Thatcherism as Scepticism and Dogmatism

Introduction

This chapter seeks to investigate the nature of Thatcherite ideology in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s. There remains, of course, a keenly fought debate about how fundamentally Thatcherism in practice affected British society and politics. Thus, those arguing in favour of Thatcherism’s transformative effects in practice have stressed the importance in the 1980s of lowering direct taxation rates, limiting the power of trade unions, as well as the privatisation of major utilities and the selling of council houses (Evans, 1997a, pp. 24–39). By contrast, those more sceptical of Thatcherism’s practical impact have emphasised that economic growth in the Thatcher period was lower than the post-war average, that the overall tax burden did not decrease, and that aspects of the welfare state (notably the National Health Service and schools) proved difficult to reform effectively (Jackson, 2012, p. 60). However, arguably what was at least as significant about this period of Thatcherite government was its ideological self-consciousness and relative ideological consistency – regularly inspiring comparisons with the influential progressive administrations of the twentieth century, namely the New Liberal governments of 1905–14 and the post-war Labour administrations of Clement Attlee – and success in popularising its message. That this was an explicit aim was clear from Margaret Thatcher herself, who declared herself a ‘conviction politician’ during the 1979 election, and constantly sought to distil her message into slogans that were readily comprehensible and easy to consume. These included such phrases as ‘you can’t buck the market’, ‘rolling back the boundaries of the state’, and perhaps most notoriously: ‘There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families’ (Thatcher, 1987).

Interpreting Thatcherite Ideology

How then should we define Thatcherite ideology? Such a question will necessarily provoke a variety of responses, and indeed it will be one of the main points of this chapter to interrogate the tensions within Thatcherism in theory and practice. However, it seems reasonable to contend that whatever other characteristics it had, at its core Thatcherism put forward three main arguments. First, Thatcherites argued that individuals ought to have the freedom from the state to make their own choices, particularly within the market, since this would incentivise them to maximise productivity, and hence benefit the United Kingdom as a whole. As such, they argued in favour of reducing rates of direct taxation, and keeping levels of inflation low (since both of these affected individuals’ ability to use their own money), and of the importance of individuals having clear property rights – whether this related to their own houses or to the ownership of shares in the stock market (Gamble, 1994, pp. 56–59).1 Second, although a key justification for advocating greater individual freedom for Thatcherites was that it ensured greater prosperity, they were also convinced that granting greater liberty to individuals would make them more moral – by encouraging greater responsibility for themselves. Because individuals had to rely on their own resources to ensure their own security and self-development, in other words, the Thatcherites argued, they were much more likely to develop what Shirley Robin Letwin referred to as ‘the vigorous virtues’ of self-reliance, moral responsibility and independent mindedness. By contrast, the more their needs were provided without obligations by the state – as the Thatcherites argued had been the case in the social democratic post-war era before 1979 – the less likely individuals were to take care of themselves or others (Letwin, 1992, pp. 33–36). Finally, although Thatcherites stressed the worth of individual liberty and responsibility, they also tended to place considerable weight on the importance of loyalty to ‘natural’ institutions beyond the individual, particularly the family, the nation-state, and British traditions more generally – which they often felt had been undermined by the ‘permissive’ values and legislation of the 1960s. If Thatcherite ideology definitely emphasised the importance of individual freedom, therefore, this usually did not make them uncomplicated libertarians, since they balanced their advocacy of liberty with a commitment to the importance of tradition (Freeden, 1996, pp. 385–93).2

If there is a reasonable degree of agreement (within limits) about how to delineate the components of Thatcherite ideology, then there is much less about how its components fit together. Leaving aside commentators who have tried to dismiss the ideological component within Thatcherism entirely, claiming (rather unconvincingly) that Thatcherism was purely a strategy to appeal to the electorate through ‘statecraft’ (Bulpitt, 1986), or simply a reflection of Thatcher’s own instincts (Riddell, 1985, p. 7), there have been broadly three attempts at explaining the nature of Thatcherite ideology. First, some commentators have attempted to claim that Thatcherite should be labelled either a conservative or a liberal without much qualification. Thus, for example, Ewen Green maintained that Thatcherism merely represented a reconfiguration of conservative ideology in new circumstances, arguing that Thatcherism’s antecedents could be found in the policies of Conservative dominated governments of the 1930s, and in the instincts of middle-class Tory members in the 1950s and 1960s (Green, 1999, pp. 20–21, 26–30). By contrast, Ian Gilmour, probably Thatcher’s most thoroughgoing cabinet critic, criticised her for departing from the ‘One Nation’ tradition of conservatism and enacting laissez-faire liberalism in its stead, citing her harsh treatment of the poor and commitment to monetarism (Gilmour, 1992, pp. 12–16, 51, 125–26; Neill, 2023, pp. 12–14). Such designations arguably captured aspects of Thatcherism successfully but are too crude to be entirely successful definitions.

