ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, it was argued that the programme to change British attitudes and behaviour began in the mid to late 1970s, as Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph toured Britain delivering speeches to the public imploring them to abandon their union instincts and imagine themselves in a healthy society composed of entrepreneurs and enterprising consumers. This chapter explores the strategies and tactics of neoliberalism practised in government in the 1980s to make these changes permanent. In the broadest sense, this chapter asks the question, how did the Thatcher government govern for the consumer? More specifically, it explains key elements of Thatcherite economic policy in the context of the society being imagined by the New Right. If neoliberals were to govern for certain ways of thinking, encouraging and fostering habits of thought that would enable consumer sovereignty to be reasserted, then the strategies and tactics to be employed had to be geared towards changing attitudes and behaviour in the economy.
