New Labour and Thatcherism: Political Change in Britain

New Labour and Thatcherism: Political Change in Britain argues that any critical analysis of New Labour must take into account the profound influence exerted on contemporary British politics by the politics of Thatcherism. In defining Thatcherism as a multidimensional political, ideological and economic project, the author argues that, subject to the interplay of opportunity and circumstance, chance and fortune, ambition and achievement, success and failure, the Thatcher and Major governments of 1979-97 did pursue and largely enact a coherent political agenda. In consequence, the much remarked transformation of the Labour Party in recent years reflects extensive political and public policy changes that were gradually enacted in the 1980s and 1990s. Informed by its ideological doctrine, constrained by the dictates of statecraft and responsive to political realities and electoral pressures, Thatcherism as an agent of political change helped promote a dramatic shift in British politics in favour of right-reformist neo-liberal politics at the expense of left-reformist social-democratic politics, so helping recast the political environment in which New Labour is situated. This book is about Thatcherism and its contribution to the party Labour had become when it returned to government in 1997, after eighteen years of opposition. It explains why the socio-economic programme of the Blair government is structured within a neo-liberal paradigm and explores how, in rejecting its collectivist, Old Labour, past, New Labour has moved dramatically away from its social- democratic traditions.