Second, other scholars, such as Colin Hay and Stephen Farrall have contended that Thatcherism should be conceptualised as an amalgamation of ‘neoliberal’ and ‘neoconservative’ aspects, where the former is primarily identified with the liberalisation of the market, and the latter with the coercive acts of the state (Hay & Farrall, 2014, p. 9). Such an analysis is more sophisticated and yields intriguing possibilities – not least the claim that the Thatcher administrations initially concentrated on liberalising the market, but subsequently pivoted to more authoritarian policies as crime rose (Farrall & Jennings, 2014, pp. 227–28). But acceding to this conception of amalgamating ‘neoliberal’ and ‘neoconservative’ instincts must be regarded as very much a last resort in comparison to more comprehensive and satisfying definitions of Thatcherite ideology. So finally, most promisingly, other scholars have attempted to analyse Thatcherism in more comprehensive terms – though it should be stressed that there remains no consensus. For Michael Freeden, Thatcherism should be conceptualised as a form of conservatism where what he sees as the core elements of conservative ideology – namely an attempt to manage change cautiously and the conviction that individual conduct is subject to ‘extra-human’ sanctions – are clearly present (Freeden, 1996, pp. 386–88). For others, such as Hugh Pemberton, Aled Davies and James Freeman, it makes more sense to conceptualise Thatcherism as a form of neoliberalism – though, as they stress, that designation fails to resolve internal tensions within the programme of market liberalisation, not least as to whether Thatcherism was designed to produce enterprising risk-taking entrepreneurs, or careful thrifty savers (Davies et al., 2018).

In view of this lack of consensus over how to conceptualise Thatcherism, here I suggest an alternative approach. Rather than attempting to adjudicate between the claims of conservatism and liberalism in conceptualising Thatcherism, my argument here is that the best way of understanding the tensions within Thatcherite ideology is to see it as an unstable mixture of scepticism and dogmatism. What really captures the essence of Thatcherism, in other words, is identifying the tension in the ideology between relying on arguments that stress the difficulty of knowing how individuals behave, on the one hand, and those that assert, dogmatically, that only particular types of behaviour are possible or legitimate, on the other. In some cases, Thatcherite ideology argues in favour of freedom from the state on the basis that it is extremely difficult to identify what motivates individuals; in others, it forcibly argues that only certain kinds of conduct are legitimate. To explore this in detail, I will first analyse the sceptical influences on Thatcherism, notably those of Friedrich Hayek and Michael Oakeshott, before outlining its more dogmatic aspects, particularly in practice. Such tensions led, during the course of the 1980s, to important contradictions in the Thatcherite programme, which thinkers on the Right sought to respond to and resolve. For reasons of space, I cannot tackle all the possible responses here, but will examine some of the most important and influential, namely those of John Gray, Peter Hitchens, and Shirley Robin Letwin.

Sceptical Influences on Thatcherism: Friedrich Hayek and Michael Oakeshott

First, then, let us examine the arguments of one of Thatcher’s most important intellectual inspirers, namely Friedrich Hayek.3 Famous for writing The Road to Serfdom, a diatribe against central planning – a treatise Thatcher herself labelled as ‘the most powerful critique of socialist planning and the socialist state’ – Hayek developed this argument in more sober publications, notably The Constitution of Liberty and Law, Legislation and Liberty, amongst many others (O’Kane, 2024; Hayek, 1960; Hayek, 1973–79). Essentially, his argument in favour of the superiority of a spontaneous free market – as opposed to socialist planning – was based on a profound epistemological scepticism about what could be known about the needs and desires of individuals in society. Because those in charge of the state had no reliable way of knowing what so many differing agents desired or needed, in other words, genuine planning for society was impossible – since such knowledge only existed in such a highly fragmentary form. To quote Hayek himself, in ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’: ‘The knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess’ (Hayek, 1945, p. 519). Because we had no reliable way of knowing what so many differing individual agents desired or needed, in other words, planning was impossible – so that, as he put it himself in ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’, ‘the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess’ (Hayek, 1945, p. 519).

