Thatcherism

11 Key excerpts on "Thatcherism"

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  New Labour and Thatcherism

  Political Change in Britain

  • R. Heffernan(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  3 The Politics of Thatcherism Thatcherism is best explored in terms of its causes, chronology and, ultimately, its consequences. The first steps in the evaluation of the Thatcherite project are: What was it and what did it seek to do? In assessing the impact that it has had, its achievements (matched against those it set itself) must be measured. Andrew Gamble argues that Thatcherism can be variously defined as `a set of intellectual doctrines, as a popular political movement, as a style of leadership, as a bloc of interests and as a programme of policy'. 1 His view (which has set the yardstick against which all discussions of this issue follow) is that Thatcherism had three overriding objectives: `To restore the political fortunes of the Conservative Party, to revive market liberalism as the dominant public philosophy and to create the conditions for a free economy by limiting the scope of the state while restoring its authority to act.' 2 Its project was to centre the free market at the heart of economic activity. While the Thatcherite project was constrained by the politics of the Conservative Party it was none the less informed by a New Right appre- ciation of political realities: in the variety of its forms the New Right marries neo-liberalism (the individual; freedom of choice; laissez-faire; minimal government) with neo-conservatism (strong government; social authoritarianism; hierarchy and discipline; the nation). The two key principles of economic liberalism are (1) the central role of the free market in the production, distribution and exchange of goods and services; (2) limiting the interventionist role of the state in the economy. Eager to use `the market-driven decision-making process to shape the way interests are represented and public choices made', 3 it offered an economic policy informed by neo-liberalism which counterposed the interventionist state with a light touch regulatory state; this is the 29 R.

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  The Politics of Nationhood

  Sovereignty, Britishness and Conservative Politics

  • P. Lynch(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  It had a sense of purpose and a concern with ‘doing the right thing’ without being an ideology or theory. 25 It was a practical form of politics addressing issues in a specific time and space: ‘Thatcherism is non-exportable’ and is ‘British by essence not accident’, its roots in British history and experiences being particularly evident in the government’s response to European integration. 26 As noted above, Letwin argues that Thatcherism marked a restoration of a tradi- Thatcherism and the Politics of Nationhood 59 tional English morality (though she talks of Britishness) which has a distinctive conception of the individual and his role in society, seeking to reassert self-sufficiency, enterprise, loyalty and patriot- ism. But as well as the authoritarian individualist language of en- terprise and sovereignty, Thatcher also used the language of Whig history, notably when talking of Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution at the French Revolution bicentenial celebrations or when pressing for the teaching of national history, though the ten- dency was still to conflate English with British history. 27 Thatcherism – A POLITICAL PROJECT Explanations which treat Thatcherism as a political project give priority to broad political factors such as achieving governing com- petence, promoting the interests of the party and its key support- ers, winning the battle of ideas and ensuring electoral success. Ideology is a tool used by the Thatcher Governments to pursue these political interests rather than a blueprint informing policy. Jim Bulpitt analyses Thatcherism in terms of Conservative state- craft, that is ‘winning elections and achieving some necessary de- gree of governing competence’, a desire to gain relative autonomy for the centre in matters of high politics being ‘the principle rule of Conservative statecraft’. 28 The focus is on the actions of rational actor political elites at the centre, namely party leaders in office or the ‘Court’.

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  Thatcher's Theatre

  British Theatre and Drama in the Eighties

  • D. Keith Peacock(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2 Thatcherism Margaret Thatcher was not only Britain's first woman Prime Minister but also the first leader since Lord Liverpool in the 1820s to win three elections in a row and to hold office for the longest uninterrupted period this century. She was also the only twentieth century Prime Minister to lend her name to a political doctrine— Thatcherism. Like her hero, Winston Churchill, she also established a robust political persona. From 1975, Margaret Thatcher sometimes attended the Conser- vative Philosophy Group and, at one of its meetings, revealed her reasons for attendance. "We must," she said, "have an ideology. The other side have got an ideology they can test their policies against. We must have one as well." 1 In fact, Labour governments had never attempted to create a completely socialist economy and were not prone to theorizing. Her reference was probably to the Tribune Group or to the extra-parliamentary far Left whose influence had become increasingly apparent in current industrial disputes. Her "ideology," however, was born not of a fondness for intellectual reflection but of utilitarian practicality. The "ideology" which, by the mid-eighties, would be identified as "Thatcherism" was only in part the outcome of political theorizing. It was largely shaped by a combination of political necessity (curbing trade-union power and reducing public spending and inflation) and, during the early years of her government, the Prime Minister's strongly held political views concerning individual responsibility. Although Mar- garet Thatcher often turned to intellectuals for advice, she herself was no intellec- tual. For her "the life of the mind was directed not at the pondering of problems," concluded her biographer, Hugo Young, "but to the discovery of solutions." 2 Part of her attraction for many was the very fact that she did not speculate, she asserted.

