Thatcherism - Thatcherism Before Thatcher

Thatcherism Before Thatcher

A number of commentators have traced the origins of Thatcherism in post-war British politics. The historian Ewen Green claimed there was resentment of the inflation, taxation and the constraints imposed by the labour movement, which was associated with the so-called Buttskellite consensus in the decades before Thatcher came to prominence. Although the Conservative leadership accommodated itself to the Attlee government's post-war reforms, there was continuous right-wing opposition in the lower ranks of the party, in right-wing pressure groups like the Middle Class Alliance and the People's League for the Defence of Freedom, and later in think tanks like the Centre for Policy Studies. For example, in 1945 the Conservative Party Chairman Ralph Assheton had wanted 12,000 abridged copies of The Road to Serfdom (a book by the anti-socialist economist Friedrich von Hayek later closely associated with Thatcherism), taking up one-and-a-half tons of the party's paper ration, distributed as election propaganda. The historian Christopher Cooper has also traced the formation of the Monetarist economics at the heart of Thatcherism back to the resignation of Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer Peter Thorneycroft in 1958.