The Routledge Dictionary of Politics, Third Edition
Margaret Thatcher became leader of the British Conservative Party in 1975, and prime minister in 1979, holding both positions until 1990. It was after the Conservative defeat in 1974 that she rose to prominence as the standard bearer of the right wing of the party, which accused their former leader Edward Heath of causing the electoral failure by taking the party too much into a centrist position. Thatcher, advocating what she described as ‘the politics of conviction’, quite deliberately broke the consensual approach which had dominated British party politics since the era of Butskellism. Her political philosophy, though always eclectic, had two main thrusts. The first was an economic policy of monetarism, in contrast to the prevailing Keynesian orthodoxy. (It should be noted, however, that monetarism was beginning to be accepted even by the Labour government of 1974–79, and has since become almost as much of an orthodoxy as Keynesianism had been.)
The second thrust was the idea of ‘rolling back the state’, of creating private opportunity and personal responsibility in all areas of life. This took many forms. Perhaps the most representative was the privatization of nationalized industries, as in the selling to the public and to industry shares in the water, electricity, gas and telecommunications utilities. Thatcherism also encompassed the reduction of the role of central or local government in many traditional areas such as council housing, and was extended to decentralization of functions which had to stay in the state domain.
Thus the National Health Service and the schools system were reformed, with hospitals and schools encouraged to take more direct control over their own budgets and practices.
Thatcherism was so pervasive that it is difficult to put any bounds on its reach. Thatcher was opposed to the power of large institutions, especially if they had aspects of a monopoly position. For example the exclusive rights of opticians to sell reading glasses, or of solicitors to conveyance in the sale of houses, were taken away, and even the privileges of barristers over ordinary solicitors were eroded. The first target of this approach, however, was the trade union movement, and a series of pieces of legislation massively reduced the ability of unions to call strikes and generally restricted their practices.
Naturally there were many other aspects to Thatcher’s policies. She was right-wing in a conventional way across the policy spectrum: tough on law and order issues, close to the USA in foreign policy and dubious of the European Communities (now the European Union) less moved by social injustice than some, but none of these are specifically ‘Thatcherite’ attitudes. Thatcherism, were it to be analysed by a political theorist, would concentrate on her notion of freedom and responsibility of the individual in a way that links her far more with libertarianism and 19th century liberalism than with the traditional ‘Tory’ philosophy of the Conservative Party. Her influence on the Conservative Party began to wane shortly after she was removed from power, and by the beginning of the 21st century very few Conservative politicians were comfortable with a Thatcherite label.
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