Introduction

Summary

People with other faiths and cultures have always been welcomed in this land, assured of equality under the law, of proper respect and of open friends. There is absolutely nothing incompatible between this and our desire to maintain the essence of our own identity.

Margaret Thatcher, address to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 22 May 1988

AIDS starts with and comes mainly from homosexuals [and] spreads to others.

Dame Jill Knight, House of Commons, 8 May 1987

Every political era is remembered in terms of its defining myth, and Thatcherism is no exception. Both leftist critics and right-wing supporters tend to agree that Thatcherism made its mark in British history in terms of its economic policies. They point to the fact that both the Labour and Conservative Parties had more or less accepted a Keynesian approach to managing the economy in the post-war period. The mixed-economy model which juxtaposed private enterprise with the public ownership of key industries and welfare state programmes became the dominant framework for political debates and policy initiatives. Private capital and the labour movement were brought together in various capital-labour-state social contracts which secured labour discipline in exchange for a stable economy and full employment. There were of course some deviations from the pure consensus approach in actual government policies. After Labour experimented unsuccessfully with National Plans in the 1960s, the Conservatives made various ‘U-turns’ between free market and managed economy policies between 1970 and 1974.