making of modern uk margaret thatchers governments and new labour

N C Gardner MA PGCE 1

The Thatcher Governments 1979 to

1990 and its legacy for New Labour

N C Gardner MA PGCE


Margaret Thatcher outside Downing Street after winning the 1979 General Election


During most of the 20th Century, the British Prime Ministership has not been a very important political office. The change of political party holding office has mattered a great deal more than the individual occupying No. 10 Downing Street.

The British system of government is not an American system and the Prime Minister is not Head of State.

Change the Prime Minister without also changing the party in power and nothing much happens. The importance of the office has been exaggerated.

Margaret Thatcher as a Prime Minister


Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative Party conference autumn 1979: her first conference as Prime Minister


The Cabinet is the crucial element in the British system of government and other Cabinet ministers such as the Chancellor of the Exchequer determine major policies.

Most Prime Ministers have not sought to be powerful and have not had policy goals distinct from those of their party. Most post-war Prime Ministers – Attlee, Churchill, Macmillan, Wilson and so on – have not had objectives which were not also the objectives of their party.

Prime Ministers are regarded mainly as the managers of their government’s and their party’s political business: maintaining party unity, preventing Cabinet resignations, and winning the next election.

The Cabinet matters


Margaret Thatcher with President Ronald Reagan, her ideological soulmate and ally in the fight against world communism


In comparison with other post-war Prime Ministers, Margaret Thatcher’s style of government was entirely different.

She had a broadly-based policy agenda of her own, an agenda distinct from that of most members of the Conservative Party.

She ensured that her agenda was her Government’s agenda and was therefore willing to assert herself on an unprecedented scale compared to other post-war Prime Ministers.

Margaret Thatcher was different


The Falklands War, 1982: crucial for the success of Margaret Thatcher. The British victory led to decisive election wins for the Conservatives under Thatcher in 1983 and 1987.


Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Invincible leaves to fight in the Falklands war, 1982


Prime Minister Thatcher with officers and men of HM Armed Forces, Falkland Islands, 1982


Michael Foot, Leader of the Labour Party 1980 – 83, holding Labour’s election manifesto. The 1983 election led to Labour’s biggest defeat of the post-war period.


The Conservative governments of 1979 to 1990 were very much the governments of Margaret Thatcher.

In her relations with her fellow ministers, civil servants and Conservative M.P.s, her distinctive weapon was fear. She sought to control the content of public policy and, through it, Britain’s destiny.

Mrs Thatcher had a formidable personality and used hectoring, cajoling, threatening, wrong-footing, bullying, embarrassing and even humiliating her ministers and officials.

Thatcher as Prime Minister


Prime Minister Thatcher with Mikhail Gorbachev on his visit to Britain in 1984: “A man we can do business with.” Gorbachev became Soviet General Secretary the following year and was mainly responsible for ending the Cold War by reforming the Soviet Union. He did not believe his reforms would lead to the eventual fall of the entire Soviet system.


As prime minister Mrs Thatcher put the fear of God into people, and they usually responded well.

More than any other prime minister, Thatcher used her hiring-and-firing power single-mindedly to produce a team of ministers loyal to her person and, more importantly, to her policy agenda.

At the same time she exercised her natural charm and had genuine concern for the well-being of many of her fellow politicians and their families.

Thatcher’s style


The miners strike 1984 – 85: the defining moment for the British labour movement. The defeat of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) by Thatcher led to the weakening of the trade unions as a whole and a shift of power towards management.


Police and striking miners do battle


Roy Hattersley, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party 1983 – 1992 and Neil Kinnock, Labour leader 1983 - 1992


The essence of Thatcherism was the advocacy of a market economy, where the state fulfills strictly limited functions such as monetary control, the upholding of the rule of law, and defence of the realm.

In the context of what had happened before 1979, Thatcherism was ideological. Margaret Thatcher adopted the free market vision of Adam Smith and challenged the post-war consensus based on nationalisation, Keynesian economics, government planning, and the provision of universal welfare.

Thatcherism and the economy


Margaret Thatcher in her Downing Street office


After her decisive victory in the General Election of June 1983, Thatcher embarked on her policy of privatization which created millions of small shareholders and significantly reduced the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement (PSBR).