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  Britain under Thatcher

  • Anthony Seldon, Daniel Collings(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Because the policy tools changed, from monetarism to exchange rate management, one should speak not of a single Thatcherite economic policy, but of a Thatcherite attitude to economics, including a commitment to price stability and the promotion of savings, but all with the avoidance of direct economic management. Thatcherites rejected the postwar notion that problems in the economy are best Thatcherism in History 81 cured by government interference. The Thatcherite mission was thus to provide a framework for individuals to pursue their own interests as free as possible from government intervention. Another manifestation of the Thatcherite bolstering of the individ-ual and the onslaught on powerful interests, which interfered with the free market, came in the government's assault on overmighty trade union power. Here, the radical and moderate right tend to unite in praise of the government's record. The legislation that was introduced was intended 'fundamentally to restore and clarify the government's authority to rule' [61 p. 132]. Since 1945, governments of both left and right had allowed trade union power to rise to excessive levels, and in the 1970s the unions had aroused popular ire by challenging the authority of the British State. The trade union legislation and direct attack on union action, notably during the miners' strike in 1984-85, were unavoidable: In taking such 'tough' measures on trade unions, the Thatcher gov -ernment was answering a widespread and deeply felt public demand to be liberated from a tyranny which, apart from its effect on employers, had made it impossible for Britain to know from one day to the next what stoppage would produce chaos in their daily life. [61 p. 157] Supporters praise Thatcherite policy towards local government because local authorities were seen to be bastions of municipal social-ism, whose spending of public money had run out of control.

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  Social Classes in Marxist Theory

  • Allin Cottrell(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4 concerning the development of capitalist property relations. I shall argue that Thatcher’s economic programme is contradictory and unrealisable in face of the dominant form of capitalist property. On the third question, it must be recognised that although Thatcher’s basic economic programme is not realisable, nonetheless Thatcherism has had real economic and political effects, and even if Thatcherism fails politically as well as in economic terms there will be no wiping the slate clean and acting as if nothing had happened since 1979. I shall offer a contribution to the debate over the political effects of developments in the Thatcher period as far as late 1982, and the effects on the prospects for socialism.

  7.1 Where Thatcherism came from

  As mentioned above, this question breaks down into a number of narrower questions — those of the conditions of formation of Thatcherist ideology, and of the conditions of dominance of that ideology within the Tory party and subsequently in the realm of electoral politics. The answers to these questions are necessarily interwoven and I shall not attempt to answer them in strictly serial fashion, but it should be borne in mind that we are dealing with a complex issue — one which involves processes at the levels of parliamentary politics, international economic relations and popular ideology — and, to echo the conclusions of earlier chapters, not an issue which is reducible to the ‘expression’ of a pre-given class interest.

  First consider the main strands of Thatcherist ideology. Thatcher and her close associates subscribe to a very definite and clear-cut vision of the problems of British society and the economy, and an equally definite vision of the solutions to those problems. The central problem is seen as state interference, bureaucracy and waste, a cancer which has been developing almost continually at least since the war, enfeebling the economy and popular morality alike. In order to finance its wasteful bureaucracy and misguided charitable programmes the state has levied taxes on a scale which has crushed out incentives for personal effort. Running up against the limits of taxation, the state has also borrowed and ‘printed’ money on an excessive scale, the former squeezing out more worthy private sector investment and the latter generating uncontrollable inflation. This cancerous growth of the state is given the name ‘creeping socialism’, but it is a ‘socialism’ which even Conservatives have connived in. In seeking to break with it, Thatcher also seeks to break with much of the tradition of Conservatism in Britain. Other major problems which have grown up in the shade of the meddling socialist state include the excessive power of the trade unions and the breakdown of respect for law and order. Within Thatcherist ideology, the solution is to restrict the role of the state, concentrating its powers on matters which are rightfully the business of the state such as defence, policing, formulation of general laws (including laws to put the unions in their proper place), and control over the supply of money. The counter-productive pretensions of the state to preserve employment, restructure industry and adjust aggregate demand, incomes or prices (directly) must be rejected. The market must be allowed to function freely within a framework of sound law and sound money and the individual must be presented with sufficient incentives to make it worth his while to succeed in the market. Further, individuals must be encouraged to accumulate private property, in the housing stock and preferably also in the means of production so as to realise the dream of a true ‘property owning democracy’ (Howell, 1978). As many people as possible should have more to lose than their chains. Respect must also be re-established for the institutions of family and state. This will provide the social and political stability which is the necessary complement to the competitive working of the free market system.

