, as it has evolved in the past decade, has moved to the left. This is not solely because, as the Labor Party often charges, it wanted to steal or adopt parts of the Socialist platform. A great many of the young men in the Tory party in 1945 sympathized with many of the Socialists' policies. "I'd have voted Labor myself if I hadn't been a Tory candidate," one of them reflected a decade later. What offended the Tories' self-esteem was that great, revolutionary changes were being made in British life by the Labor government and they, who had always assumed a special right to rule Britain, were not making the changes.

A large part of Conservative political tactics in the late forties consisted of negative criticism. The parlous state of the British economy, the withdrawals from India and Burma, the decline of British influence and power in the world offered great opportunities to a party that traditionally combines business interests and experience with an assumption of omniscience in the direction of international affairs. At the same time, the work of the back-room boys in the Central Office on the solution of Britain's economic difficulties, expressed in speeches of party leaders, gave the impression that the Conservatives, whatever their past faults, were moving to the left in their approach to the economic problem.