Thatcher also took political revenge for previous humiliations, challenging the miners by insisting on the closures of uneconomic pits. The 1984 – 85 miners strike was marked by violence on both sides, lasted a year but ended in the defeat of the NUM in March 1985.

High Tide of Thatcherism, 1983 - 1992


The humbling of the miners, with their reputation as the shock troops of the labour movement, was followed by the defeat of the newspaper print unions, whose tight hold over Fleet Street had made them a byword for restrictive practices.

Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Times Newspapers, installed new computerized technology at a new plant at Wapping. Murdoch with the help of the law overcame union resistance to changes in working practices and the technology used to produce newspapers.

High Tide of Thatcherism, 1983 - 92


Required reading for understanding the Thatcher premiership: The Thatcher Era by Peter Riddell of The Times


The essence of Thatcherism was the advocacy of a market economy and promoting free enterprise.

Therefore Thatcher’s natural supporters were the petit bourgeoisie – shopkeepers, foremen, self-employed business people.

Thatcher directed her attacks against the failures of socialist and Keynesian policies, and rejected the corporatist consensus of post-war Britain.

Essence of Thatcherism


Welfare spending accelerated under the public spending boom of a Conservative government, that of Edward Heath in 1970 – 74, so Britain’s welfare spending from 1945 to 1970 was less than many other West European nations.

Although Mrs Thatcher wished to move from a dependency culture to an enterprise culture, welfare spending actually continued to increase during the period of her governments in 1979 – 1990 and the majority of the public themselves supported increased provision for public services.

Thatcherism


Required reading for the interpretation of Thatcher’s premiership: The Enemy Within by Seumas Milne of The Guardian


For Peter Riddell, another historian of the Thatcher years, Thatcherism was essentially an instinct, a series of moral values and an approach to leadership rather than an ideology.

Riddell agrees with Dr Shirley Letwin by writing that Mrs Thatcher stood for the values of the English suburban and provincial middle-class and aspiring skilled working-class.

Her style of conviction politics and self-conscious radicalism were uncomfortable for the established such as the universities, the Church of England, the Foreign Office, BBC, and the professions.

Thatcherism


Thatcher was patronised and disliked by the liberal intellectual establishment which was centrist in its political thinking. Senior civil servants, lawyers, university lecturers and BBC executives recoiled in horror at Thatcher’s deliberate rejection of the post-war consensus.

However, international economic and political changes i.e. the spread of neo-liberalism and the fall of Soviet communism, changed intellectual opinion towards acceptance of the market.

Thatcher’s approach


The front page of Britain’s biggest-selling daily newspaper, May 1982, after the sinking of the Argentine warship The Belgrano


However, centrist intellectual opinion still held sway through the Thatcher Decade and still holds for the majority today. The centrist establishment still prevails in the BBC, the universities and the senior civil service.

For the majority of intellectual opinion, Mrs Thatcher became an object of unthinking hatred not endured by any other Prime Minister since 1945. The reason lay in the inability of progressive orthodoxy, like any other orthodoxy, to tolerate earnest and practical dissent.

Centrist intellectual opinion


Traders in the Stock Exchange dealing room following ‘the Big Bang’, the deregulation of the financial markets in London. London became the world’s leading financial centre after the Big Bang, a global city, though most City banks became foreign-owned.


The hatred of Mrs Thatcher was infected by snobbery. Intellectual snobbery for the non-intellectual Thatcher, the snobbery of Arts graduates about Scientists (Thatcher had a chemistry degree from Oxford), the snobbery of the metropolis about the provincial (Thatcher was from Lincolnshire), and the snobbery of men about career women.

In higher education, Thatcherite ideas were overwhelmingly rejected by universities and dons. In a public display of disapproval, Oxford University in 1985 refused to award Mrs Thatcher an honorary degree, hitherto an almost automatic award to a graduate of Oxford who had become Prime Minister.



Spitting Image puppet of Margaret Thatcher: the hit political satire TV show of the 1980s and 1990s


The Thatcherite view that the universities could, and should, raise more of their own finance escaped the thinking of many dons. The added advantage that independence from state control gives higher education more freedom, fewer regulations and edicts from the Secretary of State, and greater academic variety, was rarely comprehended.



