This-England

I dislike Libertarians as much as Socialists by the way.
Both are very much the same anyway.

Independent UKIP

Hilarious.

BTW I am a Libertarian Sovereigntist so I guess I won't be welcome in your new vision of a party. Thank God for that.

Genuine question here: what companies/industries did Churchill nationalising whether Key or not?

Unionist

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):

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.

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.

This-England

If Powell had become Prime Minister and enacted Privatisation methods he would have lost most of his Working Class support.
It not the way to form a United Nation.
I back Nationlisation for economic reasons and as the only guarantee of Freedom.
If you allow Foreigners to own your industry you will have no Freeedom left at all.
We will become servants to the dictat of Foreign will.
I will go more into this tomorrow.

euromutiny

Churchill had been a Liberal in the 1920s and supported a compulsary national insurance for old age pensions and healthcare. He was part of Lloyd George's government, which was brought down largely by refusal to nationalise coal mining. After WW2 he reluctantly accepted the consensus in favour of socialist planning and nationalisation, and the only argument was over which industries should be nationalised and which shouldn't. I believe he denationalised steel in power in the 1950s, only for it to be renationalised later, but I am uncertain on this. He opposed the NHS on its third reading I think, when Labour had changed it (due to the rabid communist Bevan) to be a fully state run, nationalised system.

The Tories became the 'lite' option, doing socialism slightly less and slower. The two parties competed on who had built the most houses, resulting in a now rather hillarious 1960s party election broadcast about the wonderful, modern flats that have been built.

The Tories only ditched socialism with Thatcher, who as said earlier was a Gladstonian Liberal. Enoch Powell had very similar views, supporting free market moneterism in the 1960s. Privatisation actually ended up popular with many working class people, and I doubt it would have affected a PM Powell in the slightest. As much as I love Thatcher, Powell probably would have been better. He was a hugely intelligent man with courage and common sense, that's why the left-wing supposed intelligensia shot him down.

Heath called privatisation "selling the family silver". In reality a better description would have been selling a load of old tat on ebay. Perhaps Heath had low quality family silver? It doesn't matter which country the owner is from, because we own overseas companies ourselves, and do very well from that. Our water company here is German owned, but I don't see Angela Markel swimming the channel to dig up our pipes. Any protectionism causes reprisals, and anything damaging trade hurts both parties.

I voted Thatcher because she was the greatest true Prime Minister. In WW2 Churchill was PM in title but domestic issues were organised by the Deputy PM, so the job was totally different. I consider him more of a war leader, alongside Nelson, Duke of Marlborough, Elizabeth I etc. Churchill is the greatest Briton.

Hartlepool

And Bliar, is, by far, the worst Briton.

This-England

It was very much selling off the Family Silver both McMillan and Eden agreed on that point too.
What sort of economic lunatic would sell off Britoil and our shares in BP.
Thatcher opposed Nationalisation for ideological reasons not economic ones.
As for Churchill I believe it was he who pushed through the Nationalisation of the Iranian Oil company and his support for free trade was more to do with political self interest than ideological belief.
In 1930, he sold out on free trade as well, even tariffs on food, and proclaimed that he had cast off "Cobdenism" forever.
Churchill himself who, in 1943, had accepted the Beveridge plans for the post-war welfare state and Keynesian management of the economy.
Churchill was one of the chief architects of the welfare state in Britain. The modern welfare state, successor to the welfare state of 18th-century absolutism, began in the 1880s in Germany, under Bismarck. In England, the legislative turning point came when Asquith succeeded Campbell-Bannerman as Prime Minister in 1908; his reorganized cabinet included David Lloyd George at the Exchequer and Churchill at the Board of Trade.
Churchill "had already announced his conversion to a collectivist social policy" before his move to the Board of Trade. His constant theme became "the just precedence" of public over private interests. He took up the fashionable social-engineering clich‚s of the time, asserting that: "Science, physical and political alike, revolts at the disorganisation which glares at us in so many aspects of modern life," and that "the nation demands the application of drastic corrective and curative processes." The state was to acquire canals and railroads, develop certain national industries, provide vastly augmented education, introduce the eight-hour work day, levy progressive taxes, and guarantee a national minimum living standard. It is no wonder that Beatrice Webb noted that Churchill was "definitely casting in his lot with the constructive state action."

22ANDUK

What?! No Bonar Law?! Pah! No vote from me!

This-England

When I set the poll up I had to leave out some because it only lets you have so many poll options.
But Bonar Law is one of those what if's in British politics.
He could have indeed been a Great Leader.

Lazyguy

Pah? Where's Neville Chaimberlain? if it wasn't for him we wouldn't have had the Second World War, so we wouldn't have invented Colossus, so there would be no computers, so I wouldn't even be typing this!

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#@~~Lazyguy~~@#