‘What Kind of Vision is That?’ British Public Attitudes Towards the European Community During the Thatcher Era

Abstract

Margaret Thatcher's dominance of British politics during the 1980s is well known. A self-proclaimed ‘conviction politician’, she was likely to seize any opportunity to shape the public's values. Surprisingly, however, her efforts seem to have been ineffective. Ivor Crewe has labelled Thatcher's attempt to modify the public's beliefs ‘the crusade that failed’. He concluded that ‘much of Thatcherism will die with Thatcher. Its permanent legacy at the level of the mass public will be very limited.’ So unexpected is this finding that it invites further investigation. Did Crewe find little evidence of Thatcher's impact simply because of the generality of his analysis? Might a more sharply focused study, one dealing with the delimited area of public policy, reach a different conclusion?Ivor Crewe, ‘Values: The Crusade that Failed’, in Dennis Kavanagh and Anthony Seldon, eds, The Thatcher Effect: A Decade of Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 250. See also Ivor Crewe, ‘The Thatcher Legacy’, in Anthony King et al., Britain at the Polls 1992 (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, 1993), pp. 1–28, especially pp. 8–11.