Vermin Club

The Vermin Club was an organisation of grassroots Conservative Party supporters in Britain in the late 1940s.

On the evening of 4 July 1948, Aneurin Bevan, the Labour Government's Minister of Health, addressed the annual Labour rally for the North of England at Belle Vue, Manchester, and described Conservatives as 'lower than vermin'.[1] This was at a point when Conservative fortunes were starting to turn and Bevan's Labour Party was facing disillusionment and division. Young Tories took on the description with ironic self-deprecation and set up the Vermin Club.

Members took to wearing 'vermin' badges - a chrome badge featuring a rat and the word VERMIN.[2] A whole hierarchy was established, so that those who recruited ten new party members wore badges identifying them as 'vile vermin'; those who recruited twenty were 'very vile vermin'. Margaret Thatcher, a Vermin Club member, described a Chief Rat, who lived somewhere in Twickenham.[3] The club boasted a membership of between 105-120,000 at its height.[4]

Notes and references

  1. ↑ "Bevan’s speech to the Manchester Labour rally 4 July 1948". Socialist Health Association. 5 July 1948. Retrieved 23 August 2015.
  2. ↑ 'The Vermin Club', 1948–1951, Paul Martin, History Today, June 1997
  3. ↑ 'The Path of Power' (1995), Margaret Thatcher
  4. ↑ Martin, Paul (1997). "The Vermin Club, 1948-51". History Today 47 (6). Retrieved 23 August 2015.
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