Word: thatcherism
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What is especially remarkable about the Thatcher victory is that it took place with Britain suffering its highest level of unemployment since the Great Depression. During four years of Tory rule, joblessness shot up from 5.4% to 13.3%, leaving 3,049,000 Britons out of work. Yet polls showed that voters generally did not blame Thatcher for the loss of their jobs, but accepted her argument that the world recession was chiefly at fault and that she was more
...election indicated that an astonishing one out of three unemployed Britons planned to vote Tory. Many workers greatly appreciated her feat in bringing the inflation rate down from a high of 22% in 1980 to the current 4%. In addition, Britain's generous array of unemployment benefits, which Thatcher has left largely intact, has blunted the anger of many without jobs...
...Prime Minister's success in defusing the unemployment issue is doubly impressive because the economic experiment called Thatcherism is, by her reckoning, only halfway completed. Upon coming to power in 1979, she reduced income taxes (the top rate fell from 83% to 60%), raised the value-added tax (a levy on goods and services) 8% to 15% and sharply cut public spending. Thatcher's top priority was righting inflation. That was a reversal of traditional British postwar economic policy, which held full employment as the primary objective. To curb price rises, she cut public spending at a time when rising...
...altered the shape of the nation's politics, especially within the Conservative Party. Fading fast is the image of the Tories as the private preserve of landed gentlemen who went to the right schools, believe in moderation, and carry a certain sense of noblesse oblige toward the lower classes. Thatcher has taken the party out of the hands of the gentry and turned it over to people like herself who have worked their way up in the world and who sometimes see a sense of social responsibility as an unaffordable luxury. She has forged an alliance between skilled workers...
...time, blue-collar workers will be outnumbered by white-collar workers in the labor force. Meanwhile, surveys show that voters today are growing less and less likely to vote by class, simply along the lines of bowler hat vs. cloth cap. As if that were not advantage enough for Thatcher, Britain's population is shifting from the big cities that have long been Labor strongholds to the Tory enclaves of suburbia. Parliamentary districts were redrawn for last week's election to reflect that migration, and the Tories clearly gained. "Social changes are taking place which make the Conservatives the party...