And moreover, this further implied, Hayek argued, that no objective value could be established, except through the workings of the market aside from the market, as to the value of particular goods: their worth was solely determined by their subjective value to each individual (Gamble, 1996, pp. 65–67).4 As such, Hayek argued, the state had no method of fairly redistributing resources based around an objective conception of social justice, and instead needed to stick to ensuring the basic fairness of market conditions – such as protecting private property, enforcing contracts, and removing labour restrictions (Hayek, 1960, pp. 93–94; Hayek, 1973–79, vol. 2, pp. 76–77; Gamble, 1996, pp. 46–49). (As a logical extension of this, it followed that the state should discourage over-powerful trade unions and reduce the size of oversized government agencies and institutions, particularly those that might discourage entrepreneurship (Hayek, 1960, p. 274).) Hayek was thus not claiming that the workings of the free market produced ideal results, but rather that the effects of centralised planning, or an attempt to allocate resources based upon some (arbitrary) criterion of need or desert would necessarily be worse (Hayek, 1967, pp. 18–19, 36).5

Second, having briefly examined Hayek’s position, let us turn to the other main set of sceptical arguments that influenced Thatcherism, namely those of Michael Oakeshott. Although Oakeshott arguably did not influence Thatcherism as directly as Hayek, the sceptical impulses in his thought nevertheless importantly affected some of the influential figures around her, and certainly aligned with some of the more sceptical aspects of her thought and policies. Oakeshott’s argument was essentially one that was based upon a scepticism of the power of conscious reason. In particular, he sought to criticise ‘rationalists’ who failed to appreciate that no activities, including political ones, could be performed without practical as well as technical knowledge. By ‘practical’ he meant the kind of knowledge that cannot be precisely formulated, that resists reduction to ‘rules, principles, directions, [and] maxims’, and instead ‘exists only in use, is not reflective’ and ‘can neither be taught nor learned, but only imparted and acquired’ (Oakeshott, 1991, p. 12). On this basis, Oakeshott argued that the correct approach to political activity was to rely on tradition, on inherited practical knowledge, eschewing reliance on consciously formulated, abstract political ideologies, which necessarily fail to respect the importance of practical knowledge (Neill, 2010, pp. 41–42). (To quote Oakeshott himself: ‘Long before we were of an age to take interest in a book about politics, we are acquiring that complex and intricate knowledge of our political tradition’ (Oakeshott, 1991, p. 62).)

But in addition to this, he also argued, more concretely, that the problem with modern rationalism and abstract political ideologies is that they fail to appreciate all the differences that exist between diverse modern individuals, and in that respect resembled Hayek in arguing that it was difficult for the state to know what would benefit society as a whole. As such, Oakeshott argued, it was vital to have a state that could best respect such modern pluralism, which he called ‘civil association’. This form of association is based upon the idea that laws should be impersonal, enabling citizens to pursue their individual ends, without prescribing an end for the state as a whole. And although it was always impossible to eliminate aspects of a more dirigiste, goal-driven state (an ‘enterprise association’) in practice, Oakeshott conceded nevertheless such a ‘civil association’ still represented the best attempt at providing a system of government that respected individual differences, and as such commanded the most genuine authority (Oakeshott, 1975, pp. 124–30; Neill, 2010, pp. 61–69).

To some extent, the Thatcher governments followed the sceptical arguments put forward by Hayek and Oakeshott. Thus, for example, Thatcherism’s desire to liberalise the market, to encourage entrepreneurship, to reduce the power of trade unions, and to reduce the role of the state in planning the economy (through nationalised industries), found powerful intellectual support in Hayek’s arguments about the difficulty of governments knowing the needs and desires of particular individual citizens. And the scepticism that Thatcher showed about the worth of the 1789 French Revolution with its abstract slogans about liberty and equality, in comparison to the relatively peaceful 1688 Glorious Revolution and the great tradition of freedom in practice in Britain certainly recalled Oakeshottian arguments about the importance of tradition (Thatcher, 1993, p. 753). Furthermore, it should also be noted that, given the extent of the growth of the British welfare state after the Second World War, it was perhaps not surprising that the Thatcher governments of the 1980s did not try to follow Hayek’s dictates tout court – for example, by retaining a nationalised healthcare system and a progressive taxation regime. But arguably there was a more fundamental reason for conflict within the Thatcherite programme – namely, that alongside its sceptical instincts, there were also some emphatically dogmatic ones in conflict with them. These existed at both the economic and moral levels. We will examine both in turn.

Thatcherism: Dogmatic Instincts

Firstly, then, if we consider Margaret Thatcher’s economic policy in the 1980s, it becomes clear that the Hayekian influence was not the only important one animating Thatcherite ideology. For although his sceptical arguments against social justice and central planning were clearly important in the formulation of Thatcherism, also of vital importance, particularly in the earlier 1980s, was the Thatcher government’s commitment to monetarism – namely, the theory, particularly associated with the Chicago economist, Milton Friedman, that rises in inflation are solely caused by increasing the money supply, rather than by (for example) rising wages and prices. That there are real tensions between the Hayekian and Friedmanite conceptions of neoliberalism is, of course, now well known (Jackson, 2016, pp. 835–40). But what I want to emphasise here is the dogmatism with which the Thatcher administration pursued this policy, particularly in the early 1980s. This had essentially two aspects to it.

