ABSTRACT
The election of Margaret Thatcher as British Prime Minister in 1979, and the eighteen years of Conservative rule which followed, have given birth to a vast literature devoted to the analysis of Thatcherite policies. Writers have often argued that 1979 represents a turning point and have sought to demonstrate how successive Conservative governments put an end to some thirty years of political consensus (Kavanagh 1987: 1).They have been encouraged in their analysis by statements made by Margaret Thatcher herself expressing her determination to break with what she regarded as the stalemate of the British model. The postwar years, they say, were characterized by a high level of political agreement on the nature of public policies, as well as on the strategy favoured to implement these policies (mainly through negotiation and compromise) (ibid.: 6). This agreement included ‘the acceptance of the legitimacy of the central role of the State in Welfare’ (Deakin 1994: 54).Consequently, the social policies at the heart of the Welfare State, designed to promote the well-being of the individual and to guarantee social security, are often said to have developed within a climate of high level of agreement across political parties. This climate of opinion, illustrated by Harold Macmillan’s decision to accept his chancellor’s resignation rather than reduce public spending, was itself based on the belief that the Welfare State enjoyed widespread popular support and that no government withdrawing support from it would be re-elected. These writers often treat housing as one of the five main public services having been encouraged in their belief by Beveridge’s inclusion of housing in his five Giants. As a consequence, they argue that housing illustrates most clearly the retreat from Welfare State principles and the deliberate break with post-war policies (Forrest and Murie 1988: 4, Kleinman 1996: 18-57, Balchin 1995: 8) that marked the post-1979 years. The sector is said to be somewhat of an exception in that, alone among other public services, it was targeted for change and has undergone a complete transformation and increasingly been relegated to the edge of the Welfare State. Recently some writers have challenged this idea (Malpass 2004: 209-27) and argued that housing reform, far from driving the sector away from other public services, has only anticipated the reform of the wider Welfare State. In fact, continuity and convergence are said to prevail over the long term.
