The Thatcher Revolution Western Europe from the End of the Second World War to the Present Essay

Nick De Leu // Tartu University // 2010

As we enter the final days of November 2010, one with an interest in political history

cannot help but remember the palace revolution that took place in the United Kingdom,

around this time of the year, two decades ago. After increasing discontent amongst both

the people of Britain and – perhaps more importantly – among the members of the

Conservative Party in the UK, then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (°1925) resigned

from office – effectively ending an eleven year era of government.

In 1987, Thatcher had led the Conservatives to a third consecutive electoral victory,

although, due to various circumstances, the parliamentary majority to her disposition

had been firmly reduced. The Iron Lady suggested free-market changes to the national

health and education system, and launched plans for a community tax (soon dubbed poll

tax) which fueled criticism that she had no compassion for the poor. On top of that, she

refused to support a common European currency, resulting in the resignation of Nigel

Lawson, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Deputy Minister Geoffrey Howe.1

This inspired former Defense Secretary Michael Heseltine – who had been increasingly

critical of Thatcher’s policies since his resignation in 1986 - to call for a leadership

election in November 1990. Although Thatcher beat Heseltine in the first round, many

Tory MP’s tried to persuade her to resign for the sake of the party, as even if she went on

to win the leadership election, her authority would be lethally undermined.2 And thus

Britain’s longest-serving Prime Minister (1979-1990) since 1827 and its first and only

1 Margaret Hilda Roberts Thatcher Thatcher, Baroness (Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th Edition,

2010): 1. Adacemic Search Complete,

http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?hid=109&sid=1ca7ee8a-de05-481e-aca2-

cf4439aef2d9%40sessionmgr114&vid=1&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=a9h&AN=39

035821(accessed November 19, 2010). 2 Portillo on Thatcher, the Lady’s not for Spurning (Youtube)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMui3bymw54&feature=related (accessed November 20, 2010).

female PM to this day stepped down: it seemed that even her own party didn’t believe in

her policies anymore.3

As history usually benefits from hindsight, it is perhaps more appropriate to assess the

legacy of Mrs. Thatcher now than twenty years ago. And that is exactly what will be

attempted over the course of the following pages.

The focus of this essay will be fixed on whether Margaret Thatcher’s new policies

(implemented between 1979 and 1990) can be characterized as “a revolution”. In order

to gain a clearer view of what exactly was “new” about Thatcher’s policies, first an image

of pre-Thatcherite Britain shall be constructed.

The next subject of analysis will be the actual undertakings of the Thatcher government.

These will be situated in their historical and philosophical context to find out what the

grounds were which enabled – or hindered – the Prime Minister to sail her own course.

The legacy of the Thatcher administration will be examined through an inquiry into

what resulted from eleven years of government, which thorough changes were made,

and what stayed quite the same.

In conclusion, we will try to define “revolution” and evaluate Mrs. Thatcher’s policies

accordingly.

In short, the three main questions of this essay will be: what were Margaret Thatcher’s

policies (and their outcomes), how did they contrast the pre-Thatcher situation, and can

they be characterized as a revolution. For doing so, an attempt to pass judgment on

Thatcher’s doings – be it economical or ethico-political – seems unnecessary and might

even interfere with the objective decision of whether or not they can be called a

“revolution”. Therefore, such an attempt will not be made.

Up until the seventies, there had been consensus in most Western-European post-war

states about the welfare state.4 This was no different in Britain, where this consensus

3 Ursula Donnelly, “10 Defining moments of the Thatcher Years, The resignation speech, 28 November 1990,”

New Statesman.com, November 10, 2010, http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-

politics/2010/11/resignation-speech-thatcher (accessed November 19, 2010).

was largely based off the 1942 William Beveridge Report, which propagated four

assumptions about post-war welfare provision: there should be a national health

service, an adequate state pension, family allowances and near-full employment. It

became the moral basis for the British Labour Party’s post-war program, and even the

Conservatives dared not oppose it.5 There was also a wide agreement that economy

should be managed in a Keynesian manner: the government should take responsibility

for stimulating economic activity and increasing demand.6 7

However, throughout the sixties, the British economy deteriorated. In 1966, Labour