First, monetarism was repeatedly defended in practice, particularly by Thatcher herself, not as a new or esoteric theory, but as pure common sense, as simple housekeeping: ‘It is not that monetary control or cash limits are new things. They are merely the new terms for something very old-fashioned indeed’, she declared in one speech at the Press Association (Thatcher, 1980). And whilst in her post-premiership memoirs, she conceded some of the difficulties of measuring the money supply in practice (not least because so many transactions were ‘virtual’ ones made by banks, rather than in actual cash), she was still claiming that control of the money supply was entirely possible (Thatcher, 1993, pp. 96–97).

Second, on a related point, conforming to the principle of ‘sound money’ was constantly linked by Thatcher to the idea of balancing the budget, as though there were a simple and direct analogy between the nation’s finances and a housewife’s household budget. This was suspect for a number of reasons – since governments have more ability to borrow and for longer than individuals, are less sure of the total ‘tax take’ in a particular year, invest in capital projects and forms of welfare (such as education) that only show their benefit over a much longer period, and may even (under certain circumstances) reduce their income by spending less and hence depressing consumer demand (Gilmour, 1992, p. 21).

And in addition to these points, Thatcher also departed from Hayek’s arguments in another important respect: by insisting that individuals entirely deserved the money they earned in society. For Hayek, as we have seen, the importance of the market was that it could allocate resources and hence individual rewards more effectively than any external observer, even if this were the state; since no more objective standard was available than that provided by the market, no better information was available. But this also meant that no true objective moral judgement of the outcomes of the market could be made, since the worth of any particular commodity or set of goods was subjective – its value was determined purely by its worth to an individual. The dogmatic assertion of Thatcherites that the huge profits made by entrepreneurs were morally deserved – as well as economically desirable – thus importantly departed from Hayek’s scepticism (The Best Future for Britain, 1992, p. 50).

Secondly, although certainly to some extent the Thatcherite programme followed Oakeshott’s arguments about the importance of tradition, based upon his scepticism of abstract principles, it also diverged from them quite sharply over the degree of moral and social pluralism it was prepared to tolerate, and the nature of the tradition it was prepared to uphold. It is true that a strong commitment to individualism can be derived from both Hayek and Oakeshott’s work, since the scepticism of both led them to be deeply dubious about our ability to know the needs and desires of others, and hence of any conception of ‘public good’ or ‘social justice’. To that extent, both thinkers can be said to be providing support for the Thatcherite declaration, cited earlier, that there is ‘no such thing as society; there are individual men and women and there are families’. Nevertheless, even allowing for the differing types of individual that Thatcherism was prepared to value – in other words, thrifty savers or flamboyant entrepreneurs – it is clear that certain kinds of choices and lifestyle were regarded as less legitimate than others. Those attracting Thatcherite disapproval included individuals who were said to be insufficiently patriotic, to be insufficiently supportive of the nuclear family, and to be insufficiently deferential to the workings of the free market. To be specific, these were those who objected to the Falklands War and campaigned for unilateral nuclear disarmament, those such as lesbians, gay men and single mothers who represented ‘non-traditional’ families, and trade unions and alleged ‘loony left’ councils who were opponents of market liberalisation (Freeden, 1996, pp. 391, 397–99; Grimley, 2012, pp. 90–93; Thatcher, 1993, p. 568; Neill, 2021, pp. 116–17).

Moreover, this was linked to a much more dogmatic interpretation of tradition than had been put forward by Oakeshott. For if the latter had tentatively argued that modern individualism was an achievement to be celebrated, the Thatcherites added a much more specific and dogmatic set of prescriptions about the periods and episodes they were prepared to regard as laudable. Part of their approach to history was simply to insist upon a traditional Whiggish historical story that elevated Britain’s achievements and exceptionalism, so that for Thatcher herself Britain’s role in preserving freedom in the Napoleonic Wars and the Second World War in particular was one to be highlighted.6 But more than that, there was a self-conscious effort to stress the importance of (some) ‘Victorian values’, with the implication that Britain had become great, both at home and abroad, through the adoption of self-help, adherence to religion, and unquestioning patriotism (Evans, 1997b; Auer, 2014). Such an account gave little credit to dissidents and protestors in the securing of freedom – unless they were modest and religious in the mould of John Wesley – and still less for campaigners for a cradle-to-grave welfare state, or those who were members of more recent social movements, such as feminists and queer activists. Particular opprobrium was reserved for the 1960s, with its combination of generational rebellion and so-called ‘permissive’ legislation which legalised abortion and male homosexual practices between those over twenty-one in private in England and Wales, abolished the death penalty and theatre censorship, and made gaining a divorce significantly easier (Thatcher, 1995, pp. 152–53). And this account of history, of course, sharply differed from those of labour historians or left-wing progressives who had viewed the modern welfare state as perhaps the most important achievement in modern Britain. But it also diverged from the views of influential ‘One Nation’ conservatives, such as Ian Gilmour, who sought to laud Benjamin Disraeli, however inaccurately, as the founder of the modern welfare state, and who upheld the worth of the 1930s as an era of progressive conservative experimentation in welfare – rather than viewing it as a (much maligned) era of laissez-faire (Gilmour, 1977, pp. 31, 33–34; Neill, 2023, p. 9). In short, the Thatcherite view of history had a definite dogmatic streak to it.