Thatcher’s approach revolved around:

1. a belief in Britain’s greatness and assertion of national interests.

2. a prejudice against the public sector. 3. a backing for the police and the security services in

fighting terrorism and upholding law and order. 4. a strong dislike of trade unions. 5. a general commitment to the virtues of sound money. 6. a preference for wealth creators over civil servants. 7. a support for the right of individuals to make their

own provision for education and health.

Thatcher’s approach to political issues


Nigel Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer 1983 – 89. Initially Thatcher’s ally and key exponent of her privatisation policies. However, the issue of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) led to a rift between Lawson and Thatcher which contributed to her downfall in November 1990.


Thatcher saw key political issues in terms of Britain’s past greatness, recent decline and the possibility of recovery.

Britain since the end of the First World War had experienced long-term economic decline and faced a growing Soviet threat from the 1970s onwards.

Moreover in the 1970s there were high rates of inflation, state subsidies for inefficient nationalized industries, restrictive practices of trade unions and a welfare culture that encouraged illegitimacy, the breakdown of family life and replaced incentives favouring work with encouragement for welfare dependency.

Thatcher’s approach


The Thatcher governments advocated policies to encourage enterprise. Taxes were cut with the top rate reduced from 83% to 40% and the basic rate from 33% to 25%.

The most obvious measure of a nation’s economic performance is the growth of its GDP. Here Mrs Thatcher’s achievement is not in doubt. Whereas GDP grew by less than 1% between 1973 and 1979, it grew by 2.25% in the 1980s. And in the other OECD nations in the 1980s, there was no marked improvement upon their low GDP growth rates of the 1970s.

Thatcher’s response to Britain’s relative decline


Sir Geoffrey Howe, Chancellor 1979 – 83; Foreign Secretary 1983 – 89; Leader of the House of Commons 1989 – 90. A key ally of Thatcher when he served as chancellor, pursuing the liberalisation of the economy and control of inflation by tight monetary policy.


The growth in productivity was the key element in Britain’s improved GDP growth in the 1980s under the Thatcher governments. During the Thatcher years British productivity saw both absolute and relative improvement.

Britain’s productivity performance was transformed during the Thatcher years. Britain leaped from 12th place between 1960 – 73 to 5th place in 1979 – 94 in the league of OECD nations.

Growth in productivity


The Thatcher governments altered the terms of the economic debate. Post-war corporatism was ended and Britain was transformed to a neo-liberal, free enterprise economy similar to the United States.

Free enterprise does not guarantee continuing prosperity; but it does permit it, whereas the alternatives do not.

Free enterprise does not end the business cycle of boom and bust. Thatcher realised that government has a limited role to play to provide a framework in which free enterprise can flourish.

Transformation to a neo-liberal, free enterprise economy


Live Aid, 1985: George Michael, Bob Geldof, Bono et al perform at Wembley Stadium. The nation’s values did not fundamentally change under Thatcher’s premiership.


Thatcher’s economic philosophy was based on free enterprise and a minimum role for government in the workings of the economy. It ended the relative decline of Britain and led her to leap to 5th place in the OECD league table of GDP.

Attitudes were developed in favour of free enterprise and against corporatism and the ideas of a state-controlled command economy. Britain’s prospects were transformed and her influence in the world restored.

Thatcher’s single-minded approach to Britain’s relative decline


‘It’s the fake femininity I can’t stand, and the counterfeit voice. The way she boasts about her dad the grocer and what he taught her, but you know she would change it all if she could, and be born to rich people.

It’s the way she loves the rich, the way she worships them. It’s her philistinism, her ignorance, and the way she revels in her ignorance. It’s her lack of pity. Why does she need an eye operation? Is it because she can’t cry?’

‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher’ by Hilary Mantel (fiction, published 2014)


Unemployed benefit claimants. Mass unemployment (over one million unemployed people) returned to Britain under Thatcher and has never disappeared. During Thatcher’s premiership unemployment rose to over 3 million between 1979 and 1986.


