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Introduction
Much of the debate around Thatcher and Thatcherism has been about the piecemeal and gradual nature of the practice of Thatcher government. Undoubtedly the Conservative Government led by Margaret Thatcher was confronted by both political reality and embedded institutions which diluted much of the impact of neo-liberalism. However, it also the case - as the Thatcher archives reveal - that from her election as leader Thatcher and her allies had a distinct and coherent ideological project. As she recorded in her memoirs, 'I was asking the Conservative Party to put its faith in freedom and free markets, limited government and strong national defence' (Thatcher, 1993, p. 15). In fact, the key elements of the Thatcherite programme were in place in the 1970s with Thatcher and those around her committed to reducing the role of the state in the delivery of public services and increasing the marketisation of all sectors of society. From early on the adherents to what became known as Thatcherism had a strong sense of what they wanted to achieve and what they needed to do to achieve it.
This paper argues that Thatcher was aware of the constraints that her government faced and recognised the need to 'defeat' the powerful actors of the post-war state in order to implement her own conception of government and politics. Thatcher's significance is not in what she did in policy terms (although that was clearly important in key areas) but what she did in relation to politics: first Thatcher and Thatcherism politicised (rather than de-politicised) a whole set of social relations and consequently politics became a zero-sum game with winners and losers - what Hacker and Pierson see in the United States (2010) as 'winner take all politics'; second her government focussed on reconstituting the role of the state in terms of the political relationship between government and wider society. For post-war governments the state was the central mechanism for achieving outcomes but for Thatcher the state was ineffective, self-serving and unsuitable for delivering the goals of Conservative politics. Thatcher distrusted the state but she did not distrust politics or certain key political institutions such as the executive, parliament (or at least Parliamentary sovereignty) and the Party. What she did question in politics was the...