Margaret Thatcher, the Thatcherite intellectuals and the fate of Keynes

John Trumpbour

Industrial Relations Journal, 2014, vol. 45, issue 3, 250-265

Abstract: In the early 1970s, major political leaders of the centre-right such as Richard M. Nixon proudly declared their allegiance to the Keynesian consensus and the welfare state. By the mid-1970s, this consensus unravelled so rapidly that even the leader of Britain's Labour Party came to regard Keynesian medicine as ineffectual. Seeking to demolish several foundations of the Keynesian welfare state, Thatcherism soon attracted economists and policy pundits eager to defend its achievements, including in North America at such bygone hotbeds of Keynesianism as Harvard University. This essay seeks to probe cherished mythologies of Thatcherism that she restored Britain's economic dynamism, streamlined government and revived plucky entrepreneurship. Her intellectual admirers have largely averted their eyes from law-and-order repression and the rewards delivered to politically connected insiders, most dramatically those policies unleashing finance capitalists and extending the tentacles of the Murdoch media empire.

Date: 2014
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