Thatcherism: Tensions in Practice

Thatcherism, therefore, was clearly an ideology with divergent instincts within it. To some extent, this is unsurprising. Almost without exception, any sophisticated political ideology will be composed of differing component concepts which exist in a state of creative tension with one another – and the major political ideologies of liberalism, socialism, and conservatism are excellent examples of this. (By contrast, it has plausibly been argued that some political movements – such as populism – have too thin an ideological core really to count as an ideology at all (Freeden, 2017).) In any event, despite the tensions within it, Thatcherism proved itself to be a highly potent ideological vehicle throughout much of the 1980s – its somewhat divergent impulses proving no barrier to the passing of significant legislation in the areas we noted at the start, namely lowering taxation, reducing the power of trade unions, and privatisation. However, by the 1990s, some of the tensions associated with Thatcherism’s differing sceptical and dogmatic instincts had become much clearer, at least to thinkers on the Right if not always to practical politicians.7 This was so for three reasons.

First, tensions within the Thatcherite economic programme appeared, not least because the twin aims of keeping inflation low and encouraging greater property ownership came into conflict in the late 1980s – since the enactment of mortgage interest tax relief led to a housing boom, and hence greater inflation. A particularly controversial moment came with Nigel Lawson’s 1988 budget, which not only reduced the basic rate of income tax from 27% to 25% and the highest rate from 60% to 40% but also crucially delayed the limiting such tax relief to a house, rather than a person for four months. The result was a scramble by couples to take advantage of the remaining tax relief, further fuelling inflation, and eventually leading to double-digit interest rates and a recession in the early 1990s, as the government struggled to control inflation (Vinen, 2009, pp. 206–07; Tomlinson, 2012, p. 75).

Second, it was far from clear that greater prosperity had encouraged more moral behaviour, since those making huge profits in the City of London appeared to be indulging in amoral conspicuous consumption, rather than becoming dutiful family men (and women). (Margaret Thatcher herself was often at her most uncomfortable when defending vulgar displays by well-remunerated ‘yuppies’.) Furthermore, more concretely, despite the importance given to the nuclear family by Thatcherites, the divorce rate in the 1980s soared, and the attractiveness of marriage decreased, leading to questions about how compatible neoliberal economic policies and the traditional family structures actually were (David, 2014, pp. 180–81).

Finally, despite considerable railing about the negative effects of 1960s ‘permissive’ legislation, particularly by such ministers as Norman Tebbit and Margaret Thatcher herself, there was little made to repeal them. And indeed, other than the notorious ‘Clause 28’ of 1988, which was allegedly designed to ‘prevent the promotion of homosexuality in schools’ and was tacked on relatively late to a much larger Education Act of that year, there were few attempts at intervening directly through legislation to change the country’s morals.

Attempts at Ideological Resolution: John Gray, Peter Hitchens, and Shirley Robin Letwin

In response, by the end of the 1980s, not merely thinkers on the Left, but also those on the Right, began to analyse Thatcherism’s internal tensions in the hope of formulating more coherent versions of the ideology. Although not often explicitly formulated in these terms, they tended to highlight the tensions between the sceptical and dogmatic impulses, with a view to resolving the contradictions between them. First, we will examine the work of the prominent academic and public intellectual John Gray. Gray had been a prominent intellectual supporter of free markets and the New Right in the 1980s, notably producing scholarly works extolling the merits of John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Hayek, as well as a considerable number of pamphlets and other publications (Gray, 1983; 1984). By the 1990s, however, he had become far more critical of the Thatcherite programme in practice, and of neoliberalism in theory, and began to mount far-reaching criticisms of what the New Right had evolved into. Key to his criticisms was a far-reaching critique of how dogmatic Thatcherism had become, and he sought to reemphasise how important it was to base economics and public policy on an epistemological scepticism – stressing our difficulty of knowing the needs and desires of other individuals. His critique had, in other words, both economic and social implications.

