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Conservative Democratic Alliance


The Conservative Democratic Alliance (CDA) was a political pressure group from the United Kingdom. The CDA referred to itself as the "authentic voice of conservatism". It closed in December 2008.

The CDA was formed mostly by disaffected members of the Conservative Monday Club, another right-wing pressure group, who disagreed with the club's response to the Conservative Party's severing of links with the club in 2001.The Daily Telegraph described the CDA as "a hardline offshoot of the Monday Club".

The group was described as "ultra-right" by the Commission for Racial Equality.

The group's chairman was Michael Keith Smith, who had been a member of the Conservative Monday Club since the early 1970s, and served on its Executive Council, 1986–1993.

Original members of the CDA's steering committee included:

On 27 June 2002, The Daily Telegraph carried a letter from the CDA, signed by Mike Smith, attacking the Conservative Party and its chairman Francis Maude for "the sleaze, double-dealing, arrogance, incompetence, Europhilia, indifference and drift with which the party is still associated. "Voters", he said, "deserve a real alternative to Blairism and his 'straight kinda guy' chicanery. Mr. Maude and his C-Changing Tories are incapable of providing it." ("C-Change" was a now-defunct Tory modernising pressure group headed by Maude.)

The CDA often criticised free-market economics and Americanisation in the United Kingdom, both of which it perceived to be after-effects of Thatcherism. That may be seen as distinguishing it from Iain Duncan Smith's Conservative Party leadership, which CDA members often criticised as neoconservative. The CDA was also fervently opposed to the European Union and to close links with the George W. Bush administration.


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