THE NEW RIGHT (NEOLIBERALISM)
The eleven years when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister (1979-90) represented such a change in British political and economic life that they can be described as a `revolution from above'. They were a two-pronged attempt to reverse Britain's decline, first through an appeal to a glorious past and secondly through a huge influx of `new money' or progressive capital which was to vitalise the economy through the private sector. The attempt was not successful, but it was a measure of the clear purpose of the Prime Minister in her three periods of government that the experiment lasted for so long.
In 1979, Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister with 43% of the popular vote. The daughter of a shopkeeper, she was not only the first woman Prime Minister but the first science graduate to reach that position. She is also a trained lawyer married to a millionaire businessman who funded her early years in politics. She has brought to British politics a strong ideological stance and an unwillingness to compromise. She has purged her Cabinet of the traditional Upper class Tory in favour of new pragmatic conservatives - and earned herself many enemies within the party as a result. Since then, fundamental changes have been taking place in British political, economic and social life. They are not a simple result of "Thatcherism", but she has become the clearest representative of these new values. Basically they represent a radical turn away from the consensus politics and mixed economy of the postwar era towards a modernised version of Victorian liberalism.
In economic terms, this meant in the early years a strong commitment to monetarism:
- strict control of the money supply.
- emphasis on controlling inflation rather than unemployment.
- an end to the use of public spending as a means of controlling the economy (the traditional Keynesian solution).
- no minimum wage.
Although purely monetarist policies were soon abandoned, these principles are still followed. In practice this has meant a strong commitment to privatisation of the public sector, ranging from some of the largest share issues ever floated on the Stock Market (British Petroleum and British Telecom) to services like school meals and rubbish collection. The process has helped to conceal the extent of Britain's economic decline, but it has been compared by a former Conservative Prime Minister to `selling the family silver'. In addition, private companies have been encouraged to compete with the remaining state enterprises like the Post Office, and hospitals and schools became self-governing. This transformation has brought great changes. Economically, the decline of manufacturing industry has increased in favour of high technology, service and `leisure' industries, with their high turnover of staff (often part-time and low paid), frequent bankruptcies and reliance on foreign capital and expertise.
This has brought unprecedented social unrest. Not only has the conflict in Northern Ireland - an area of particularly high unemployment - intensified, but the mainland too has seen violence in almost every area of life (the inner cities, the miners’ struggles, and of course, football hooliganism). Moreover, the encouragement of patriotism to the point where it becomes open racism has led to such different international episodes as the Falklands War and the deathsof 39 Italian football fans at the Heysel stadium in 1986. The nineteenth century aspect of this is evident when one compares the words of the novelist Frederick Marryat in 1839, "Everyone knows that one Englishman is worth three Frenchmen", with those of The Sun newspaper in August 1984: "One hundred Argentinians are not worth the life of one British soldier". Margaret Thatcher has emphasised her own debt to the Victorians, although the ideas owe more to seventeenth century Puritanism: "I was brought up to work jolly hard. We were taught to live within our income, that cleanliness is next to godliness. You were taught self-respect. You were taught tremendous pride in your country. All those are Victorian values" (April, 1983).
This nostalgia has been combined with a broad attack on `liberal' (or libertarian) changes in society such as an end to media and cultural censorship, the legalisation of homosexuality and abortion, the ending of the death penalty, and the idea that society and the individual live in symbiosis: "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families” (Margaret Thatcher, 1987).
The chief achievement of Thatcherism was to maintain both a particular view of the modern world (the ideology of get-rich-quick, look after Number One, get the state off my back, let’s stop drooling about the poor, etc.) and the defence and upholding of traditional values (patriotism, the family, law and order). Although under attack from the beginning even from within her own party (the so-called `wets'), it succeeded for so long because of a number of factors:
- a favourable international climate.
- the once-only windfall of profits from North Sea oil and the privatisation of the nationalised industries.
- the lack of a credible political alternative.
- the fact that the 'losers' (the unemployed, workers in manufacturing industry, public service employees and welfare state dependents) have not yet been able to organise themselves into an effective opposition.
- the political system: the voting system, and the greatly increased power of the Prime Minister, make it possible to govern Britain with 43% of the popular vote.
The years since Margaret Thatcher's resignation in 1990 have brought changes in political style, but have not basically diverged from her basic line. The restructuring of the economy, now conventionally described as `leaner but fitter', has not produced the hoped-for economic boom. Business failures have become so general that even national financial institutions like Lloyd's of London are in difficulties. Inflation is low, but interest rates and unemployment have remained high for so long that they have undermined the consumer patterns of extensive debts and high spending that have prevailed since the 1950s. The Stock Exchange has lost its jobbers and brokers, now replaced by money dealers and computer terminals. The market for Britain's goods has changed: half her exports now go to the European Community and only a quarter to her traditional trading partner, the Commonwealth.
In international trade, neoliberalism, through the World Bank and the IMF, demanded that Third World countries implement SAPs (Structural Adjustment Programmes), involving privatisation, cuts in public spending, increases in the export of cash crops and raw materials, and absolute loyalty to the priciples of 'free' markets and 'free' trade (e. g. no cartels).