Conservative Party
Edwards at first sat in Parliament as an Independent but he accepted invitations to speak from Conservative Party bodies. Speaking to the City of London Young Conservatives in July 1948 he apologised on behalf of his former party for Aneurin Bevan's attack on the Conservatives as "lower than vermin". Edwards began to argue against nationalisation as a whole, and claimed that few Labour Party MPs thought nationalisation was essential to socialism. When he suggested a campaign against steel nationalisation, the Steel Defence Campaign was established.
In August 1949, after his Parliamentary campaign against the Steel Bill had proved unsuccessful, Edwards announced that he had joined the Middlesbrough Conservative Association and applied for the Conservative Party whip in Parliament. He was immediately adopted as the Conservative candidate for his constituency, and made a speech praising private enterprise and denouncing Labour Party extremism.
Read more about this topic: Alfred Edwards (politician)
Famous quotes containing the words conservative party, conservative and/or party:
“Growing older, I have lost the need to be political, which means, in this country, the need to be left. I am driven into grudging toleration of the Conservative Party because it is the party of non-politics, of resistance to politics.”
—Kingsley Amis (1922–1995)
“The democrat is a young conservative; the conservative is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed,—because both parties stand on the one ground of the supreme value of property, which one endeavors to get, and the other to keep.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I recommend to you, in my last, an innocent piece of art: that of flattering people behind their backs, in presence of those who, to make their own court, much more than for your sake, will not fail to repeat, and even amplify, the praise to the party concerned. This is of all flattery the most pleasing, and consequently the most effectual.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)