The Bow Group

The Bow Group is a subset of the Tory party that acts both as an internal organisational body and externally as a means to promote conservative ideology.  In the latter form Bow Group cons media and public with the false assertion that it is sometimes distinct from general conservative ideology.  This con trick was devised simply to acquire more airtime and media space for conservative views. 

Bow Group’s political stance is wholly within normal conservative viewpoints and it has no particular consistent position.  That is, as a political sub-group, Bow Group is entirely unnecessary and insufficient.

Bow Group’s dishonesty and intent are clear from a sentence in an 2015 article in Bow Group webzine Crossbow:

“If Conservatives want to place clear blue water between this parliamentary term and the coalition years and truly reverse the error of 13 years of Labour government, they have to hold the prime minister to account and ensure that they drag the Conservative Party to the right, rather than allowing Corbyn to drag our politics further to the left.”

Bow Group is peopled with potential Tory protagonists, normally selected from university conservative societies, and the undead like Norman Tebbit.  Many Tory MPs are Bow Group alumni.

Bow Group chairman Ben Harris-Quinney

The young conservatives who contribute to Bow Group are, unsurprisingly, infused with politics way off to the right and, equally unsurprisingly, they express themselves with unpleasant arrogance that is not supported by intelligence, knowledge, reason or logic, but is familiar with provocative offensiveness and petulance.

For example, in an ugly culture war polemic, Woke Revisionism Revisited, the Fight for British Culture, Joshua Gardner, former ‘Nationhood and Culture Lead’ at Christo-Fascist lobby group Orthodox Conservatives, used every gormless comment ever made by “anti-woke” campaigners including nonsense such as “working class boys often are in life, cursed for his race and gender, unfashionable as a cause,”  “a dangerous woke populism has arisen from the old mantras of multiculturalism” and “western civilisation, as we have understood it to be, is threatened.”  Long lists of inventions and absurd exaggerations of “woke” behaviour were a preamble to his support for authoritarian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill that severely restricts the democratic right to protest and for Oliver Dowden’s censorious restrictions on heritage sites’ historical accounts.

On a similar theme the biography for Chris Davies, Bow Group’s ‘research fellow for economics and construction,’ described him as “a fiscal and defence hawk, patriot and libertarian” who “abhors the cult of wokeism including all identity politics, cancel culture, white privilege and the (illegal) teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools.”  (This is no such thing as “Critical Race Theory” in UK schools.)  His article ‘Inflation: pandemic consequence, government negligence or globalist obedience?‘ said we (Bow Group) want the government to “abandon the slavish pursuit of Net Zero and instead align with traditional conservative principles to deliver affordable domestic energy.”  He failed to mention that fuel in UK is unaffordable due to price-gouging by privatised fuel suppliers.

Links to brief descriptions of other right-wing think-tanks: UK think-tanks

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