Making Britain Work Again: Unemployment and the Remaking of British Social Policy in the Eighties

Abstract

Abstract Faced with persistently high unemployment in the first half of the 1980s, the Conservative government fundamentally recast the social policies directed at those who were out of work. Rather than regarding them as victims of economic problems beyond their control, Thatcher and her allies came to view the unemployed themselves as an economic problem because they allegedly lacked sufficient motivation to take up paid employment. In response, the government implemented measures that required the unemployed to play a more active role in changing their employment status. In particular, it designed new disciplinarian welfare regulations to force the unemployed onto the labour market irrespective of the incomes that available positions offered. Drawing on the national press, memoirs, parliamentary debates and official archival records, this article explores the motivations behind the gradual implementation of changes in social policy that redefined the social citizenship of millions of Britons by exposing those out work to market mechanisms. In addition to espousing market rationales, Thatcher pursued a culturally conservative project of moral reform that aimed to reinvigorate the virtues of hard work, thrift, and self-dependence. This neoliberal welfare regime had significant material consequences because it intentionally promoted low-wage labour, thereby stoking rising social inequality in Britain in the Eighties.