Free-market lobbyists blazed a right-wing trail

John Rentoul
Wednesday 16 August 1995 23:02 BST
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JOHN RENTOUL

Political Correspondent

John Redwood's new think-tank pushes itself on to a crowded Westminster scene.

The Centre for Policy Studies, on which the Conservative 2000 Foundation is modelled, triggered a vogue for free- market think-tanks when it was set up by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher in 1974. The Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), derided by journalists as cranky, came in from the wilderness and the Adam Smith Institute (ASI), whose founder Dr Madsen Pirie was pilloried as "Dr Mad", was set up in 1978.

It took a long time for liberal and left-wing derision to turn into imitation. The left-leaning Institute for Public Policy Research was set up by Kinnockites, including Neil Kinnock's former press secretary Patricia Hewitt, with money from the tax inspectors' trade union in 1988.

Demos, which refuses left-right categorisation, but whose director, Geoff Mulgan, is close both to Tony Blair, the Labour leader, and Gordon Brown, the shadow Chancellor, was set up after the general election in 1992. But think-tanks - the term originated with the official Central Policy Review Staff set up in 1970 by Edward Heath - still tend to be on the right.

As the Thatcherite revolution ran its course, the IEA and ASI retreated to the wilderness. The IEA accused Chris Patten when he was Tory chairman of being a "socialist". Mr Patten's crime was to talk about the "social market", an ambiguous ideological concept borrowed from the German Christian Democrats.

The Social Market Foundation (SMF), set up in 1989, just before Baroness Thatcher's fall, by Tory-minded elements of the former Social Democratic Party, quickly became the ideological test-bed of the new Major administration, although it lacked the coherence of its free-market precursors.

Now the process has come full circle, as the SMF's director and former David Owen aide, Danny Finkelstein, is expected shortly to take over as head of the research department at Tory Central Office. For the Thatcherites, the circle must begin again, with a renewed attempt to restore the party to the true ideological path under a new leader.

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