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The idea is partly based on these postings by AH users ShortsBelfast and Cevolian, and especially by two pieces. One was an article I've read some years ago by German conservative/libertarian-leaning journalist Ulf Poschardt, who suggested that both punk rock and Margaret Thatcher led to a radical change in British culture and therefore sowed the seeds of 'Cool Britannia'. The other was this interview with Melanie Philips (who's also become quite conservative in recent years, but more traditionalist than Poschardt), where she mentions that Britain in the 1980s was challenged by a double assault of both Thatcherist individualism in the economy and cultural individualism in society (in her words, a "privatisation of morality"), thereby effectively destroying what Philips calls "the bonds of trust" and "common culture".

Due to Clause 28 or the clamp down of rave culture, we associate Thatcherism with cultural conservatism . But wasn't there a convergence between the self-help, autonomous DIY ethos of the radical fringe end of punk with bands like Crass, and Thatcher's notion that "there is no such thing as society" or "Save yourself, others you cannot save"? So the challenge idea is to create not just a post-script analysis of what Poschardt and Philips were talking about, but a proper political movement within a party that openly proposes radical social change (freedom for the individual, and freedom for the economy, but also combining this with the emancipation of women and minority groups) and then sets out to make it reality. I'm not talking about an early version of New Labour, but a 'bottom up' movement that would be railing against the traditional right-wing, but also against the traditional left-wing as examplified by the trade unions and the Labour Party.
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