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Originally Posted by This-England
If backing Nationalisation of key strategic industries makes you a Socialist then we would have to say Winston Churchill, Stanley Baldwin, Edward Heath, Neville Chamberlain, General Franco and Vladamir Putin where all Socialists.
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A lot of the Tories did follow socialist policies, as Thatcher herself (and her mentor Sir Keith Joseph) recognised after 1974.
Churchill supported some welfare measures but very often it was expediency, as with his reluctant acceptance of the Beveridge Report during the war. He tried to kick it into touch but the huge support for Beveridge at the time made it difficult for the wartime (and coalition) PM to ignore completely.
After the war Churchill accepted the way the party was going but with some reluctance. An example was the Conservative Party's Industrial Charter in 1947 (whilst in opposition):
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"Some of the Charter's features represented conventional Tory thinking, tailored only with a few qualifying or emollient sub-clauses... However, tucked in between them were a number of statements demonstrating support for a more corporatist approach to economic management. Government would now play a strong role co-ordinating economic policy in tandem with the trade unions and industrialists. Underlining a commitment which had already been given during the war, the Charter also stated that Government would be responsible for retaining 'a high and stable level of employment'. A year after the death of John Maynard Keynes, the Conservative Party now seemed to be sure that it intended laying to rest the ghost of Adam Smith...
Told beforehand by Maudling what it involved, he [Churchill] had protested that he did not agree with a word of it. But when told that it now had the Conference's stamp of approval, Churchill thought he had better endorse it after all." From: A. Clark, The Tories: The Conservatives and the Nation State 1922-1997.
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Churchill may have been the right man at the right time for a wartime leader but he was never much good on domestic policy. It is absolutely true to acknowledge that Churchill's government in the 1950s did keep largely within the socialist framework it inherited from Atlee's government, and some of his successors such as Macmillan were enthusiasts for socialist planning.
Even Thatcher carried through socialist policies as a minister in the Heath government, as she herself later accepted. Only when they came to a fundamental shift in thinking did they reject the legacy of past Conservative governments that had helped put Britain into the dire position it had attained.
Incidentally, This-England, one of the first Conservatives to recognise this was your hero Enoch Powell who was quite the economic liberal in the 1960s (a time when everyone else accepted the supposed expert view that proper state planning could bring continuous high growth and full employment - which turned out to be very misguided). The "experts" were completely wrong and the consensus views of 1960s economic policy makers would be ridiculed now. Note that the experts also opposed the Thatcher reforms in the 1980s (remember the 364 economists?) and supported entry into the ERM, just as all expert opinion had guided Churchill to return to the Gold Standard at an unsustainable rate all those decades earlier.
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Originally Posted by This-England
I dislike Libertarians as much as Socialists by the way.
Both are very much the same anyway.
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I do find it peculiar that you insist that socialists and libertarians are the same, when on virtually all concrete issues they are opposites - whereas you, robust anti-socialist that you are, support some of the key objectives of all socialists through state control of the economy and a large welfare state.