New Right

New Right is used in several countries as a descriptive term for various policies or groups that are right-wing. It has also been used to describe the emergence of Eastern European parties after the collapse of the Soviet Union and systems using Soviet-style communism.

New Right by country

Australia

In Australia the "New Right" refers to a late 1970s/1980s onward movement both within and outside of the Liberal/National Coalition which advocates economically liberal and increased socially conservative policies (as opposed to the "old right" which advocated economically conservative policies and small-l liberals with more socially liberal views). Unlike the United Kingdom and United States, but like neighbouring New Zealand, the 1980s saw the Australian Labor Party initiate Third Way economic reforms, which bear some familiarity to "New Right" ideology. After the John Howard Coalition defeated 13-year Labor government at the 1996 federal election, economic reforms were taken further, some examples being wholesale labor market deregulation (e.g. WorkChoices), the introduction of a Goods and Services Tax (GST), the privatisation of the telecommunications monopoly Telstra, and sweeping welfare reform including "work for the dole". The H. R. Nicholls Society, a think tank which advocates full workplace deregulation, contains some Liberal MPs as members and is seen to be of the New Right.

New Right (Netherlands)

New Right (Dutch: Nieuw Rechts, abbr. NR) was a nationalist Dutch political party, founded by Michiel Smit in February 2003 and dissolved in December 2007.

History

Michiel Smit was secretary of Pim Fortuyn's local Leefbaar Rotterdam party. He was elected into the Rotterdam city council in March 2002. After the assassination of Fortuyn, May 6, 2002, the Leefbaar Rotterdam leadership was handed over to Ronald Sørensen. Michiel Smit was forced out of the Leefbaar Rotterdam party though in February 2003, after it became public that Smit participated on various rightwing radical internet fora, one of which was the American based Stormfront.org and operating the site www.arabischeuropeseliga.nl. Sørensen earlier forbade Smit from visiting the Belgian Vlaams Blok as representative of Leefbaar Rotterdam.

However, Smit held on to his seat in the Rotterdam city council, forming a one person party called Nieuw Rechts. From this position Smit started to build up the Nieuw Rechts party. New Right worked with the nationalist NNP party (whose chairman Florens van der Kooi worked for a time at the New Right party office) to form the Actiecomité Stop MARTIJN in 2003, which campaigned against the pedophiles of the Vereniging MARTIJN.

New Right (UK)

New Right is a UK-based pan-European nationalist, conservative revolutionary think tank and school of thought, founded by the nationalists Troy Southgate and Jonathan Bowden.

It is unrelated to the wider British and American usage of the term New Right (the ideologies of neoconservatism and neoliberalism) and is directly inspired by the French Nouvelle Droite and the broader European New Right.

It has defined itself as follows: "We are opposed to liberalism, democracy and egalitarianism and fight to restore the eternal values and principles that have become submerged beneath the corrosive tsunami of the modern world."

It was launched on January 16, 2005, with a meeting in central London. This followed an initial meeting the previous month, in which it was described as a "dynamic and strictly metapolitical group [that] seeks to unite the disparate strands of the British Right and get everybody pulling in the same direction".

New Right publishes a journal, New Imperium.

Footnotes