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  Global Capitalism and National Decline

  The Thatcher Decade in Perspective

  • Henk Overbeek(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 7 Thatcherism in power

  The Thatcherite concept of control

  The year 1979 was a year of crisis, or rather a year of a conjuncture of crises. Internationally, the crisis of Fordism, of the Keynesian welfare state and of American hegemony was compounded by the effects of the second oil crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In Britain, these crises were superimposed on the long-term decline of Britain. The concrete manifestation of this conjuncture of crises in the Winter of Discontent brought out once more the archaic capital-labour relationship in Britain, and the acute crisis of the political system reflected the ‘unfinished’ bourgeois revolution and the incomplete ‘nationalization’ of the British state. Ruling circles in Britain had gradually become aware in the course of the 1970s that the problems which Britain was facing were of a structural character and that their solution required a fundamentally different political approach. ‘Thatcherism’ represented an attempt to provide a radically new answer to this ‘triple crisis’ of the British social formation. It of course did not drop out of a clear blue sky, but was constructed over a number of years and out of elements which predated their integration into this single framework. The formative period of what has eventually become ‘Thatcherism’ was the period from the 1973-4 crisis to the 1979 election campaign. During these years isolated ideas and partial programmes gradually acquired some degree of coherence as the previously hegemonic corporate-liberal coalition of class interests disintegrated under the impact of the unfolding structural crisis in the world economy. ‘Currency-crankery’ became respectable monetary policy, racism became a respectable expression of ‘Britishness’, anti-socialist free market ideology1

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  Twentieth-Century Britain

  A Political History

  • William D. Rubinstein(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  There were other reasons, as well. Thatcherites had a number of highly visible and palpable enemies – bloody-minded trade union bosses, effete Tory ‘wets’, woolly minded left-wing intellectuals, the Soviet ‘empire of evil’ in its decline phase – whom it was easy and popular to target. Thatcherism put in place the theories of right-wing economists and intellectuals such as Frederick von Hayek and Milton Friedman who moved from the periphery of intellectual debate to the centre with the collapse of Keynesianism. There was, as well, the crucial influence of Ronald Reagan in America: ‘Reaganism’, the American equivalent of Thatcherism, is often seen as having been centrally influenced by Margaret Thatcher, and Reagan was first elected in November 1980, a year and a half after Thatcher came to power. Nevertheless, the central themes of Reagan’s policies, especially drastic cuts in personal taxes, significantly influ-enced the direction of Thatcherism after its initial phase, not the other way round. Thatcherism also represented a generational change. As Denis Healey once perceptively noted, Thatcherism was impossible before those with a direct 317 318 TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITAIN adult memory of Britain’s successful national planning during the Second World War passed from the scene. While there were plainly exceptions to this rule, it is nevertheless true that the gap in experiences between Edward Heath (b.1916), an officer during the war, and Margaret Thatcher (b.1925), a teenager during the war, was of great importance. Thatcherism also skilfully exploited quite contradictory desiderata: more authority, against the breakdown of authority and law and order, and less state control and less ‘socialism’, as per-ceived by much of the middle classes. But in the final analysis one comes back to the character and personality of Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher ( née Roberts) was, of course, the daughter of a Methodist grocer in Grantham (who became Mayor of the town).

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  Heath and Thatcher in Opposition

  • Eric Caines(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  PART I Though Nigel Lawson claimed to be its progenitor, it is generally acknowl- edged that the term ‘Thatcherism’ was coined just before the 1979 election in an article by Stuart Hall in Marxism Today and was simply used thereafter as shorthand for what Hall described as ‘the swing to the Right’. 1 The term did not embrace – obviously could not at that stage embrace – the collection of attributes which it acquired over the next eleven and a half years of Thatcher governments, not to mention the further encrustations which adhered to it under John Major’s stewardship between 1992 and 1997 and later. Indeed, as time passed, it became a term into which anything which anyone disapproved of during that entire period could be packaged. Commenting on how rare it is for political practitioners to be ‘promoted to the status of an “ism”’, Kenneth Minogue pointed to the double-sided nature of the term: ‘“Thatcherism” reflected on the one hand a widespread conviction that Thatcher introduced something new and significant into British political life’, but it was also an expression created by her enemies who needed a focus and ‘being intellectuals, would hardly be satisfied with merely disliking a person. They disapproved of everything she stood for: hence “Thatcherism”.’ 2 Whether or not one agrees with these definitions of Thatcherism, what the Stuart Hall term in particular suggested was that by the time of the 1979 election, there was a body of thinking which was recognisable as a coherent programme upon which a Conservative Opposition could put itself forward as an alternative government. It also implied that it could be associated in a distinctive way with the leader elected by Conservative MPs, totally unexpectedly, four years before on a platform which, to the extent that it warranted the name, was not clear to some and was unac- ceptable to many others.

