1 - Thatcherism, the new racism and the British New Right: hegemonic imaginary or accidental mirage?

Summary

In the Introduction, I used the somewhat controversial term ‘hegemonic project’ to describe Thatcherism. I argued that the electoral success of the Conservatives under Thatcher's leadership cannot be explained entirely in terms of the failures of the previous Labour governments, or exclusively in terms of economic policies. Attention should also be given to a wide range of social, economic and cultural elements, including race and sexuality, which have emerged as nodal points in contemporary British politics. Instead of analysing Thatcherism as the mere sum of various policies, I emphasized the symbolic aspect of Thatcherite discourse. Its free market entrepreneurialism, for example, had a specifically moral dimension; its anti-statism took on a particularly anti-union, racist and homophobic character when it was applied to central government–local government relations; and its revival of nationalism was framed in terms of Britain's post-colonial condition. Instead of proposing an abstract model of British society, the Thatcherites responded directly to popular concerns – including anxieties around race and sexuality – and constructed a new and yet already partially normalized common sense. My analyses of Powellism and Section 28 discourse are therefore constructed within the post–Marxist framework of hegemony theory. Hegemony theory has of course been dismissed by several critics as theoretically inconsistent, misleading and wholly inappropriate. In this chapter, I shall clarify my own appropriation of hegemony theory through a discussion of these criticisms.