Traces the former British prime minister's career and the effects of her policies and personality on the various social strata of England, from opposition politicians to coal miners to the patricians in her own party.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Dellheim's highly astute, evenhanded, fast-moving narrative sets Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's capitalist revolution in the context of British postwar history. Preaching self-reliance and entrepreneurial initiative, she reduced taxes, privatized nationalized industry and curtailed trade union power during her 11-year tenure, which ended in 1990. Dellheim, an Arizona State University history professor, argues that these measures were necessary to stem Britain's long economic decline, which he traces to the immediate postwar period, when an expensive welfare state was erected while both labor and management blocked modernization, each more intent on exploiting, rather than reforming, a faulty system. Under Thatcher, living standards rose for many, foreign investments rebounded, inflation was temporarily halted. Yet her policies aggravated old inequalities, further polarizing rich and poor, and this sweeping history blames her failure partly on "moral arrogance," on her "indifferent or mean-spirited attitude to those who could not help themselves."
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Treating Thatcher's years in power as history rather than current controversy, Dellheim embeds her program and political convictions into the undulating swell of Britain's rich past. Reaching for his theme as far back as the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, Dellheim builds a framework of Britain's anticapitalist sentiment that culminated in the socialist edifice erected by the Atlee government. This Thatcher sought to dismantle, and Dellheim delivers a sharp and persuasive analysis of Britain's deteriorating fiscal and monetary condition in the decade before she was able to implement her plan in 1979. It entailed squeezing out inflation, breaking the unions, and selling off state-owned industries. The critics' howling, mostly from the intellectual class, was tremendous and not untinged with condescension toward Thatcher's petit bourgeois background and penchant for Victorian homilies. The market: creator of wealth or inflicter of inequality? The 1980s answer to that question as studied by Dellheim becomes fluidly readable and provocative, for his conclusions will please neither Thatcherites nor Thatcher-hates, the self-evident sign of balanced, quality work. Gilbert Taylor
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