If we turn, then, to Gray’s criticisms of Thatcherism and the New Right in the 1990s, at their heart was a critique of a dogmatic over-reliance on the free market. What had been forgotten, in other words, he argued, was the fact that markets merely represented the best way of coping with a situation where the information we could gain was profoundly imperfect; instead, markets were increasingly being regarded as a panacea for all ills. This position Gray labelled ‘free market fundamentalism’, and he argued that it had three deeply negative consequences.

First, articulating a conservative worry that went all the way back to Edmund Burke, Gray charged that unfettered markets tended to undermine the very conditions that made them possible, by erasing the distinctiveness of local knowledge that was inherent to them. In this way, unfettered capitalism encouraged a dreary cultural uniformity, rather than genuine civilisation for all, creating a historical breach with the past which ultimately destroyed the very sensitivity to individual differences that was one of the major strengths of the market in the first place (Gray, 1997, pp. 40–41).

Second, Gray claimed that ‘free-market fundamentalism’ encouraged a utopian mindset which assumed that permanent universal progress was possible – whereas in fact thinkers like Hayek let alone Oakeshott had always appreciated that human beings were necessarily imperfect creatures, and that any progress would be limited and infinitely variable, relative to the culture involved (Gray, 1997, pp. 41–43).

And finally, most fundamentally, Gray argued that free-market fundamentalism also encouraged an entirely false picture of individuals as being capable of making meaningful choices with little reference to their cultural backgrounds – whereas in fact, as Oakeshott had insisted, these were always made with reference to traditional practices (Gray, 1997, p. 44).8

What was the solution to this situation? Gray became increasingly sceptical during the course of the 1990s as to whether any was possible at all, such were the increasingly pervasive effects of globalised capitalism, so that by the time he wrote ‘The Undoing of Conservatism’ (1997) he had become extremely disillusioned with the whole neoliberal project. But if there was to be a solution, as put forward in his earlier work from the 1990s in, for example Beyond the New Right (1993), it would rest on nourishing and reenergising civil society, to enrich the possible choices individuals could make, and to reinforce the plurality that was such an important feature of British cultural life – and indeed more widely across the Western world. Key to doing so would be to re-establish the primacy of politics over economics – to ensure that ‘the market is made for humans, not humans for the market’ – to build on Hayek’s sceptical insights, rather than bake them into a dogma (Gray, 1993, p. 63).9 More concretely, Gray argued for three particular remedies, whilst remaining open to the possibility of some expansion of the free market into previously public-owned industries and services.

These were, first, to ensure that the environment was sustained and protected from the excesses of the free market, since it was imperative to recognise that ‘the capacity for unfettered choice has little value when it must be exercised in a public space that […] is filthy, desolate, and dangerous’ (Gray, 1993, p. 60).10

Second, in order to inspire loyalty to one’s traditions and civil society, it was vital to ensure that education was saved from purely utilitarian concerns, from the goal of maximising economic efficiency and increasing GDP. Even at primary and secondary level, Gray argued, although it was important to concentrate on learning basic skills and aptitudes, it was equally important for children to be initiated ‘into the history and principles of the civil society they will enter as adults’ (Gray, 1993, p. 61). This would inspire some degree of loyalty and affection for the nation in which they lived.

And third, although there were some clear limits to the degree of pluralism that he was prepared to countenance, being sceptical of multiculturalism and of citizens unable to express themselves in English, Gray thought it was important to accept and appreciate the worth of modern plural values. In particular, he thought it was folly to try to repeal the ‘permissive’ legislation of the 1960s, since the state had no business in trying to dictate values, dogmatically, to the population at large, not least because the law now actually corresponded to what the British public wanted. Indeed, it was one of the more sensible decisions of the Thatcher government in the 1980s that they had not attempted to do so – whatever Thatcher’s later regrets (Gray, 1993, p. 57). If the state could not be simply ‘neutral’ between the different forms of life within it, therefore, it could not afford to be too prescriptive about different individuals having differing values. To give a concrete example: although the state should certainly try to shore up a healthy family structure through the tax system where possible, trying to pretend that all well-functioning families had to be identical, or that women should be encouraged to stay at home was completely unrealistic and undesirable (Gray, 1993, pp. 57–58). So, simply pursuing reactionary policies and attempting to recapture the values of the 1950s was no longer an option.

