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Margaret Thatcher's Revolution of 1979? (book review) - Page 4

© Joseph Sramek

Nevertheless, when assessing these four very incomplete, tentative analyses, I found Peter Jenkins to be the most convincing and Hugo Young to be the weakest. While Jenkins presents a clear, cogently argued thesis that largely seems to be correct from the vantage-point of 1999, Young contradicts himself completely. While Thatcher is to be credited with causing much fundamental change in British society, these changes were undermined by her successors. This statement is non-sensical; how can something be a fundamental change if it is not upheld by a succeeding administration? Likewise Biddess’ assertion that Thatcher "won" the 1983 general election on her ideas and policies, but that this should not be construed as a victory for "Thatcherism" seems equally as absurd. Finally, while Harris is quite consistent in his almost hagiographic account of Thatcher, his seeming failure to critique her on any fundamental level was quite disappointing.

In closing, I would finally say that I suspect that these faults will be remedied by a new generation of scholars in a couple of decades, when the archives open up and the Labour Government of Tony Blair is as much recent history as the Thatcher Government is to us nowadays. There just is not enough proper distance yet to properly determine Thatcher’s role in the "revolution of 1979."

Footnotes:

[1] Kenneth Harris, Thatcher, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), p. 216.

[2] Hugo Young, One of Us: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher, (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 624.

[3] Kenneth Minogue and Michael Biddess, eds., Thatcherism: Personality and Politics, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), p. 6.

[4] Ibid., p. 11.

[5] Peter Clarke, Hope and Glory, (New York: Penguin, 1997), pp. 408-10.

[6] Minogue, p. 11.

[7] Harris, p. 2.

[8] Ibid., p. 4.

[9] Ibid., p. 3.

[10] Ibid., p. 110.

[11] Ibid., p. 121.

[12] Ibid., p. 214.

[13] Ibid., pp. 215-6.

[14] Young, pp. 598-9.

[15] Ibid., pp. 621-2.

[16] Ibid., p. 506.

[17] The Winter of Discontent took place in 1978-1979, when several strikes, all relatively minor but annoying to the populace, such as one involving garbage collection, helped to bring down the James Callaghan Labour Government and forced early elections which Thatcher and her Conservative Party won.

[18] Peter Jenkins, Mrs. Thatcher’s Revolution: The Ending of the Socialist Era, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 28.

[19] Ibid., p. 89.

[20] Ibid., p. 166.

[21] Ibid., p. 335.

[22] Ibid.

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