Prime Minister Harold Wilson had to face a mounting trade deficit and a sterling crisis,

eventually forcing him to devaluate the pound by 14 percent. In 1967, Wilson tried to

get Britain to join the European Community – not because he was an European

enthusiast, but because he realized Britain was running out of options. French President

de Gaulle, however, vetoed the application, concerned about the British economic

weakness.8 A third thorn in Wilson’s side were strikes between ’67 and ‘69, which

inspired the Labour government to try and reform strike legislation. The trade unions,

however, reacted outraged, and Wilson gave way to pressure.9

According to Thomas William Heyck, the following elections of 1970 revealed the

unraveling of the aforementioned postwar consensus. Not because of the harsh attacks

of the Conservatives on the Labour government, but because he notices that many young

workers were drifting away to the New Left and other socialist groups, whereas the far

right of the Tories, led by Enoch Powell, expressed increasing concern that current

leader Edward Heath was not sufficiently opposed to immigration, nor enthusiastic

enough about free enterprise. To Heyck, this signified the beginnings of the polarization

that was to mark the ‘70s and ‘80s.10 In Post War, Tony Judt agrees that the collapse of

4 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Vintage Books, 2005), 535. 5 Tony Judt, Postwar, 75. 6 Tony Judt, Postwar, 536. 7 Thomas William Heyck, The Peoples of the British Isles: A New History, from 1870 to the Present (Chicago:

Lyceum Books, 2002), 152. 8 Thomas William Heyck, The Peoples of the British Isles, 260. 9 Thomas William Heyck, The Peoples of the British Isles, 261. 10 Thomas William Heyck, The Peoples of the British Isles, 262.

the British consensus was not due to ideological confrontation, and adds that the failure

of governments of all colors to identify and impose a successful economic strategy was

largely responsible for it.11

As to illustrate this, after the elections, the new Conservative Prime Minister Edward

Heath stated in 1970 that he wanted to “embark on a change so radical, a revolution so

quiet and so total that it will go far beyond the program of a parliament”, adding that

“we were returned to office to change the course and the history of this nation, nothing

less.”12 Heath had adopted a rhetoric of free market agenda after brainstorming at the

Selsdon Park Hotel, near London.13 John Davies, Heath’s minister for Trade and Industry,

even said at a conference that he “will not bolster or bail out companies where I can see

no end to the process of propping them up”. However, he had scarcely spoken, or the

government nationalized the aero-engine division of Rolls Royce.14 An important U-turn

for ‘Selsdon Man’, and Heath called for elections after facing massive trade union

opposition and strikes – and lost them to Harold Wilson in 1974.

Wilson did not pick up the gauntlet against the trade unions, and was succeeded by

James Callaghan, who acknowledged a certain inevitable level of unemployment,

reduced social transfer payments and labor costs and tried to control and reduce

inflation and government spending. He was also somewhat forced into this, by the

conditions of an IMF loan. However: all of these policies were done stealthily, so as not

to upset the left wing supporters of the Labour party.15

The strategy did not work, and Callaghan could not avoid the 1978-9 ‘Winter of

Discontent’, filled with militant picketing, violence and walk-outs among tanker, lorry

and ambulance drivers, with rubbish piling up in the streets, patients waiting for

hospital workers and corpses queuing for the crematorium – all of this accompanied by

11 Tony Judt, Postwar, 538. 12 Robert Blake, The Conservative Party from Peel to Thatcher (London: Fontana Press, 1985), 309. 13 Tony Judt, Postwar, 538. 14 Robert Blake, The Conservative Party, 313. 15 Tony Judt, Postwar, 539.

the worst winter for many years. It proved to be the last straw for the Callaghan

government.16

In the meanwhile, Margaret Thatcher, a relatively unknown right-wing Tory MP and

former Secretary of State for Education and Science, had obtained the leadership of the

Conservatives in the 1974 elections. In the campaign for the 1979 elections, the

Conservatives emphasized the hardships of the winter strikes and Labour’s failure to

work with the unions, while advocating policies of lower taxation, lower public

expenditure and less state intervention.17 Topped off with the legendary Saatchi &

Saatchi slogan “Labour isn’t working”, the Tories won the 1979 elections, putting

Margaret Thatcher in charge of British politics, as the first woman PM in history.