Unemployment did rise to over three million between 1979 and 1986 but then steadily declined due to the Lawson boom of 1982 – 89. The Thatcher Governments did fear the electoral impact of rising unemployment but ended the Keynesian policies of artificially increasing aggregate demand.

Instead the Thatcher Governments embarked upon labour-market reforms, business deregulation and the encouragement of incentives to work.

Adult unemployment fell for 44 consecutive months from 1986 until April 1990 when it reached a low of 1.6 million, roughly half its mid-1980s peak.

Unemployment


Guildford, Surrey: the heart of Tory England. A North-South divide opened up in the 1980s and has never been rectified.


Britain in the 1980s moved from a manufacturing, industrial economy to a services, knowledge economy in line with world economic trends.

During the 1980s employment in professional and scientific services (mostly education and health) increased by half a million, followed by miscellaneous services (sport and leisure, restaurants, clubs and pubs, as well as computer-based services) and insurance, banking, finance and business services.

Restructuring of the UK economy


Privatisation (denationalisation) was central to Thatcherism. The rolling back of the State and encouragement of the free market were encapsulated in the privatisation programmes of the Thatcher Governments.

40% of the industries nationalised in the corporatist era of 1945 – 79 were privatised. Bus and coach routes were de-regulated, local government services were contracted out to private firms, private pensions, health care and education flourished and professional restrictive practices, such as the solicitors’ conveyancing monopoly, were eroded.

Privatisation


The selling of British Gas shares advert of 1986 to promote widespread share ownership amongst the population


The first large nationalised industry to be privatised was British Telecom in 1984 and it was a huge success, not just through the take-up of shares but through the access the business gained to private capital with which to invest in rapidly advancing technology.

BT’s customers also gained in terms of price and service.

The next major privatisation was that of British Gas in 1986. However, the sale of British Gas didn’t promote competition or much improved efficiency. It did liberate the taxpayer from subsidising nationalised industry.

Privatisation


When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, much of the economy, and almost all its infrastructure, was in state hands.

For traditional socialists, state hands meant ‘the people’s hands’. For traditional Tories, state hands meant ‘in British hands’.

For Thatcher and her allies, state hands meant ‘in the hands of meddling bureaucrats and selfish, greedy trades unionists’.

Privatisation


British Airways was privatised in the 1980s as part of Thatcher’s privatisation of state-owned industries


A third of all homes were rented from the state.

The health service, most schools, the armed forces, prisons, roads, bridges and streets, water, sewers, the National Grid, power stations, the phone and postal system, gas supply, coal mines, railways, refuse collection, airports, buses, freight lorries, air traffic control, much of the car, ship, and aircraft building industries, British Airways and other industries were in state hands in 1979.

Privatisation in the 1980s


Where the money is: the City dealing rooms. Dealers buying shares in British Steel, privatised in 1988


The background to Thatcher’s privatisation revolution in the 1980s was stagflation, a sense of national failure, and a widespread feeling, spreading even to some regular Labour voters, that the unions had become too powerful, and were holding Britain back.

Labour, and Thatcher’s centrist predecessors among the Conservatives, had tried to control inflation administratively, through various deals with unions and employers to hold down wages and prices.

Thatcher’s privatisation programmes 1980s


Yuppies, 1980s: young, upwardly mobile, professionals, beneficiaries of Nigel Lawson’s boom


For Alan Walters, Thatcher’s chief economic adviser, believed a key source of inflation and the weak economy was the amount of taxpayers’ money being poured into over-manned, old-fashioned, government-owned industry.

Just as in the Soviet Union, Walters thought, Britain’s state industries concealed their subsidy-sucking inefficiency through opaque, idiosyncratic accounting techniques.

Alan Walters, chief economic adviser of Thatcher


Let the Good Times Roll: Yuppies celebrate success in Thatcher’s Britain


For Thatcher, privatisation was simply one of many weapons to use in her battle against the unions, which was, in turn, a single episode in her war to exterminate socialism.

Her great political inspiration, apart from her father, was the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 book, ‘The Road to Serfdom’.

‘The Road to Serfdom’ claims that socialism inevitably leads to communism, and that communism and Nazi-style fascism are one and the same. The tie that links Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Germany, in Hayek’s view, is the centrally planned economy.

