Beyond the Thatcher Decade: The Politics of ‘New’ Labour

Abstract

As is often quoted, toward the end of the 1979 election campaign, the then Labour Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, all but resigned to impending defeat, remarked to his then adviser Bernard Donoughue: ‘You know there are times, perhaps once every thirty years, there is a sea change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of. I suspect there is now such a sea change – and it is for Mrs Thatcher.’1 This much over-used and therefore somewhat well-worn quotation effectively makes a point: the advent of Thatcherite politics after 1979 did see a political sea-change, one heralded before 1979 as well as after. As a dominant force in British politics Thatcherism did make a significant contribution to changes in the ideological assumptions that inform policy choice.2