Quotes About Thatcherism

Thatcherism has become bigger than she ever was.

Everything I had been taught to regard as a vice - and I still regard them as vices - under Thatcherism was in fact a virtue: Greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees.

I never swallowed in its entirety the free-market rhetoric of the Thatcherites. But I deeply sympathized with Thatcher's motives. She wanted the electorate to recognize that the individual's life is his own and the responsibility of living it cannot be borne by anyone else, still less by the state. She hoped to release the talent and enterprise that, notwithstanding decades of egalitarian claptrap, she believed yet to exist in British society. The

After the rise of Thatcherism, the smashing of the trade unions, and the post-cold war sense that any alternative to free-market capitalism was permanently discredited, you can see why the wealthy felt drunk on the sense of eternal victory.

During the 1980s, many people mistook Thatcherism and Reaganism - actually a wild form of liberalism - for conservatism.

While every effort is being undertaken to make the memory of the Thatcher government disappear, Thatcherism is still working its way through the system.

One of the most important things that a Thatcher government did was change the mood of the nation to give it back its confidence.

Spare me this sanctimony about politeness, please. There are millions of people in this country who hate the very word 'Thatcher' and 'Thatcherism,' which continues until this day.

The Margaret Thatchers of this country made it through - like I did - because of the grammar school system, which gave the opportunity of a lifetime to working-class kids. It put them on a level playing field with the privately educated kids, and opened up the top universities to them.

Blair - except at the edges - was a Thatcherite. Brown, in contrast, regarded Thatcherism as something that had to be taken on board while at the same time seeking to retain as much as possible of the Labour legacy, or 'Labour values,' as he would put it.

Blair worshipped Thatcherism, could see little or no wrong in it, believed that that was what the country needed, thought that there was no alternative, regarded it as a legacy that had to be built on rather than rejected.

Thatcherism, as an ideology, addresses the fears, the anxieties, the lost identities, of a people. It invites us to think about politics in images. It is addressed to our collective fantasies, to Britain as an imagined community, to the social imaginary.

My hope that Thatcher would inadvertently bring about a new political revolution was well and truly bogus. All that sprang out of Thatcherism were extreme financialisation, the triumph of the shopping mall over the corner store, the fetishisation of housing and Tony Blair.

I am sure future historians will say the biggest and most astonishing change in politics has been the embracing of all the tenets of Thatcherism by the party of Keir Hardie: trade union legislation, Europe, the replacement of Trident, 10 per cent tax for people who have made millions from their companies.

Britain's unions were broken and battered by Thatcherism and never recovered.

It is Cameron's cabinet of millionaires who are the real spongers given free rein to live out their Thatcherite fantasies at the expense of ordinary, decent communities throughout these islands.

My vehement distaste for Reaganism and Thatcherism is joined to 35.2 million Americans who voted against Reagan in 1980 (out of a total 76.5 million votes cast) and 37.5 million Americans who did likewise in 1984; and allied with 57.8% of the British electorate who voted against Mrs. Thatcher in 1987. Plus 56.1% anti-Thatcherites in 1979 and 57.6% in 1983. That is quite a lot of consensus repugnance.