Introduction

Even 25 years after her election as Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher still arouses passions: fervent loyalty, nostalgia and hatred. There are at least four divergent accounts that have been developed over the years about her social policy legacy:

• • She was a wicked neo-conservative witch who ushered in a new era of social and economic policy. Her reign marks a watershed in postwar history and her impact was malign. This could be called the strong agency view.

This was an outlook shared not only by many on the left (Hay, 1996) but by moderate Conservatives such as Ian Gilmour (1992) and some political scientists (Bulpitt, 1986).

• • Others see her as an actress destined to play a part written by history – the structural view. It is no accident that the big changes that we see in the 1980s followed the oil shocks of the 1970s and the combination of recessions and inflation of that time. They came on top of longer-run social changes like the ageing population and ideological shifts that went far beyond Mrs Thatcher’s influence (Lowe, 1999). The fundamental shifts that were under way in the economic and social structures of the age were such that they would have produced such outcomes whoever was prime minister. The UK and the USA went furthest in dismantling welfare but other regimes faced difficulties and had to adapt (Esping-Andersen, 1996).

• • A third view agrees that there have been big social and economic changes and that Thatcher and Reagan, with others, did try to seize the moment but, given the scale of these structural changes, it is the resilience of welfare regimes that is notable, even in the UK and the USA (Pierson, 1994, 1996).