There is a particular kind of intellectual honesty required to acknowledge that your opponents have won — not just an election, but an argument. It is the kind of honesty that the British left has been reluctant to apply to the legacy of Margaret Thatcher, and the reluctance is understandable. The Thatcher years were, for many people, a period of genuine hardship: communities hollowed out, industries dismantled, a social contract rewritten in ways that were experienced as a kind of violence.
And yet. The framework within which British politics operates today — the assumptions about the proper role of the state, the relationship between taxation and growth, the primacy of market mechanisms in allocating resources — is, in its essentials, the framework that Thatcher and her allies constructed between 1979 and 1990. Subsequent governments, including Labour governments, have operated within it. They have adjusted its parameters, softened some of its edges, occasionally pushed back against specific applications. They have not dismantled it.
This is not a novel observation. It has been made many times, by commentators across the political spectrum. What is perhaps less often noted is the degree to which this framework has survived not merely as a set of policies but as a set of instincts — a way of thinking about economic questions that has become so embedded in the culture of British institutions that it no longer presents itself as ideological. It presents itself as common sense.
The privatisation of public utilities is the clearest example. When the water companies were sold off in 1989, the decision was contested. Today, the debate is not about whether utilities should be privately owned but about how to regulate private owners more effectively. The question has shifted. The terms of the debate have been set by the answer that was given in 1989, and the answer has become the baseline.
Housing is another. The right to buy, introduced in 1980, transformed the social landscape of British cities. It also transformed the political landscape: a generation of working-class homeowners became, in significant numbers, Conservative voters. The policy's long-term consequences — the depletion of social housing stock, the rise of a private rental sector that has become increasingly unaffordable — were not foreseen, or were foreseen and discounted. But the political logic was sound, and its effects persist.
None of this is to say that Thatcherism was right, or that its consequences were uniformly beneficial. The evidence on inequality, on regional divergence, on the long-term effects of deindustrialisation, suggests otherwise. It is to say that understanding contemporary British politics requires understanding the degree to which the arguments of 1979 remain, in important ways, unresolved.