Her tone and style marked a shift “from consensualist centrism to the Radical Right”,

says Robert Blake, who like Judt and Heyck suggests that this shift corresponded to a

“distinct change in the general climate of opinion”, more notably “against ‘big

government’, Keynesian economics and the more extravagant aspects of the welfare

state.”18

The latter was more and more perceived as unsustainable, as the cost of paying

unemployment benefits kept growing. The very concept of the welfare state rested upon

two assumptions: it was expected that economic growth and job creation would

continue at the high levels of the ‘50s and ‘60s and that the birth rate would remain well

above replacement level. This, however, did not happen, and the fact that this was the

best-nurtured generation ever – which would almost certainly live longer – did not make

things easier.19

The Keynesian consensus was also increasingly under fire. The two main arguments

against it were that the high level of social services and provisions to which Western-

Europeans had grown accustomed were not sustainable, and that, regardless of that, the

interventionist state was an impediment to economic growth. Economists Friedrich

16 Robert Blake, The Conservative Party, 329-330. 17 Robert Blake, The Conservative Party, 333. 18 Robert Blake, The Conservative Party, 333. 19 Tony Judt, Postwar, 536.

Hayek and Milton Friedman and their political disciples stressed that the state should

not own means of production, allocate resources, exercise monopolies or set prices or

incomes.20

Friedman even took his criticisms further by suggesting that “state intervention is not

the solution but the real cause of economic trouble”, claiming that it disturbs market

automatism and undermines freedom, whereas a self-regulated market has a strong

corrective automatism, and privatization increases efficiency.21

These criticisms against the post-war consensus left room for a new one. In Europe Since

1980, Ivan T. Berend draws a sketch of a Europe in which there was a collective shift to

the right between the end of the sixties and the eighties. He refers to the June 1968

elections in France which occurred after the May student rebellions and surprisingly

brought an overwhelming victory for the Gaullist right – the first election in French

history in which a party gained an absolute majority. He goes on to cite Italy, where the

Christian Democratic Party stood strong, and sees a shift to the right in the fact that

West-German Christian democrat Helmut Kohl took over from Willy Brandt’s and

Helmut Schmitt’s Social Democratic Party, coming to power in 1982 and remaining there

to preside over German unification.22

Indeed, this signified that not only was there a climate change in economic opinion:

there was also a shift on sociopolitical grounds, most notably with the upsurge of

neoconservatism. Neoconservatives interpreted egalitarian ideas as destructive and

counterproductive, and stressed that inequality is the inevitable outcome of individual

freedom and initiative, and that this is explained and in fact legitimized by human nature

itself. They found that the social state had broken the balance between equality and

freedom and had distorted it towards an equality that undermined the self-assurance of

private ownership and replaced it with the fear of ownership.23 In 1975, Margaret

Thatcher expressed this idea at a Conservative party conference, saying that “everybody

20 Tony Judt, Postwar, 537. 21 Ivan T. Berend, Europe Since 1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 99. 22 Ivan T. Berend, Europe Since 1980, 114-5. 23 Ivan T. Berend, Europe Since 1980, 101.

has the right to be unequal.” In fact, according to Thatcher, “a man’s right to work as he

will, to spend what he earns, to own property” was “the essence of a free economy.”24

Economically, Thatcher embraced neoliberalism, reviving classical liberal ideas as the

importance of the individual, the limited role of the state and the value of the free

market.25 She did this with the backing of not only economists like Friedman or Hayek,

but with the backing of a whole intellectual revolution, for instance in the form of

Financial Times journalist Samuel Brittan and Peter Jay of the Times, who weren’t quite

Tories, but supported Thatcher’s monetarist policies nonetheless – support Heath had

clearly lacked during his period in government.26 However Thatcher was not very keen

on the postwar consensus, she could have never defeated it by herself: the nation’s

revulsion from previous policies was necessary to put her in office and to mobilize

opinion in her favor. By her combative leadership – starting the restoration of order

with an iron hand, a populist style and optimism and a toughness in action, all of which

impressed the Britons – she still had an immense impact on altering the framework of

