Margaret Thatcher
and the state
D
uring her period of office, Margaret
Thatcher introduced dramatic changes to
the British political landscape. She sold
off council houses (social housing), introduced
‘reforms’ into the trade union movement
(particularly with regard to the election of
leaders), reduced welfare benefits and preferred
private to public transport, championing the
interests of what she called the individual against
the interests of what she saw as established
institutions, included among which was the civil
service. All this was presented in a famous phrase
that was invoked during her period of office,
‘getting the state off the backs of the people’.
Thatcher was seen by her critics as an old-
fashioned liberal. She expressed scepticism about
the existence of society as a force that stands
above the individual, she was a passionate free
marketeer and she knighted Friedrich Hayek
who challenged the consensus support for the
economist, John Maynard Keynes, in the 1950s
and 1960s.
The aspect of the state that she opposed was
the ‘welfare state’. Her policies certainly
weakened welfare provisions, and she argued
passionately that welfare state ‘handouts’
undermined the independence of the individual.
But what of the coercive dimensions of the state?
She strengthened the police (increasing their
pay), built more prisons and the military victory
over Argentina in the Falklands War boosted the
prestige of the armed forces and led to a strong
revival of patriotism. Her suspicious attitude
towards ‘aliens’ and multiculturalism took the
form of a potent English nationalism and lack
of enthusiasm for the European Union. If she was
a liberal, she was a conservative liberal who
appointed hereditary peers to the House of Lords
and opposed the African National Congress of
South Africa.
Her period of office raises sharply the
question of the nature of the state. If the state is
defined in terms of its welfare aspects, then she
was certainly anti-statist, but if we stress the
link between the state and force, then she
strengthened rather than weakened the state.
Moreover, critics saw her as a great centraliser,
establishing rule through appointed committees
(called quangos) and using the state’s interven-
tionist power to engineer denationalisation on
favourable terms to private investors. Thomas
Hobbes, a seventeenth-century champion of
state sovereignty, was reputedly her favourite
philosopher.
- Do you see Thatcher as a Tory (Conservative)
or a liberal?
- Is the state an institution that is more
concerned with providing welfare for citizens
than resorting to force?
- It is sometimes said that Thatcher sought to
establish a strong state and free economy. Do
you agree?
- How would you interpret the slogan of
‘getting the state off the backs of the people’?
Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013; British prime minister
1979–90)
© Greer Studios/Corbis
