The Thatcher decade : how Britain has changed during the 1980s /

Riddell (US editor of the Financial Times) provides a sequel to his much respected The Thatcher Government (2nd ed., 1985). It is much less a reappraisal than an expansion of the thesis he developed in the earlier work, e.g., that Thatcherism is not a coherent ideological perspective or policy orientation but rather a highly individualized political style. After a brief introduction on the nature of Thatcherism, Riddell dedicates almost the entire book to the dimensions of Thatcher's economic policy, while the last two chapters discuss civil liberties and national security policy. Riddell argues convincingly that there is no such thing as the "Thatcher Revolution": her government has "worked with the grain" of policies initiated earlier; their radicalness was not planned but was only an ad hoc response to the failure of more moderate policy responses; the government has generally proceeded cautiously and with ideologically inconsistent policies whose coherence is only discernable in retrospect; the effects of the Thatcher decade, while not insignificant in terms of changed attitudes or agenda, do not constitute an enduring transformation of British political economy or the establishment of a new hegemonic project. For Riddell, Thatcherism reflects short- and long-term circumstances more than ideology. Along with D. Kavanagh's Thatcherism and British Politics (2nd ed., 1990; CH, Jan'88) and P. Jenkins's Mrs. Thatcher's Revolution (CH, Apr'89), this is one of the best treatments of the subject. Upper-division undergraduates and above. -J. B. Freyman, Transylvania University