ABSTRACT
In Britain the 1980s began in 1979, when the Conservatives won the general election and Margaret Thatcher became the first woman Prime Minister. The Tory’s landslide victory was a foregone conclusion. The Labour Party was in ideological disarray and its policies had produced economic and social instability. Thatcher’s promise of a return to strong government leadership had wide public appeal among a populace fed up with the repeated crises of the 1970s. The new Tory policies inaugurated the most fundamental redirection of British society since the second world war. All spheres of social and cultural life were to be judged first in economic terms. Monetarism meant the dismantling of the welfare state, privatisation of the nationalised industries, radical curbing of trade union power, ‘structural’ unemployment, a strengthened police force, a pro-nuclear defence policy, and a new moral order based on self-interest. Private enterprise was to replace public dependency, so cuts in government expenditure, including that on the arts, were inevitable. In effect, the values of ‘community’ which informed the 1970s were to be replaced by those of the nuclear family and the individual. Co-operation was to be supplanted by competition. Thatcherism was bound to exacerbate confrontation, and produce a divided nation (Sked/ Cook 1984).
