The death of Margaret Thatcher in April 2013 should have provided an opportunity for quiet and considered reflection of her impact as Prime Minister between May 1979 and November 1990. Nearly a quarter of a century had passed since her tearful departure from Downing Street, and although she has continued to play an active (and at times disruptive role) in politics in the 1990s, ill health had forced her to remove herself from public life in 2002 (Theakston 2010: 197ā205; Thatcher 2002a). Her increasingly low profile, added to the degeneration of the Conservative Party and the hegemony of New Labour and the Third Way, would lead Colin Hay to argue in 2007 that Thatcherism had āall but disappeared from the lexicon of British political analysisā (Hay 2007: 183). Thus, by the time that a modernised Conservative Party re-entered government under David Cameron, as part of a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, Thatcher seemed a distant memory. Indeed, upon acquiring the Conservative Party leadership in late 2005, Cameron had made a determined effort to distance his brand of Conservatism from that of Thatcherism (for a discussion on the crisis of post-Thatcherite Conservatism and Cameron and the modernisation project see Lee and Beech 2009; Bale 2010; Dorey et al. 2011; Hayton 2012).
However, her death proved not to be a precursor to quiet or considered reflection. Instead, Britain was propelled backwards into a divisive and shrill debate about the impact of Thatcherism (Hadley 2014). The ability that she had to divide public opinion was the inevitable consequence of her political style. She despised the consensus-seeking politics of the post-war era, seeing it lacking in principle and being driven by compromise. Rather, she was a self-proclaimed conviction politician. You were with her (for example āare you one of us?ā Young 1990) or you were against her (for example she called the trade unions āthe enemy withinā, Marsh 1992; Milne 1994; Dorey 1995) and āher fierce opinions and unwillingness to compromise were what enraptured and captivated her admirers and what so infuriated and nauseated her opponentsā (Gamble 2015: 4).
That Thatcher was seen to divide opinion so much was a reflection of her political persona and this was shaped by how she attempted to justify the politics of Thatcherism. Justification was understood by the electorate, and accepted or rejected, by the way in which she constructed and presented her arguments through her public appearances. Her rhetoric and oratory across different forumsāin Parliament, at Annual Party Conference and other set-piece speeches, in interviews and press conferencesāprovides the focus of this book. However, before we map out how we aim to analyse these speeches, it is necessary to position our work within the existing interpretations on Thatcherism.
Interpreting Thatcherism
That Thatcher had an -ism attached to her name was indicative of her impact, both as leader of the Conservative Party (from February 1975) and as Prime Minister (after May 1979). She achieved the primary objective for a Conservative Party leaderāpower. When she inherited the leadership of her party, they were engulfed by a sense of crisis. The previous ten-year period had seen them contest five General Elections of which they had been defeated in four (October 1964, March 1966, February 1974 and October 1974). Any satisfaction that Conservatives could derive from their victory in June 1970 was short-lived. The Heath administration of 1970 to 1974 not only failed to demonstrate governing competence but appeared to lack a clear political strategy (see for example, Holmes 1982; Kavanagh 1996; Seldon and Ball 1996). A strategic vacuum existed within the Conservative Party in the mid-1970s, and when Thatcher annexed the leadership in February 1975 she exploited that vacuum. In the run-up to the 1979 General Election the supposed discrediting of social democracy and Keynesian economic thinking, evidenced by the IMF crisis of 1976 and the Winter of Discontent in 1978ā79, gave Thatcher the window of opportunity through which to advance her new approach (Evans 2004: 9ā12; Hay 2010: 465).
The impact of Thatcherism upon the economy and society between 1979 and 1990 was considerable (excellent recent accounts of the Thatcher era are provided by Vinen 2009; Jackson and Saunders 2012; Farrell and Hay 2014). Thatcherism witnessed the transformation of a corporatist economy into an essentially market-based economy (Johnson 1991). This process comprised many elements of which the politics of privatisation became emblematic of Thatcherism (see Young 1986; Wolfe 1991; Martin and Parker 1997) and the privatisation agenda also embraced the sale of council houses through the right-to-buy scheme (see Forest and Murie 1988; Jones and Murie 2006). The logic underpinning the privatisation of state-owned enterprises adhered to their wider belief in liberalisation and deregulation of labour and financial markets to aid competition and to foster an entrepreneurial culture. Incentives were to be created to encourage the accumulation of individual and corporate wealth, and to facilitate this, the case would be made for reducing direct taxation on corporate income, personal wealth and incomes (Riddell 1989). For Thatcher, the rhetorical line of ārolling back the frontiers of the stateā was used to justify her objectives (Green 2010: 27).
Thatcherism unleashed massive social transformations (see Crewe 1988, 1992), which would widen the gap between the richest and poorest within society. These changes included the spread of home ownership (increasing from 57.2 per cent in 1979 to 71 per cent by her third term) and share ownership (up from 7 per cent in 1979 to 22 per cent by her third term). Thatcherism also resulted in the decline of council tenancy (declining from 31.4 per cent to 22.9 per cent by her third term); the contraction of the public sector and heavy manufacturing jobs; the growth of employment in service industries; and the fall in union membership (down from 13.2 to under 10 million by her third term) (Pattie and Johnston 1996: 45ā46; Evans 2004: 39ā40). Inherent within these assumptions was the Thatcherite rejection of egalitarianism and their willingness to justify the inevitability of inequality. Venerating wealth creators went hand in hand with attributing lower individual incomes to individual failings as opposed to systematic failings within capitalism (see for example, Dorey 2011, 2015; Walker 2014).
Thatcherism was, however, more than just driven by new-right thinking in terms of the economy. It was an ideological amalgamation of economic liberalism or neo-liberalism as advanced by economic dries and neo-conservatism as promoted by social conservatives (Gamble 1988). Neo-conservatism was motivated by three main concerns: issues relating to authority and the maintenance of law and order; issues relating to the importance of tradition, the sanctity of marriage and the centrality of the family within the context of wider morality-based considerations; and issues relating to the preservation of national identity from internal and external threats. Critically, neo-conservatism rejected the parameters of the 1960s sexual revolution and the liberalisation of abortion, divorce and homosexuality. They suggested that a correlation existed between liberal demands for sexual liberation (for example the contraceptive pill), progressive attacks on marriage, motherhood and the family, and increased divorce rates, single parenthood, social disorder, juvenile delinquency and welfare dependency. Neo-conservatism could be reactionary in tone. They were known for their opposition to homosexual rights; freedom of contraception; and abortion; but were supportive of the family; capital and corporal punishment; and censorship (see for example, Durham 1989, 1991). Neo-conservatism was also characterised by a desire to protect, preserve and promote British national identity, and it was this that fuelled their rejection of devolution; their scepticism about the growth of multicultura...