Such were Gray’s attempts at responding to what he regarded as the problems associated with Thatcherism in practice, reacting against its tendency to favour adherence to dogmatic free-market fundamentalism. But other thinkers on the Right sharply disagreed with Gray’s diagnosis and criticised the Thatcher government’s record not for being too dogmatic, but on the contrary, for not being dogmatic enough. One such critic has been the journalist and commentator Peter Hitchens, and if his arguments lack the theoretical subtlety of Gray, he has nevertheless been an influential and prominent voice on the Right from the 1990s to the present. Hitchens has been a fairly constant presence on the broadcast media since the 1990s and has also produced a constant stream of newspaper articles and comments, but his most significant contribution to debate has probably been his starkly written jeremiad The Abolition of Britain, published in 1999. This text was overtly aimed at the New Labour government, but as a critique of British society and politics since the 1960s, it was also implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) critical of the Thatcherite period also. Hitchens was scathing about a number of changes that had occurred since the Victorian period, but his ire was especially directed at three interconnected twentieth-century changes.

First, he lamented the decline of religion, and especially its more censorious side, arguing that much (though not all) of its decline could be attributed to the effects of both world wars. Already under threat from the challenges of nineteenth-century industrialisation, Hitchens argued that the ‘old order, rural, aristocratic, hierarchical’ of which the church was a part was ruined by the First World War – ‘smashed to pieces at the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916’ – and the Second too brought fateful changes (Hitchens, 2000, p. 109).11 This conflict in particular, Hitchens claimed, caused both middle- and working-class couples to split in much greater numbers than before, paving the way towards the complete acceptance of divorce later in the twentieth century (Hitchens, 2000, p. 110).12

Second, Hitchens deplored the decline of deference in British society, counterposing the funeral of Winston Churchill in 1965 with that of Princess Diana in 1997. The former represented decency, loyalty, and restraint, whereas the latter represented sentimentality and angry victimhood, with the monarchy in particular being blamed and castigated for being ‘uncaring’ (Hitchens, 2000, pp. 1–2). This contrasted starkly with the generally held opinion of the monarchy in 1965, when (Hitchens claimed) ‘the throne represented […] continuity, respectability and the family, characteristics specially valued by the lower middle and working class, who also clung fiercely to good manners and proper behaviour’ (Hitchens, 2000, pp. 12–13).

And finally, perhaps most crucially, Hitchens decried the permissive legislation passed in the 1960s, arguing that this represented the coup de grâce for old-fashioned values and morality, blaming the Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins (1965–67) above all for undermining them. For Hitchens, strikingly, it was Jenkins who ‘devised a programme which had more effect on the way that life is lived in this country than any other post-war politician, including Margaret Thatcher’ (Hitchens, 2000, p. 304). (This was the ‘permissive’ legislation referred to in section III – namely the legalisation of abortion and male homosexuality in private in England and Wales, the abolishing of the death penalty and theatre censorship, and the easing of divorce.) And indeed, Hitchens saw Thatcher’s time in power as largely a failure, since instead of taking the opportunity to reverse the ‘cultural revolution’ that had occurred since the 1960s, she ignored morals and culture, and rather looked to the market to solve all problems. Instead, Hitchens argued, some of its changes actually made matters worse, since (for example) selling off council houses undermined previously united communities. In short, Hitchens argued, the failure to reassert conservative dogma by Thatcherites meant the battle was lost by default. If he had few explicit solutions to provide, and still fewer compromises to make, Hitchens’s fulminations clearly packed a punch – and to some degree found an audience.

The diagnoses of Gray and Hitchens were therefore sharply opposed to one another. It is true that both were united in the belief that liberalising the market could not solve all problems, and that insisting upon individual rights (particularly on a libertarian basis) was an insufficient way of guaranteeing a flourishing civil society. But essentially their two visions were starkly different. Gray was critical of Thatcherism for its dogmatic nature; Hitchens criticised it for not being dogmatic enough. However, not all theorists and commentators on the Right agreed with this diagnosis, and it is instructive to examine one who sought to reconcile Thatcherism’s more sceptical and dogmatic aspects with one another, namely the prominent political theorist and commentator Shirley Robin Letwin, who produced a thoughtful and influential work The Anatomy of Thatcherism (1992).

