ABSTRACT
Ironically, by contrast, the period of the mid-to late 1980s named by Hay as ‘radical Thatcherism’, during which the Thatcher project was most fully in possession of state power, saw markedly less open contention on criminal justice issues. Law and order figured much less prominently in the election manifestos and campaigns of 1987 and 1992 than in those of 1979 or 1983 (Downes and Morgan, 1997). Neither the Children Act 1989 nor the Criminal Justice Act 1991 betrayed obvious signs of authoritarian populism (even if they were consonant with the governing principles of neo-liberalism in their ‘managerialist’ and ‘consumerist’ dimensions) (Lacey, 1994). Indeed the Criminal Justice Act 1991 was far more centrally the product of cautiously progressive civil servants and Home Office ministers seeking to systematise a notoriously eclectic sentencing system and to restrain the seemingly inexorable expansion of the prison population than of any populist intuition. Curiously it seemed at the entree of the 1990s that a government born in a spirit of authoritarian populism was less concerned to refashion the Home Office than it was such other ministries as Health and Environment (where responsibility for local government lay).
