Swinton Circle - History and Membership

History and Membership

The London Swinton Circle was founded in 1961 by Conservatives who had attended Party training schools at Swinton Castle in Yorkshire, and who wished to maintain contact through regular meetings in London. A prominent early member was Roger Moate MP.

By the end of the sixties the Circle began to be dominated by right-wing tories who were disaffected from the mainstream of Conservative Party politics, a position the Circle holds to this day. The Swinton Circle would come to be run for many years by Mrs Bee Carthew. Carthew had previously formed and ran the Powellight Association in support of Enoch Powell during the late sixties and early seventies. An executive member of the Monday Club with George Kennedy Young, she was expelled from the Club in 1974 as part of a purge made by Jonathan Guinness. She briefly joined the National Front before later rejoining the Conservative Party. At the beginning of the nineties the Swinton Circle was run by Adrian Davies, and then subsequently by Allan Robertson an associate editor of Right Now! Magazine and former chairman of the Scottish Monday Club.

In the early 80s the group held several meetings of “right-wing Tories and neo-fascists” with the aim of “co-ordinating anti-immigration campaigns”. By the early 80s the Conservatives were concerned that “co-ordinating Groups” like the Swinton Circle were being infiltrated by the far right. Its most notorious meeting was in 1983 with Ivor Benson, author of The Jews: The World Wide Conspiracy. Revelations about the extreme right past of one member led to a motion in Parliament. In recent years the Circle has been supportive of the UK Independence Party.