Whether OUCA will produce another Thatcher no one can know. The mood of OUCA in 2006 is not unlike that of 1946. Some of us in the Forties wondered whether the Tories had accepted too much Labour policy, but we all recognised the electoral arguments for the Churchill-Butler strategy. In terms of the early return to office, it worked in terms of reform, it was a damaging delay. This strategy won the 1951 General Election and gave the Conservatives 13 years in office, but postponed very necessary reforms until the Thatcher period, 30 or more years later. The essence of Churchill’s broad strategy was to accept the welfare state and the nationalisation of industries, other than steel, to accept the continuation of war-time levels of taxation, and to leave alone the privileges and power of the trade unions. Churchill did not much enjoy Opposition, and handed most of the detail over to Rab Butler. When I became a member of OUCA in the Forties, the Conservatives under Winston Churchill had recently suffered the great defeat of 1945. Perhaps some hard-working Labour researcher has also done so. She claims to be the only person who has read all, or almost all, of Cameron’s papers, including particularly his writings for the Centre For Policy Studies. She will not only be dealing with Disraeli’s original ideas, but coming forward to the present time. It is a historic review of ‘the Conservatives as a One Nation party’. She is working on a thesis for her finals that goes to the centre of the Conservative Party’s concerns. Our hostess was Sophie Steele, the current president of the association. I had the opportunity for both formal and informal talk. We had lunch together and went on to a meeting room in Magdalen College. I enjoy political discussion better than partisan debate, now as then. The change is less than one might expect. I have always found them a sociable but serious group, in 2006 as in 1946. I have, therefore, known OUCA in different political and student moods for 60 years, which seems an absurdly long time. I joined OUCA in the cold winter of January 1946, voted for Margaret Thatcher as the first woman president, became president myself, went back to speak from time to time and was more closely in touch when my son, Jacob, became president 15 years ago.
My own contacts with the Oxford University Conservative Association go back a long way. I was invited to talk about post-war politics, and concentrated on the periods of Opposition. Last Thursday I went to Oxford University to give a talk to its Conservative Association and to see how much support the new strategy was winning among Conservative students. He wants women and young voters to see the Conservatives as a ‘One Nation’ party in the terms first used by Benjamin Disraeli, and by the ‘One Nation’ Conservative MPs of the Fifties. In the last two Elections, the Conservatives have been seen as short on compassion, particularly by women and young voters.ĭavid Cameron is genuinely a liberal Conservative, but he knows his party can never win an Election unless he can change its image. The new Conservative strategy is intended to give the party a better image.
Some Lib Dems were beginning to wonder how much damage the scandals had done.
Please write to our President, Rhys, if you'd like to book us for your event, or for workshops.However, the result will be a reassurance to the Lib Dems after the resignation of Charles Kennedy and a leadership contest in which scandal has damaged two out of four candidates. On days when we also have a concert that evening, we offer participants the chance to exercise those performance skills by inviting them onstage to perform the song with us! We invite participants to join in on our physical, breathing, and vocal warm-ups, conduct a beatboxing tutorial, and then teach them the music and choreography to one of our own songs. We also love sharing our music with students and adults alike by conducting workshops around the world. We have experience performing in intimate group settings, for stadiums of thousands, and with everything in between! In the past, we performed on Broadway, opened for One Direction and for Weird Al in Montreal, and put on the highest grossing non-professional show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe -the largest arts festival in the world. We are one of the UK's few groups to own a live sound system, allowing for large-scale outdoor concerts.
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