ABSTRACT
At the heart of the Thatcherite project lay the ability successfully to capture the sense of insecurity and social upheaval that was being increasingly experienced in Britain from the late 1960s onwards and articulate this into a new hegemonic project. The advent of the global recession during this time was bound to hit Britain particularly hard. Many of its traditional industries were becoming obsolete and the constraints imposed by its existing technological base meant that the only option left for Britain, as it strove to be competitive and remain profitable, lay in the wholesale restructuring of its economy. As new technological systems were slowly introduced, large sections of existing employment, particularly in the manufacturing industries disappeared and were only partially replaced by an increase in the amount of part-time and temporary work offered in the service sector industries (Urry, 1989; Murray, 1989; Overbeek, 1990; Mitter, 1986). The growing sense of social upheaval that accompanied this was compounded not only by the still resonating effects of the slum-clearance programmes of the 1960s, where whole communities were broken up and people were isolated from their neighbours, but by a capitalist logic which required a fundamental reassessment of the welfare state and its provisions. Not only did the growing levels of unemployment place increasing demands on the welfare system but there were strong fiscal pressures on the government dramatically to cut and rationalize its welfare spending (Jones, 1989).