Thatcher and privatisation


The best ever decade for fashion: the 1980s (the Thatcher decade)


Hayek was proven wrong. Across western Europe, including in Britain, socialists came and went from power, introduced a welfare state and nationalised large swathes of the economy without democracy and individual freedoms being threatened.

Private doctors kept their clinics on Harley Street, young aristocrats still went to Eton, the private shop windows of Harrods still blazed at Christmas time.

Hayek was proven wrong


The best ever decade for pop music: Duran Duran, pop band supreme in Thatcher’s decade


After Thatcher defeated the attempt by Britain’s coal miners to starve off mass redundancies and pit closures in 1984 – 85, she wrote:

‘What the strike’s defeat established was that Britain could not be made ungovernable by the Fascist Left.’

Thatcher’s ideological crusade against socialism


The best ever decade for television: ‘Miami Vice’ stars Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas


Privatisation failed to turn Britain into a nation of small shareholders. Before Thatcher came to power, almost 40% of the shares in British companies were held by individuals.

By 1981, it was less than 30%. By the time Thatcher died in 2013, it had slumped to under 12%.

Thatcher and Lawson’s vision of a shareholding democracy failed to materialise.

Privatisation failed to turn Britain into a nation of small shareholders


Calvin Klein Jeans: very popular in the Eighties, though Mrs Thatcher herself never wore them


Privatisation failed to demonstrate the case made by the privatisers that private companies are always more competent than state-owned ones – that private bosses, chasing the carrot of bonuses, will always do better than their state-employed counterparts.

Through euphemisms like ‘wealth creation’ and ‘enjoying the rewards of success’ Thatcher promoted the notion that greed on the part of a private executive elite is the chief and sufficient engine of prosperity for all.

Criticism of privatisation


Wide shoulder-pads were ‘in’ in the Eighties


The ‘winner-take-all’ society created in the 1980s by the Thatcher governments has resulted in the denigration of the concept of duty and public service, according to the critics.

A squalid ideal of all work as something that shouldn’t be cared about for its own sake, but only for the money that it brings.

Denigration of the concept of duty


Madonna, Princess of Pop in the Eighties


Privatisation failed to make firms compete or give customers more choice.

Water companies were already a monopoly before privatisation and remained so afterwards since they had nobody to compete with and couldn’t offer customers a choice.

And the privatisation of electricity showed how privatisation failed to empower individuals as it was supposed to. It failed to provide customers with information with even less comprehensible pricing systems after privatisation.

Critics of Privatisation


Margaret Thatcher’s greatest impact as Prime Minister was upon Britain’s international standing.

Partly this reflected the transformation of Britain’s economy and improved GDP growth relative to other nations, but it also reflected Thatcher’s willingness to use and develop British military power, and to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with President Reagan to defeat Soviet Communism.

Britain’s standing in the world


Shopping at Selfridges, Oxford Street: the triumph of the consumer culture in Thatcher’s Britain


Victory in the Falklands War in June 1982 transformed the political fortunes of Margaret Thatcher. She knew after the Falklands victory how to cope with war which she saw, as many do, as the supreme test of statesmanship.

Her domestic and international standing soared. She was no longer a housewife, she was a warrior. And the Falklands victory meant that Britain was once again a power to be reckoned with.

Victory in the Falklands War, 1982


Yet Thatcher did not let the Falklands War victory go to her head. For example, she knew Britain still had to negotiate with China over the future of Hong Kong, on very much Chinese terms.

Also she never thought she could go it alone in international affairs without the help, support and alliance of the United States. The realities of global power politics had not been changed by the Falklands War victory.

Falklands War victory, June 1982


Britannia reborn: Mrs Thatcher visits the triumphant troops following the Falklands War victory, 1982


President Reagan piled on the pressure with the continued superpower confrontation with the USSR. Reagan knew that the USSR, because of its weak economy, could not increase its military spending, but that America could double its military output with ease.

While Thatcher believed that the Soviet Empire would ultimately collapse because communism was fundamentally unworkable, she did not share Reagan’s view of its current weakness.

