ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on an area where there has been little work done, namely why the government abandoned its monetarist economic policy in the 1980s. In 1979, a Conservative government was elected with a firm commitment to implement monetarist economic policies. Moreover, despite the fact that some would argue that the real ‘counter-revolution’ post-1979 occurred at the micro level, there are only passing references to microeconomic policy. While the bulk of the literature on the economic record of the last 25 years has focused on macro and micro performance indicators, there have only been a few accounts by economic historians and historians on the origins and diffusion of the new economic strategy within the Conservative Party. The work of the political scientists has been more instructive about the changes in policy during the last 20 years than that produced by the historian.
