History Taster Lecture

The Crisis of the Conservative Party and the Birth of Thatcherism

In 1979, the Conservative Party in Britain led by Margaret Thatcher won an emphatic election victory after a wave of trade union strikes, commonly known as the ‘Winter of Discontent’, paralysed the country and helped to keep the Labour Party out of power until 1997. In retrospect, it is often assumed that the Conservatives’ electoral success and the free market policies that Margaret Thatcher’s government initiated were all but inevitable. But in the mid-1970s it all looked very different. The Conservative Party, demoralized after losing four elections out of five, worried that the electorate was becoming increasingly ‘proletarianized’ and that its new leader was ineffective, too associated with the south of England, too middle-class, and just too drearily earnest to win. This talk examines how the Conservative Party and conservative intellectuals responded – highlighting the development of policies that were enacted in the 1980s, but also those that were floated but not pursued.