Abstract
This chapter investigates Thatcherism’s legacy by examining its ideological impact on conceptions of citizenship and civil society in the 1990s and 2000s. It argues that in the 1990s, political thinkers on the Left as well as the Right largely accepted the Thatcherite argument that a global free market could be harmonized with a flourishing civil society, but grew far more critical in the 2000s, querying Thatcherism’s fundamental ideological assumptions.
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Notes
- 1.
There remains something of a debate about the degree to which John Major’s 1990–1997 governments remained entirely Thatcherite. Certainly, Major’s emollient personal style, and his background as a councillor in Brixton who had never been to university, contrasted with Margaret Thatcher’s stridency, and her reputation as a politician most comfortable with ‘middle England’, or at least the ‘upwardly mobile’. Major also notably abolished the poll tax, and made some moves towards being more tolerant of gays and lesbians, at least at the level of rhetoric. However, most of the political instincts and significant pieces of legislation of Major’s government arguably remained Thatcherite: the Major government privatized British rail, and attempted to sell off the Post Office; Peter Lilley as Social Security Secretary endeavoured to reduce the welfare budget; and the instinct to keep direct taxes low remained strong.
- 2.
There were of course other reasons why politicians and political thinkers were inclined to start focusing more systematically on the nature of citizenship in the 1990s—notably the increasing impact of the European Union, questions concerning multiculturalism, feminist campaigns designed to achieve genuine equality for women, and a general desire to combat political apathy—but nevertheless queries about Thatcherism itself were highly important (Neill 2006).
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Neill, E. (2020). Intellectual Reactions to Thatcherism: Conceptions of Citizenship and Civil Society from 1990–2010. In: Mullen, A., Farrall, S., Jeffery, D. (eds) Thatcherism in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41792-5_3
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