How, if at all, are 'Thatcherism' and 'New Labour' interrelated Essay

How, if at all, are 'Thatcherism' and 'New Labour' interrelated - Essay Example He was the first serious politician of the left to appreciate the legacy of Mrs. Thatcher and was able, unlike his predecessors, to operate in the post-Thatcher world. Blair identified where the new centre was and quickly occupied it, leading to many branding him as a ‘closet Tory’. However, we have to decide whether he merely stripped down socialism to make it acceptable in post-Thatcher Britain or whether he has taken certain social democratic values and added them to a variant of free market neo-liberalism that was prevalent in Thatcherism. Although there seems to be a significant continuation of policy in many areas, this may have been necessary for Labour to win back lost electoral ground by pursuing a large degree of conformation to the highly successful Thatcherite campaigns. It is therefore necessary to compare Thatcherite and New Labour policies before we can say how interrelated the two ideologies are. Is the ‘Third Way merely a more compassionate version of Thatcherism or is it a new ideology, combining traditional social democratic values with neo-liberal tendencies that have grounded themselves in British politics? Free trade ideology developed out of Adam Smith’s distinctive contribution to the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment and reached its apogee in the Liberalism of William Gladstone, and so forth. (3) The importance of Thatcherism, therefore, lay not in the novelty of its ideas but in the context of their operation in the late 1970s and 1980s. Thatcherism as an ideology stood for a limited but firm government, the rolling back of the welfare state, the end of consensus politics and a staunchly anti-European and independent attitude on many vital issues. (Adams 1998, p. 95) The question of just how successful the Thatcher revolution was in making Britain a better place is a matter of fierce controversy. How