ABSTRACT
This book has so far concentrated on Thatcher’s impact on the Conservative Party. But how much influence did she exert on her political opponents and particularly on the Labour Party? Did her long period as prime minister cause a fundamental reappraisal of Labour priorities? Perhaps, above all, did her three successive election victories provide lessons that Labour needed to learn in order to regain office? In short, did Margaret Thatcher, even as her health began to fade, continue to exercise huge influence over British politics into the twenty-first century? How much Labour changed in the 1990s is an issue that has attrac-
ted much debate. The leading left-wing sociologist Stuart Hall argued that Blair’s election landslide in the 1997 general election gave ‘New Labour’ a genuine choice. It could adopt either ‘an alternative radical strategy to Thatcherism’ with bold thinking and emphasis on a clear new direction or it could ‘adapt to Thatcherite, neo-liberal terrain’.1 In embracing both the language and the methods of ‘modernisation’, in its obeisance to the private sector as efficient and wealth-creating, and in its determination to work with the grain of free-market economics, rather than against it, Hall concluded that the similarities between New Labour and Thatcherism were far more important than the differences. New Labour chose what he called a ‘grim alignment with corporate capital and power’ and turned its back on old Labour traditions. As the political editor of The Spectator put it in 2002, on the occasion of her medically enforced removal from political life: ‘Make no mistake: Margaret Thatcher begat Tony Blair.’2
