'What Did Margaret Thatcher Do?': A Survey of the Thatcher Prime Ministership's Economic and Social Policies

Abstract

'What Did Margaret Thatcher Do'?: A Survey of the Thatcher Prime Ministership's Economic and Social Policies endeavors to offer a systematic, grounded and properly contextualized, but still concise, summation of the British Prime Minister's conduct in the area of domestic economic and social life. In particular it focuses on the principles and program laid out in the Conservative Party's 1979 General Election Manifesto, and then details the Conservative government's policies when in office, concentrating on the areas of monetary and fiscal policy (including central banking and revision of the tax structure); the privatization of state assets and services (extending to the outsourcing of welfare functions, and the mandating of privatization at local government level); organized labor; the welfare state; and action regarding the manufacturing and financial sectors. The paper also considers some of the larger implications of this line of policy, not least the changes in the structure of the British economy (from the positions of manufacturing and finance, to the distribution of incokme), and the ways in which Thatcher's successors modified but also significantly forwarded this legacy.