Touching from a Distance: The Younger Generation of One Nation Conservatives and Thatcherism

Abstract

It is argued here that the younger generation of One Nation Conservatives made a concerted effort to conform to the requirements of the free market agenda of the Thatcher governments during the 1980s. This served to distinguish them from the older generation of wets who had preceded them in the cabinet and who had been more inclined to engage in coded criticism of that agenda. The younger One Nation Conservatives knew that they had to conform if they wanted to hold office and the problems which Britain faced gave them a structural, as well as a personal, motive for conformity. Their willingness to conform made them important members of the second and third Thatcher governments. They provided a renewed radical impetus to government policy in the mid and late 1980s, which culminated in the introduction of the community charge or poll tax, and they possessed the communication skills needed to promote those policies in public. The efforts which the younger generation of One Nation Conservatives made to conform in the sphere of domestic economic policy were undone, after Thatcher had been replaced by Major in November 1990, by the issue on which they retained their distinctiveness: Europe. Their continued expression of pro‐European views became a problem for them after Thatcher had recoiled from the prospect of economic and monetary union in the late 1980s, because it proved to those on the right of the Conservative Party that they were not really ‘one of us’ at all.

One Nation Conservatism: a Gypsy, Roma and Traveller case study

“…3 One Nationism became increasingly muted or derided in the Thatcher period where its adherents were dubbed as 'wets', yet the younger generation of One Nation Conservatives such as Clarke and Major were able to attain positions within Thatcher's governments by accepting the economic tenets of Thatcherism but retaining support for Europe, a core feature of One Nation Conservatism, as well as an interest in social and racial issues. 4 During the early period of Cameron's party leadership, notions of One Nation Conservatism were revived with the Big Society agenda of decentralisation and empowerment. However, reflecting the ascendancy of neoliberalism, forms of statism and radical interventionism were absent in this flagship policy; instead localism was a foil to the perceived centralism of New Labour and, according to its critics, the Big Society was a marketing ploy for the 'Small State'.…”