Superpower confrontation


Thatcher acted as Reagan’s constant supporter and provided him with mainly good advice in dealing with the Soviet Union. She was also a good personal friend for President Reagan.

Reagan saw Thatcher as an ideological soul-mate in their joint battle against socialism and communism. This gave Thatcher special access, and at times influence, with the President.

Thatcher the Cold War warrior


President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher, Camp David, 1984: ideological soulmates and allies in the Cold War against the Soviet Union


The most serious domestic crisis of Thatcher’s premiership until her eventual downfall in November 1990, was over a disagreement concerning the Westland Helicopter Company. Westland was the only British company to produce helicopters but was in danger of going into receivership (bankruptcy) in 1985.

When Michael Heseltine (Defence Secretary) learned that the Westland Board of Directors was looking favourably upon a rescue package by the American firm, Sikorsky, he declared that it would be better to have a European rescue.

The Westland Affair, 1985 - 86


Thatcher, however, backed the view of Leon Brittan (Trade and Industry Secretary), that it was a matter for the Westland Board and did not require government interference.

Heseltine, both a pro-European and an interventionist, had different ideas. He personally built up a European rescue package. He clearly went against the government’s policy of non-interference, turning the issue into a full blown political crisis.

The Westland Affair 1985 - 86


Michael Heseltine, Defence Secretary, stormed out of the Cabinet meeting which discussed the future of the Westland helicopters company, 9th January 1986


Since Heseltine had gone against government policy, his position eventually became untenable and he resigned from the Cabinet in January 1986.

Heseltine was a hugely ambitious politician. When he was an Oxford student, he had written out a career plan aiming to become an M.P., then a senior Cabinet Minister, and eventually Prime Minister.

Heseltine resigns from the Cabinet


Heseltine bid his time on the backbenches after his resignation in 1986 and four years later played a major part in Thatcher’s downfall since he stood against her for the party leadership.

He secured enough votes on the first ballot for the leadership to force a second ballot to be held and at this point the Cabinet advised Thatcher to stand down since a majority of the Cabinet no longer supported her, thinking that Thatcher had become an electoral liability and that she would therefore lead the Conservative Party to defeat at the next General Election.

Heseltine’s part in Thatcher’s downfall, November 1990


Thatcher aimed to liberate the market to preserve a social order (that of private sector company owners and managers) since this had been threatened by too much government in the 1960s and 1970s.

Thatcher wished to sustain a highly traditional order, one in which trade unions knew their place, two-parent families were the norm and loyalty to the monarch was unquestioned.

Thatcher’s aim: to preserve a social order


Thatcher’s rhetoric made a strong appeal to well-off manual workers and reinforced support within the expanding middle-class.

Thus the Conservatives re-adjusted to their previous ideas in favour of individual freedom and private enterprise.

Thatcher’s appeal for ‘Middle England’


Neil Kinnock, Leader of the Opposition, 1983 to 1992


For Labour adjusting to the new individualism and free market economy of the 1980s and 1990s was more difficult than it was for the Conservatives.

Much of the post-war settlement had been dictated by the party’s assumptions about state intervention.

For the 1974 – 79 Labour Government it was a painful time since they were forced by international currency speculators to curtail public spending and allow unemployment to rise.

Labour’s difficulties in the 1980s


Power within Labour fell into the hands of activists following Labour’s defeat in the 1979 General Election, who accused their leaders of betraying ‘socialism’.

The left-wing activists created an alternative economic strategy including more nationalization, enhanced regulation and higher taxes. Labour’s appalling performance in the 1983 election demonstrated the unpopularity of these policies.

Labour’s troubles in 1980s


Margaret Thatcher celebrates her third successive General Election victory


After defeat in 1987, Labour leader Neil Kinnock was determined to adapt his party to the new economic climate of neo-liberalism. Through a wide-ranging policy review, Kinnock argued that Labour had to embrace low inflation as government’s immediate goal.

Kinnock also recognized that taxing and spending had to remain at ‘prudent’ levels.

Labour’s defeat in 1987


After the policy review, Labour’s economic policy proceeded from the assumption that, while the state had an important role, it was ‘not to replace the market but to ensure that markets work properly’.