British politics nonetheless.27 28

For instance, Margaret Thatcher went on a veritable privatization binge between 1979

and 1990. British Petroleum, British Aerospace, British Sugar, Cable and Wireless,

Amersham International, National Freight Corporation, Britoil, Associated British Ports,

Jaguar, British Telecom, National Bus Company, British Gas, British Airways, the Royal

Ordnance, Rolls-Royce, the British Airports Authority, the Rover Group, British Steel, the

Regional Water Authorities, Girobank, the National Grid and British Shipbuilders were

all privatized, reducing the nationalized industry’s share of the economy from 10

percent to 6 percent of the GDP.29

24 Margaret Thatcher, Free Society Speech (1975) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK3eP9rh4So (accessed on 22 November 2010) 25 Nigel Ashford & Stephen Davies, A Dictionary of Conservative and Libertarian Thought (London:

Routledge, 1991), 185. 26 Robert Blake, The Conservative Party, 323. 27 Ivan T. Berend, Europe Since 1980, 116. 28 Thomas William Heyck, The Peoples of the British Isles, 292. 29 Thomas William Heyck, The Peoples of the British Isles, 294.

And there was something to be said for this “decade long national auction, liberating

producers and consumers.” It replenished the treasury – although it caused even older

Tories like former PM Harold Macmillan to accuse Thatcher of “selling the family

silver”.30 But vital economic assets had been held with little thought: they were starved

of cash, protected from competition and consumer pressure and subject to bureaucratic

inertia and political meddling. Thanks to Thatcher’s privatization, the British market for

goods, services and eventually labor expanded, while there was also more choice and

price competition. As far as economy was concerned, Thatcher’s Britain was a more

efficient place.31

However, the share of British GDP absorbed by public expenditure remained virtually

the same in 1988 as ten years earlier, because the Conservative government had to pay

unprecedented sums in unemployment benefit. The number of jobless people rose from

1,6 million in ’77, under Callaghan, to 3,25 million in ’85 and remained one of the highest

in Europe for the rest of Thatcher’s time in office. Many jobs were lost in inefficient

industries such as steel, coalmining, textile and shipbuilding, and many people would

never find work again.32

The government made cuts in particular programs of social expenditure, like old-age

pension, public housing and education, however even Margaret Thatcher had limits to

her reach: the essentials of the National Health Service were not touched.33

One of Thatcher’s most remarkable accomplishments is her destruction of the British

trade unions.34 With her Employment Acts of ’80 and ’82 and the Trade Union Act of ’84,

the Iron Lady pushed through a few reforms: picketing was restricted to the strikers’

place of work (which helped in containing so-called “sympathetic strikes”), unions were

made liable for damages done in unlawful strikes, a closed shop must be approved by

four fifths of workers in the company, and a prestrike vote must be passed before any

industrial action. On top of those legislative efforts, Thatcher refused to intervene to

30 Tony Judt, Postwar, 541-2. 31 Tony Judt, Postwar, 543. 32 Tony Judt, Postwar, 543. 33 Thomas William Heyck, The Peoples of the British Isles, 294. 34 Tony Judt, Postwar, 542.

settle strikes: she thought it was the responsibility of employers and employees to

handle it themselves. 35

In 1984, the PM crushed a violent and emotional effort by the national union of miners

to break her governments policy of closing inefficient mines and ending subsidies to coal

industry. The mere fact that Thatcher won a battle previously lost by Heath – and

avoided by Labour – strengthened her hand severely.36 By the end of Thatcher’s reign,

only 37% of Britain’s workers belonged to a trade union – in ’79, this had still been

51%.37

Thatcher’s conservative ideas were most prominently shown in her insistence on

maintaining Britain’s independent nuclear deterrence, by the purchase of Trident

submarines from the US. Adhering to her good relationships with Washington, she also

supported their policy of installing medium range and cruise missiles in Europe.

