Thatcher’s Legacy to Blair

Abstract

Margaret Thatcher was that rarity in British politics, a politician with a clear mission to change the way we thought about the role of state. However much critics such as Gamble (1990) may dispute the existence of a coherent body of thought which could be called ‘Thatcherism’, her aim throughout was clear. She sought to make ‘Britain safe from Socialism’ (Mayo, 1994, p. 2). The new right claimed the Thatcher decade marked an electoral, ideological and policy watershed in which Thatcherism had ‘broken the hold of collectivism’ on ‘intellectuals and policy-making elites’. Economic decline had been reversed, the authority of the state restored and British sovereignty reasserted (see Gamble, 1990, p. 335). At its most populist, she had ‘put the Great back in Britain’. Has the soul of the British polity been changed? Is socialism dead? By the end of Mrs Thatcher’s reign in 1990 most commentators had no doubt that the effects of Thatcherism, of eleven years of strife and confrontation, was nowhere near as significant as new right ideologues had been claiming. As well as dismissing the economic and political claims of Thatcherism, sceptics disputed the claims of widespread public support for her policies. In this view, popular support for Thatcherism was not widespread and her governments had failed to instil the values of the ‘enterprise culture’.