By the 1992 election, Kinnock’s left-wing critics wondered there was between Labour and the Conservatives.

Labour’s acceptance of the free market


However, Labour in the 1990s and since still gives the state a more significant and influential role than the Conservatives.

Moreover, Labour’s object remained that of furthering equality, and still does. This was renamed ‘social justice’, so as not to frighten middle-class voters.

Labour still gives the state a significant role


Tony Blair’s leadership of the Labour Party (1994 to 2007), signified, many thought, Labour’s abject surrender to Thatcherism.

However, new Labour was ‘older’ than Blair wanted to admit and while a ‘dynamic economy’ was desirable, it would have to be one ‘serving the pubic interest, in which the enterprise of the market was joined with the forces of partnership and co-operation’.

Labour’s adjustment to Thatcherism


Mrs Thatcher’s ultimate triumph: New Labour, elected in a landslide in 1997. The Labour Party had to adopt and digest the sea-change marked by Thatcherism and become acceptable to Middle England in order to get elected for the first time since October 1974.


Tony Blair, prime minister from 1997 to 2007, very much accepted the Thatcher settlement, the doctrine of free-market capitalism.

Thatcher declared that her aim was to destroy socialism in Britain and she succeeded. However, the Conservative Party existed to oppose socialism and indeed social democracy.

So Thatcher removed the chief reason for the existence of the Conservative Party, its opposition to socialism and social democracy.

Tony Blair: an American neo-conservative


Peter Mandelson, architect of New Labour, along with Blair and Gordon Brown. Mandelson contributed to Labour’s acceptance of the market and of an economy led by private enterprise.


By identifying New Labour with the market, Tony Blair was able to deprive the Conservatives of the threat that had defined Labour for generations.

As a result, the Conservatives were mired in confusion for nearly a decade.

Blair embraced without question the neo-liberal belief that only one economic system (capitalism) can deliver prosperity in a late modern context.

Tony Blair: American neo-conservative


Cool Britannia: Tony Blair’s Britain had economic prosperity and the best girl pop group of all-time, the immortal Spice Girls.


Blair’s One Nation Toryism was a political marketing tool.

He attacked his own party as much as the Conservatives. He pressured Labour into acceptance of the market.

Blair carried on the agenda of privatisation that had developed from Thatcher’s original programme into core areas of the state such as the justice system and prison service, and inserted market mechanisms into the NHS and education.

Blair’s One Nation Toryism


Tony Blair meets Noel Gallagher in Downing Street signifying the new style of government under New Labour. Pop stars, actors and fashion designers were invited to the ‘Cool Britannia’ party after 18 years of Conservative rule ended with Blair’s landslide election victory in May 1997.


Blair consolidated Thatcherism, continuing the marketisation of British society and institutions but he did not change Britain as much as Thatcher had.

Blair’s main impact was on his own party. New Labour was constructed to bury the past history of the party. It had few links to the political tradition of Labour from Keir Hardie, Clement Attlee to Harold Wilson.

Blair consolidated Thatcherism


Gordon Brown, New Labour’s chancellor of the exchequer, 1997 to 2007


Neo-conservatives such as Tony Blair realised that capitalism is a revolutionary force that overturns established social structures but also recognised that state power and military force are needed to expedite the process.

In international relations neo-conservatism shaped Blair most deeply. He will be remembered for taking Britain into the ruinous war in Iraq and his part in this destroyed him as a politician.

Blair as a neo-conservative and the ruinous war in Iraq


The Iraq War, 2003. Blair was insistent that Britain had to give the United States full support.


Blair broadcasted from Downing Street on the night of September 11th, following the Islamic terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

“This mass terrorism is the new evil in our world. The people who perpetrate it have no regard whatever for the sanctity or value of human life, and we the democracies of the world must come together to defeat it and eradicate it. This is not a battle between the United States of America and terrorism, but between the free and democratic world and terrorism.

We, therefore, here in Britain stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends in this hour of tragedy, and we, like them, will not rest until this evil is driven from our world.”

9/11: the root of Blair’s intervention in Iraq


September 11th, 2001. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, New York City, are attacked by the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda. Over 3,000 people are killed.


