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Torrance David (2010), Noel Skelton and the Property-Owning Democracy . London : Biteback . £25, pp. 272, hbk.
Noel Skelton, a Conservative Scottish Unionist MP from 1922 to 1935, is developing a reputation as an intellectual forerunner of 'Red Toryism' and the 'Big Society' (Blond, 2010). In 1923, he wrote a series of articles for The Spectator, later published as a pamphlet under the title Constructive Conservatism (Skelton, 1924) in which he used the phrase 'a property-owning democracy'.
Torrance reproduces these Spectator articles in an appendix. Skelton argues that the Conservative Party must act as an 'architect' of the future not as the 'caretaker' of the past. His analysis of politics in the 1920s is simple yet perceptive and well worth Torrance's resurrection. 'Britain is now, electorally, a complete democracy' (p. 230) he states, and because Britain is an educated democracy - 'alert, sensitive, receptive, plastic' (p. 232) - its citizens are susceptible to 'fundamental principles' embodying a 'social conscience'; an ideology coming from 'the Socialist disguised as an educator and a teacher' (p. 232). Skelton had a valid point; in the 1920s, Labour was capturing the political high-ground. Back in the late 1960s, talking to Jim, an elderly Labour Party member and formerly a foreman at a textile machinery manufacturing company, I mentioned Thomas...