For Letwin, the enactment of some Thatcherite policies had certainly raised queries about its direction and consistency. But it is important to emphasise that Letwin felt that Thatcherism, both in practice and in theory, was far more defensible than either Gray or Hitchens. Key to understanding what Thatcherism was, according to Letwin, was appreciating that it was not purely an economic doctrine, nor one that had ignored the importance of moral and social change. Rather, reaffirming the connection that Thatcher herself had sought to draw between economic reform and moral character, Letwin argued that the essence of Thatcherism was to promote what she referred to as the ‘vigorous virtues’. These were, she claimed, more precisely defined as self-reliance, adventurousness, loyalty, robustness, lawfulness, support for the traditional family and for a small central state. (This was in contrast to what Letwin referred to as the ‘softer’ virtues such as kindness, humility, gentleness, sympathy, cheerfulness (Letwin, 1992, p. 33).) And in general, Thatcherite policies had enhanced such virtues, successfully marrying the more sceptical and dogmatic sides of the ideology. So, for example, Letwin argued, the selling of council houses to former tenants encouraged owners to develop a sense of self-sufficiency, and strengthened family life by helping to transmit property between generations, and the policies of low inflation, privatisation, and reduction of the influence of trade unions in the economy were defensible for similar reasons (Letwin, 1992, pp. 101–08). This was contrasted by Letwin with the inferior traditions of libertarianism and ‘One Nation’ conservatism, which represented temptations that conservatives ought to resist. The latter, Letwin maintained, was decadent, paternalist and nostalgic, particularly about the empire, and unable to resist socialism, given its acceptance of so much post-war statism, and disinclination to formulate a determined ideological position to oppose it (Letwin, 1992, pp. 56–58, 66–68). But the former was also suspect, since it put forward an abstract and unconvincing picture of human nature, was over-obsessed with the free market, and was uninterested in the vital role culture played in ensuring a rich and vibrant civil society – it was over-sceptical about what we could know about other individuals, in short (Letwin, 1992, pp. 43–44, 339).

According to Letwin, then, the marriage of sceptical and dogmatic aspects of Thatcherism had generally held up well. In particular, the upholding of the ‘vigorous virtues’ meant that Thatcherites could adopt a sceptical approach to the market with a more dogmatic attitude to the permissive culture of the 1960s – seeking to change hearts and minds, rather than reversing legislation (Letwin, 1992, pp. 45–46). But she was nevertheless critical of some of the more dogmatic aspects of Thatcherism in practice, which, she contended, often ultimately lay in a lack of self-understanding by Thatcherites of their own ideology. All too often, she argued, Thatcherites tended to slip into justifying their position in dogmatic economic terms. To some extent this was understandable, due to the sheer degree of collectivisation of British society in 1979, and the difficulty in reversing this. But such justifications could also be highly damaging, since they distracted Thatcherites from the real goal of empowering individuals with the vigorous virtues, and instead substituted the spurious goal of greater prosperity as an end in itself.

This, Letwin argued, had been particularly damaging in the sphere of education, where Thatcherism had often tended in practice to promote utilitarian goals based around ‘enterprise’, rather than inducting students into the rich tradition of liberal learning that Britain had historically possessed. At its worst, such a tendency had been combined with (and nourished by) a false thesis about Britain’s industrial heritage, propagated by the historians Martin Wiener and Correlli Barnett which claimed that Britain’s economic problems had their roots in an upper-class preference for liberal learning and snobbery about practical, technical skills (Letwin, 1992, pp. 250–51, 255, 275–76). This was a major error, which was in danger of giving Thatcherism’s opponents a real cause for complaint. So, a key remedy for Letwin was to remember and reinstate Oakeshott’s more sceptical approach to tradition, with its respect for traditional values, and better-rounded approach to what an individual in modern society should ideally be. Only by doing so, she argued, could Thatcherism truly build upon its successes and empower individuals properly, allowing them to pursue genuinely different goals and hence enrich Britain’s civil society.

Conclusion

This chapter has sought to argue in favour of three points. First, it has contended that rather than trying to resolve the difficulties of conceptualising Thatcherism as conservatism or (neo)liberalism, or some combination of both, there is considerable mileage in an alternative strategy. Rather, Thatcherism should be conceptualised as a combination of scepticism and dogmatism, where the sceptical influences of Hayek and Oakeshott were counterbalanced – and in some ways contradicted – by dogmatic positions concerning economics and tradition.

Second, it has argued that these divergent impulses proved no impediment to providing a potent ideological programme, capable of mobilising public opinion and passing significant legislation – on trade unions, privatisation, and taxation. However, ultimately, the tensions within Thatcherite ideology – particularly over the relationships of the individual, the market, and tradition – became apparent, and demanded some kind of resolution.

Third, therefore, the chapter has explored three divergent ways in which thinkers on the Right tried to resolve such tensions in the 1990s. For John Gray, the solution lay in reasserting scepticism about the nature of what we can know about other individuals, trusting instead to tradition and institutions without falling into the trap of being reactionary. For Peter Hitchens, by contrast, Thatcherism had failed because it had not diagnosed the real challenges correctly, and hence had been insufficiently dogmatic in reversing the permissive legislation of the 1960s. Finally, while admitting that Thatcherism faced real challenges – not least a tendency to embrace managerialism and technocracy – Shirley Robin Letwin thought that it was possible to remarry a sceptical approach to the market with a more dogmatic approach to tradition. And although the chapter has not sought to comment on more recent events, it could be noted that the challenge of combining a free market with a particular view of British tradition is one that conservatives in Britain are still wrestling with.