Blair’s ‘shoulder to shoulder’ broadcast from Downing Street following 9/11 was defined in his memoirs ‘Tony Blair: a Journey’ (2010) as follows:

‘I took this view for reasons both of principle and of national interest. As a matter of principle, I was sure that we should see the atrocity as an attack not on the U.S. per se, but because the U.S. was the leader of the free world, it was therefore an attack on us too.

It was also in our national interest to defeat this menace and if we wanted to play a major part in shaping the conduct of any war, we had to be there at the outset with a clear and unequivocal demonstration of support.

Blair’s rationale for supporting America


‘I believed in the alliance with America, I thought its maintenance and enhancement a core objective of British policy, and I knew that alliances are only truly fashioned at times of challenge, not in times of comfort.’

(Tony Blair: a Journey, published 2010)

Blair’s rationale for supporting America


Tony Blair speaking at the U.S. Congress commits Britain to America’s war on terror.


After 9/11, Washington was going to ‘re-order’ the world on western terms by a combination of military power and the on-going westernising process of globalisation.

However, in Britain the public remained hostile to the prospect of an Iraqi invasion. The British public could simply not understand why Blair had sided with President Bush and joined in the fateful 2003 invasion.

Washington ‘re-ordering’ of the world after 9/11


Tony Blair with President George W. Bush shortly after 9/11


All the opinion polls at the time (2003) showed decisive majorities against the invasion, an opposition made manifest by a massive march and rally in central London.

The main European partners, France and Germany, were against the Iraqi invasion, the intelligence was not clear-cut; and the UN could not be squared. The UN did not support the invasion and hence the U.S. and U.K. violated international law.

Majority of British public against the Iraq War


Anti-Iraq war protests, London, 2003


Blair nailed his colours, and his legacy, to the mast of a conservative Christian Evangelical Republican President, George W. Bush.

Former Conservative Cabinet Minister Chris Patten wrote: ‘history will judge Blair as a defender of Bush’s agenda above Britain’s’.

Blair had taken the ‘special relationship’ to a new level.

Blair and Bush


British Royal Marines, invasion of Iraq, March 2003.


Following the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, for the first time since the imperial days of the British Empire, British troops took over the military occupation of Arab lands, in the south of Iraq around Basra.

To the late 20th century British mind the very idea of British troops occupying a heartland Arab nation after having toppled its government would have seemed an act of blatant imperialism and wildly far-fetched.

British imperial adventures restored under Blair


Once Washington had made up its mind to go to war against Iraq in March 2003, the British Prime Minister – any British Prime Minister – had no alternative but to support the President of the United States.

In sum, Britain’s ‘special relationship’ demanded it; and when an American President goes to war, and asks for Britain’s support, such support is normally given.

Washington calls the shots


The centre of world political power: the Oval Office, the White House, Washington D.C. Blair had no choice but to support President Bush during the Iraq War, at least in a diplomatic if not military sense.


Over the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the major continental powers, France and Germany, not only opposed Washington, they campaigned against it in the United Nations.

Blair was forced to choose between America and Europe. But for Blair it was not a difficult or agonising choice. From Downing Street, the western geo-political power correlation looked clear. Washington was still the stronger of the two western contestants.

But the continental European powers opposed Washington


British prime minister Tony Blair with President George W. Bush shortly after 9/11.


President Bush was adamant and committed, and would go to war with Iraq anyway.

And the Franco-German security core was in its infancy.

It has been argued that Blair believed that what happened in the U.S. defined the limits of the possible for Britain. Accordingly it was simply ‘impossible’ not to support the United States.

Britain is, in fact, subordinate to the United States in world politics.


President Bush with British prime minister Tony Blair at Camp David


It was difficult for Tony Blair, and is for any British prime minister, to sell the raw fact of subordination to the United States to the British public.

At the time of the Suez Canal Crisis, 1956, Sir Pierson Dixon, Britain’s UN Ambassador, argued: ‘if we cannot entirely change American policy, then we must, it seems to me, resign ourselves to a role as counselor and moderator’.

Britain is, in fact, subordinate to America in world politics


American power: aircraft carriers and military bases around the world.

making of modern uk margaret thatchers governments and new labour

Documents