Losing the discursive battle but winning the ideological war: who holds Thatcherite values now?

In what ways, if at all, do past ideologies shape the values of subsequent
generations of citizens? Are public attitudes in one period shaped by the
discourses and constructions of an earlier generation of political leaders?
Using Thatcherism – one variant of the political New Right of the 1980s –
as the object of our enquiries, this paper explores the extent to which an
attitudinal legacy is detectable amongst the citizens of the UK some 40
years after Margaret Thatcher first became Prime Minister. Our paper,
drawing on survey data collected in early 2019 (n = 5,781), finds that
younger generations express and seemingly embrace key tenets of her
and her governments’ philosophies. Yet at the same time, they are keen
to describe her government’s policies as having ‘gone too far’. Our
contribution throws further light on the complex and often covert
character of attitudinal legacies. One reading of the data suggests that
younger generations do not attribute the broadly Thatcherite values that
they hold to Thatcher or Thatcherism since they were socialised
politically after such values had become normalised.

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