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  Events That Changed Great Britain Since 1689

  • Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling, Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  What may ap- pear as personality failings to some people can be seen by others as evi- dence of determination, tempered by a sense of what is right and proper. At any rate, personality notwithstanding, it is fair to categorize her govern- ment as one with a distinct ideological bent, led by an ideologue with a no-nonsense approach to getting things done. The Thatcher government tackled the economy head-on, and it is in this realm that the most far-reaching changes took place. At the heart of the problem (according to the Thatcherites) was Keynesian economic thinking, which dictated that governments should step in to expand the supply of money in an effort to promote employment across society. While it is argu- able that Keynesian economics served the West well in the decade of the Great Depression, Thatcherites considered such direct intervention in the marketplace outmoded, and in large part responsible for the double-digit inflation of the 1970s. Thatcher sought to make Keynesianism obsolete by changing the paradigm to "monetarism," which calls for government to re- strict the money supply and work toward fiscal responsibility. Budgets had to be cut, public sector borrowing needed to be reduced, and overall spend- ing had to decrease. The easiest way to accomplish these goals while at the same time strik- ing a blow against the welfare state was to sell off—or privatize—many of Great Britain's nationalized industries. Despite the government's good in- tentions, its practice of purchasing nonprofitable industries in order to "prop them up" and save jobs had led to considerable unwanted conse- quences. For one thing, government agencies proved no better at running ailing industries than private operators. In the worst cases nationalization led to waste, and stories of absurdities within the system—such as workers being paid for doing no work—abounded.

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  A History of Britain

  1945 to Brexit

  • Jeremy Black(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Indiana University Press

    (Publisher)

      7     Thatcherism, 1979–90

  THE DEATH OF Margaret Thatcher in 2013 underlined the contentious nature of her legacy. The death also demonstrated the changing character of British society, being greeted with more division than that of any former prime minister. A state funeral in St Paul’s Cathedral attended, most unusually, by the Queen in a very public show of respect, contrasted with the vocal abuse circulating in, and from, some circles. This difference captured the ambiguities of Thatcher’s government and legacy, each of which bulk especially large in foreign attention. These ambiguities also relate to very different histories of Britain, and these histories focus on Thatcher’s intentions and impact.

  Coming to power determined to reverse what she saw as Britain’s decline and to overthrow what she presented as the causes, Thatcher presented herself, not as a restorer, as Churchill had done when replacing Labour in 1951, but as a radical reformer and an opponent of big government, whose reforms were intended to change as much as to restore. Churchill had focused on foreign policy and defense, but, while doing so, the hyperactive Thatcher was also determined to change Britain from within, as Churchill had not sought to do. Her agenda was greatly shaped by a response to what had happened earlier in her life, including her upbringing as the daughter of a devout Methodist self-made grocer in small-town England, which was a background very much outside the usual circles of Conservative privilege. World War II was also important. However, coming from outside the circles of privilege did not entail any obvious political trajectory as both experiences had also been true of Heath and Powell and were to be true of Major and May. A key element in all these cases (bar Major) was a lack of “clubability” and, notably, of the upper-class clubability of shared assumptions and background that was true of the social elite from which the Conservative leaders of the 1950s had come.

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  Recovering Power

  The Conservatives in Opposition Since 1867

  • Anthony Seldon, S. Ball(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The trouble was that each Labour move to the left was forcing the Conservatives to adjust to a more left-wing middle ground. The analysis impressed Thatcher and reinforced her detestation of so- called consensus politics. 232 Recovering Power Thus was born the idea of ‘Josephism’, soon known as ‘Thatcherism’. 30 In speeches and interviews, the leader praised the free market and its indispensable links with a free society, warned against expecting too much of the state, called for the withdrawal of the trade unions’ legal privileges, and expressed her scepticism about the pursuit of equality. Complaining that too many of her upper-class predecessors (and colleagues) had felt inhibited from taking necessary decisions because of guilt over the mass unemployment of the 1930s, she insisted in a speech that she would not be intimidated by what she called ‘bourgeois guilt’. 31 The Institute of Economic Affairs, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman had propounded such ideas for a number of years. However, now that major politicians were speaking out and the existing stock of policies were clearly failing, there was a more receptive audience. The ideas were supported by sections of the press, particularly the Telegraph papers, The Times and the Daily Mail, and such weeklies as the Spectator and The Economist. They provided a platform for prolific commentators like Paul Johnson, Roger Scruton, T.E. Utley, John Vaizey, George Gale and Frank Johnson. In The Times and the Financial Times, the influential economic commentators Peter Jay and Samuel Brittan respectively, and the editor of The Times, William Rees-Mogg, advanced the case for monetarism and cast doubt on incomes policies. In addition, right-wing academics and intellectuals participated in seminars at think-tanks such as the Centre for Policy Studies, the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute. Labour and the left could not match the range of this activity.

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