ABSTRACT
As this book goes to press, little remains of the confident and decisive Conservative regime of the 1980s. Of course, it does not follow that the Conservative Party is bound to lose the 1997 election. Still less does it follow that the New Right paradigm of the 1980s and early 1990s is about to be replaced by a successor. The post-war Labour Government was in comparable disarray for its last eighteen months, and lost the subsequent General Election, but the Keynesian social democratic paradigm which had guided it held the field for another quarter of a century. By the same token, no one who watches Labour’s current embarrassment over taxation and public expenditure can doubt that, on certain matters at least, New Right approaches still enjoy at least a vestigial hegemony.