Domestically, Thatcher instigated a major build-up in the size of the national police force

to 115 000 men, and the development of a nationwide computer network for the police

– however economic circumstances often forced her to cut on defense and order

spending. The British Nationality Act of ’81 gained her some right-wing conservative

support, with amongst others the approval of Enoch Powell, by controlling immigration

of former Commonwealth citizens into Britain.38

Thatcher also proved particularly adept at putting neoliberal theory to use. In order to

make the economy take a turn for the better, Thatcher tried to restore the

entrepreneurial spirit in the minds of the British, by withdrawing the government from

the economy, reducing income taxes, increasing VAT to 15% and encouraging the

attitude that profits and wealth were good. She also sought to defeat inflation by means

of monetary policies such as increasing the interest rate. Inflation had climbed to 21% in

’79 and remained high throughout the first half of the ‘80s. Thereafter, it began to fall. By

35 Thomas William Heyck, The Peoples of the British Isles, 295. 36 Tony Judt, Postwar, 542. 37 Thomas William Heyck, The Peoples of the British Isles, 295. 38 Thomas William Heyck, The Peoples of the British Isles, 293.

’84, the increase in prices was down to 5% a year and that remained so until ’88, when it

began to creep up again.39

But to her credit: while heavy industrial output languished, economy as a whole, driven

by financial services and some high-tech enterprises grew at a rate of 2,5 to 3 percent a

year between ’82 and ’89. Perhaps Thatcher’s strongest anti-inflatory weapon may well

have been her willingness to see millions of people out of work for month after month.40

Even when times were hard in the beginning of her government period, “the lady” was

not “for turning”.41

It is this determination and confidence that has facilitated Margaret Thatcher’s more

radical reforms. Already in 1976, when she was not even in government yet, the Soviet

press gave her the coveted nickname “Iron Lady”, as to imply that she was not one to

mess with. The Argentine military would soon figure out the same, as Thatcher swiftly

answered the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands with a British military force.

Even in Europe, Thatcher would stand strong: when she found that Britain was investing

more than it got out of Europe, she first rejected a refund of £350 million, only to get a

£1800 million refund eventually.42 But also domestically Thatcher introduced a “firm

smack of government”. While the whole of Europe was engaged in a large-scale

decentralization, Thatcher centralized power. The British were once again being ruled. 43

Centralization was not the only mark Thatcher left on Britain. By the end of ’83, there

had been a notable alteration in the electorate’s expectations of what government could

do.44 Unemployment, though still rising, was beginning to flatten out, and people were

coming to regard it as something like the weather, for which the government was not

responsible. This had contributed to breaking the power of the trade unions: people

39 Thomas William Heyck, The Peoples of the British Isles, 295. 40 Thomas William Heyck, The Peoples of the British Isles, 296. 41 Margaret Thatcher, Speech to Conservative Party Conference,

http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104431 (accessed on 23 November 2010)

42 Robert Blake, The Conservative Party, 341. 43 Tony Judt, Postwar, 540-1. 44 Robert Blake, The Conservative Party, 345.

were less inclined to go on strike or make excessive wage demands, out of fear of pricing

themselves out of the market.45

This control of the trade unions, along with her privatization successes, and her

encouragement of entrepreneurial culture allowed Thatcher to shift the center of the

British political center a couple of notches to the right.46 In the past, lack of nerve, clear

ideology and fear of the electorate had lured the Conservatives into merely reacting to

the initiative of Labour, rather than taking it for themselves. Yet Thatcher was

determined to turn the ratchet her way, no longer looking for a relatively small middle

ground, but for a fairly broad common one. 47 Because as Conservative Deputy Chairman

Michael Fraser had concluded: that was much more volatility in the British electorate

than expected. Thatcher set her sights on a target group of up to 14 percent of the total

that could be conquered – and she did.48

Only under her successors as prime ministers, the Conservative John Major and the new

Labour leader Tony Blair, it became clear which impact Thatcher had on British politics.

