Margaret Thatcher's Revolution of 1979? (book review)
short, the 1980s represented a defeat of the old Labour Party and the post-war consensus much more than a victory for Thatcher or Thatcherism. Despite titling his book "Mrs. Thatcher’s Revolution," Jenkins argues that it was anything but.
In closing, the question of how much credit to give Margaret Thatcher and her Government for the significant changes that occurred within British society and politics after 1979 will undoubtedly continue to be debated for many years to come. Unfortunately, until both the official government papers of the Thatcher Government start becoming available in 2009 and the Tony Blair Government leaves office, we will not really know whether a new Thatcherite consensus has been formed in place of the older one or not. Such is one of the perennial dangers of doing contemporary history.
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),
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