The Consequences of Thatcherism: The End of Consensus, and the Forging of a New Consensus

Abstract

This book has been written on the assumption that issues in politics are inseparable from institutions and cannot properly be discussed apart. Appropriately, therefore, it ends with the major political question of our times, overarching, including and dominating all others — the overall impact of the Conservative Governments of Mrs Thatcher after 1979 up to 1987 (the start of their third term) and the prospects for the future. In the second half of the 1980s, it was frequently asserted that ‘Thatcherism’ (a shorthand term for the New Right policies and ideological values of Mrs Thatcher) had broken the political consensus on which Britain had been governed previously, and had inaugurated a new era. This chapter subjects this claim to critical examination, considering in turn the meaning of consensus, the record of the Conservative Governments in the light of their expressed aims and the extent to which the changes they had brought about in British politics by the late 1980s were likely to be permanent. In doing so, it brings together earlier social and economic policy themes in a historical and comparative context.