After the post-war consensus and the New Right consensus, now emerged a Thatcherite

consensus: a more service-oriented economy, with less of a community-spirited and

more of an individualistic public mood and an eager embrace of “modernization” of

institutions and attitudes.49 The default assumption in British politics used to be that the

state “is a natural fount of legitimacy and initiative”, but after the passage of the Iron

Lady, even Labour didn’t believe that anymore.50

Strangely, this did not mean that the Conservative party was out to dominate the

political playing field for the next decade. Quite on the contrary: it seemed that the very

lines of division which had made Simon Jenkins describe Thatcher’s downfall as a case of

“hungry wolves devouring their own” (and which Thatcher had probably created herself

by largely governing alone, demoting disagreeing party members) were still present

45 Robert Blake, The Conservative Party, 350. 46 Thomas William Heyck, The Peoples of the British Isles, 309. 47 Robert Blake, The Conservative Party, 322-3. 48 Robert Blake, The Conservative Party, 304. 49 Thomas William Heyck, The Peoples of the British Isles, 309. 50 Tony Judt, Postwar, 547.

within the party. 51 52 It seemed that by “assassinating” Thatcher, the Conservative party

had committed suicide. It remained without leaders, program, policy, goal, style nor

soul, while Thatcher’s ghost still cast a dark shadow over every leadership election – up

until David Cameron’s in 2005.53

John Major managed to stay in the driving seat until the 1997 general election, when he

was overwhelmingly beaten by Tony Blair. After the precursory efforts of Neil Kinnock

and John Smith, Blair had been able to reform the ailing Labour party of the 1983

“longest suicide note in history” (the program generally consisting of a commitment to

undo all Thatcherite reforms) to a party with a new set of policy objectives and a new

language in which to present them in order to appeal to the concerns and aspirations of

a new middle class.54

By ’86, many leading British socialists were redefining their philosophy to reemphasize

individual freedom, with bold statements like “the true purpose of socialism is the

protection and extension of individual liberty.”55

Labour had abandoned the “looney left” and removed four policies that more or less

guaranteed defeat: they abandoned the cry for unilateral nuclear disarmament,

membership of the European Union was accepted by virtually all the party (albeit with

varying degrees of enthusiasm), the trade unions no longer dictated industrial policy,

and it was agreed that renationalization was – desirable or not – largely impossible.56 57

This resulted in the abandoning of Clause 4, which committed the party to public

ownership of means of production, distribution and exchange, in 1995.58

51 Simon Jenkins, Thatcher’s Legacy (Political Studies Review: 2007 vol.5), 161. 52 Tony Judt, Postwar, 544. 53 Tony Judt, Postwar, 544-5 . 54 Tony Judt, Postwar, 546. 55 Thomas William Heyck, The Peoples of the British Isles, 301. 56 Thomas William Heyck, The Peoples of the British Isles, 312. 57 Roy Hattersley, Maggie’s Long Goodbye, New Statesman.com, 18 November 2010,

http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2010/11/labour-party-thatcher-blair (accessed 23 November 2010) 58 Thomas William Heyck, The Peoples of the British Isles, 313.

When Blair’s New Labour came to power in 1997, there was no talk of unraveling the

Thatcher revolution. Many old Labourites, however, were disappointed that Blair made

no move to revise Thatcher’s trade union legislation, and even moderate socialists were

upset that Blair did not renationalize some of the newly privatized industries, most

notably the railroads. On the contrary, Blair seemed determined to privatize London

transport, including the underground system, despite fierce opposition from London’s

(Labour-)mayor Ken Livingstone.59

Labour appeared – very much like the Thatcherite Tories indeed – opposed to high

taxes, corruption and inefficiency. In fact, Blair’s successes rested upon a threefold

inheritance of Thatcher: the replacement of the public sector with a privatized,

entrepreneurial Britain, whose praises Blair sang. Furthermore, Thatcher had destroyed

“Old Labour”, and by doing so had facilitated the task of the reformist Blair. Lastly,

Thatcher left her own party, as stated above, fractured by her own asperity and

intolerance of dissent. 60

After all of this, it seems like the Thatcher era of British government was very much a

whirlwind destroying several things along the way: from trade unions over Old Labour,

through the postwar consensus, Keynesianism and, ultimately, the Conservative party

itself. Now that we have gathered enough background, it seems time to answer the

question that was asked in the beginning of this paper: can this whirlwind be

characterized as a revolution?

According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a revolution in social and political science is

a “major, sudden, and hence typically violent alteration in government and in related

associations and structures. The term is used by analogy in such expressions as the

Industrial revolution, where it refers to a radical and profound change in economic

relationships and technological conditions. […] it now implies a fundamental departure

from any previous historical pattern.”61 Earl Aaron Reitan stresses that “the word

‘revolution’ is a slippery one, but if the word means anything, it means changes of a

59 Thomas William Heyck, The Peoples of the British Isles, 321. 60 Tony Judt, Postwar, 546-7. 61 Revolution, Encyclopedia Britannica,

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/500584/revolution, (acessed 23 November 2010)

fundamental nature in a comparatively brief period of time. The word fits the American,

French and Russian revolutions; maybe the industrial revolution, maybe not.”62

Concerning the United Kingdom in particular, Will Hutton remarks that “Revolution is

not a term to be used casually in Britain. An upheaval there, even a shakeup is a

monumental undertaking. After all, Britain is very old. No other country its size has

more venerable institutions.”63

It seems that the basic element of a revolution that can be distilled from these

definitions is, quite unsurprisingly indeed, that it marks a fundamental change, probably

in a short period of time.

When we talk about Mrs. Thatcher’s policies, we can make out three important

components of which they consist. The most obvious one is perhaps her frontal assault

on the size of the state sector. To push through those reforms, a policy of centralization

had to be wielded. In order to consolidate her power, she had to fight a third battle:

against the trade unions.

Yet as we demonstrated: Thatcher had far from been the first postwar Prime Minister to

cherish these ideas. They had been part of the unraveling of the postwar consensus, and

they were very much the core of the newly established New Right consensus – so that

hardly makes for a sudden, fundamental change.

But Thatcher was the one to synthesize all the newly (re-)emerging theories into her

own –ism – and consequently applying that to a nation which, as Hutton said, is

particularly sensitive to any kind of upheavals. She shook up the delicate fabric of British

society, even going so far as denying there was one (in a September ’87 interview for

Woman’s Own Magazine): “Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual

62 Earl A. Reitan, The Thatcher Revolution (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003)

http://books.google.com/books?id=7qaMqwGRE00C&pg=PR7&lpg=PR7&dq=reitan+The+word+%E2%80%9Crevolution%E2%80%9D+is+a+slippery+one&source=bl&ots=hU4EiiSUfh&sig=5cILpktTuqZCDgQUeAtsPikgSko&hl=nl&ei=6tjsTOzlHsiXOrfXkaoB&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false (accessed on 17 November 2010) 63 Will Hutton, Thatcher’s Half-revolution, http://www.jstor.org/pss/40257809 (accessed on 23 November 2010)

men and women and families. No government can do anything, except through people,

and people look to themselves first.”64

Margaret Thatcher was the first one to implement her ideas fully, notwithstanding any

opposition. Indeed, it was the ferocity with which she pushed through her reforms, the

determination, the obstinacy with which she insisted that there was no alternative that

defined her policy, more than the actual reforms themselves. If the intellectual

revolution was already taking place in the minds of economists and philosophers,

Margaret Thatcher catapulted it right into the heart of Britain – and the world – and that

is what makes her policy revolutionary.

Perhaps it is after all a New Labour MP who sums it up the best. In an article about New

Labour, in 2002, Peter Mandelson comes down on countries that try to run an economy

by ignoring the realities of the market or prudent public finances. He stresses the urgent

need to remove rigidities and incorporate flexibility in capital, product and labor

markets. However, to sum up his plea, he does not say that he is adhering to a neoliberal,

Hayekian, free-market based or neorealist ideal. In fact, Mandelson concludes by saying

“we are all Thatcherites now.”65

64 Peter Mandler, The English National Character, The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 232. 65 Matthew Tempest, Mandelson: we are all Thatcherites now, The Guardian.co.uk, June 10, 2002,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2002/jun/10/labour.uk1 (accessed on 20 November 2010)

Cited Works

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