CHALLENGE:Thatcherism in the fifties?

As it says on the tin. Create a fifties where a form of Thatcherism dominates British politics with a POD of 1946.
 
I highly doubt it, unless Enoch Powell becomes Prime Minister. Which would discredit my ideology for decades to come.
 

Thande

Donor
Um, how? What would it be reacting against?

Even if Churchill's government didn't accept Attlee's nationalisations when they got back in in 1951 and reversed them, that couldn't be as radical as Thatcherism by definition, because that would mean there wasn't a socialist consensus to start with!

That's like saying "How can the U.S. South undergo Reconstruction in 1850?"
 
Sorry, methinks I should have said Monetarist. Is it possible, given the situation during the fifties?
 
Well part of thatcherism was rolling back some of the welfare state which was in the process of being implemented in the 50's you would be effectively be cancelling the creation of the welfare state in the first place, however I don't think that would technically be considered thatcherism per sey. That would be like calling American pre-new deal government economic policy reaganomics. As said before, thatcherism was reacting to something, since the 50's were before there was anything to react to in the respect, it wouldn't count.
 

Hendryk

Banned
I share the general consensus: Thatcherism was very much a product of its time, and couldn't have plausibly existed in a recognizable form before 1970 at the earliest, when the post-WW2 British socio-economic system began to sputter and break down.
 
1950s Liberals

Indeed, but it would need either a much stronger Liberal result in 1945 or perhaps a schism in the Conservative Party after 1945 neither of which is easy to imagine.

Had the Conservatives lost as badly in 1945 (213 seats) as they did in 1997 (161 seats) it's possible to imagine the narrow anti-welfare anti-european Chamberlainesque policies surviving. Perhaps Churchill would have retired earlier sensing there would be no quick way back for the party.

That said, Eden would presumably have inherited in say 1947 and though he bungled Suez, the main problem was his recurring bouts of ill-health.

If Labour win again convincingly in 1950 you're looking at 1955 at the earliest for a change - perhaps a Con-Lib Coalition with Liberals occcupying the economic portfolios and Tories the Home and Foreign Secretaryships.

The thing is, the Liberals themselves were moving away from their "small-state" vision under Jo Grimond in the late 50s.

The POD would have to be much earlier and far more radical for this to work - perhaps no WW2 at all.
 
As it says on the tin. Create a fifties where a form of Thatcherism dominates British politics with a POD of 1946.

What do you mean by Thatcherism?

Thatcherism is a reaction to the failure of the system internationally from the end of the 60s- rapidly rising welfare costs and strikes.

Of course in Britain, with relative decline it is possible to imagine radical solutions emerging earlier.

I think you face the problem that the extent of relative decline was not really evident until the end of the 50s/early 60s, leaving the first attempt to tackle this to Harold Wilson's. I suppose Tory victory in '64 could lead to something more radical..

The big POD here though remains ROBOT

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinetpapers/themes/crisis-creation-robot.htm
In early 1952 the Treasury and Bank of England advanced a plan to Richard ‘Rab’ Butler, which became known as ROBOT, an acronym derived from the names of its originators - Leslie Rowan, Sir George Bolton and Otto Clarke. The idea was to restore convertibility for non-resident sterling (sterling held outside Britain) as had been agreed at Bretton Woods. The major innovation of the plan, however, was that convertibility would be at as floating, rather than the current pegged rate of £1 to $2.80. This would mean the disruption of the Bretton Woods system. This was posited on pegged rates of currency exchange, which could only be changed by the International Monetary Fund under conditions of 'fundamental disequilibrium'.

ROBOT was politically controversial, as it would have alienated the American government by undermining Bretton Woods. In spite of Butler's arguments in favour, Cabinet turned down the scheme in February 1952 and again in June. In the event, the balance of payments improved during the year, pressure was taken off the pound, and Butler dropped the ROBOT scheme.

Although a macro-economic measure it would have created strong pressures for micro-economic reform by increasing the level of competition.
 
The problem is that no one even thought of those ideas at the time: they were considered to be outside the infamous "consensus". You can't privatize, deregulate, and put the nanny state on a strict diet if the nanny state is prevented by a solidly Blue Conservative Party.
 
The problem is that no one even thought of those ideas at the time: they were considered to be outside the infamous "consensus". You can't privatize, deregulate, and put the nanny state on a strict diet if the nanny state is prevented by a solidly Blue Conservative Party.

I think that might be a stretch, Powell and others, and the likes of ROBOT were monertarist in the 1950, the idea of curtailing the waste and excesses was hardly Thatcher's invention, indeed Thatcher was anti-Keynesian but I wouldn't call her much of a monertarist, her farming subisidies weren't exactly in the free-trade spirit.

Really the only chance I think you have here is for Labour to dominate 1945-1955+ and for the likes of Cripps to dominate, leading to massive nationalisation, anti-NATO policies (unlikely given Labour's hawkish anti-Soviet attitude at the time mind), anti-nuclear, crazy technocratic project and social engineering (the horrid phrase maximum wage springs to mind) etc. basically have Labour do everything in their power to make themselves unpopular keep ID Cards, extended rationing, bureaucratic inefficiency.

Then along comes the Tories promising liberty, freedom of enterprise etc. It would have to be a sliding scale, slowly towards dismantling welfare etc/. and Bretton Woods is a massive hurdle, but I think by end of the 1960s you might end up with a more American economic model, with all the unique oppourtunities and pitfalls that will bring.
 
I agree with what has been posted above. Thatcherism wasn’t some sort of bolt from the blue. You can’t bring in a solution until the problem is manifest. 95% of people in the fifties and early sixties were quite content with the overall structuring of the economy and saw no reason for radical change.

I would posit that part of the problem, if you want to define it as that, was that the electoral/economic cycles never brought themselves into a position where the climate was conducive to reform. By the time Labour took over in ‘64 the problems were becoming more evident, but Labour, for obvious reasons, was never committed to real reform. When Heath took over, it was all too easy to utter platitudes about stabilising the economy and making slight reforms, on the back of Labour’s extremely mixed record. All those big Heath ministers had had their heyday under Macmillan. They remembered that long stretch of government under One-Nation economics and naturally in the main they reached for all the familiar levers and toggles with regard to policy.

It is hard to decide how things would have been effected if the Conservative Party had had more mixed electoral fortunes; Labour’s economic record in the 1945-51 period did not provoke a strong response against the fundamentals. All that was envisaged was a return to ‘sunlit uplands’, I.E, getting off austerity. The position of the party electorally was still extremely weak in the early fifties (What was the Tory majority after ‘51? Twenty?) and consequently there was no real appetite for radicalism. ROBOT-style schemes were feared because, horror of horrors, they might produce a temporary rise in unemployment, with an expected serious electoral knock-on. As Full Employment was the top deity in the Butskillite pantheon, anything which was perceived to aggravate it, how slightly and for however short a period and for whatever sort of long-term economic advantage, was more or less automatically deemed to be deeply wrong in the fifties.

Really, though, it depends on what you consider to be the strongest features of Thatcherism. Monetarism itself encompasses a range of economic tenets and was a reasonably small part of the overall package. I would argue that privatisation and trade union reform were actually more salient, and politically decisive features than monetarism. And both of those were much more likely to be adopted by the Tories in the ‘45-’79 period. Privatisation actually was, it was just incredibly limited, and was, in the most prominent case of iron and steel, reversed by Labour. Trade Union reform was also being raised by the mid sixties, but despite the Heath government’s dalliances with it, it was never properly implemented because of the immense obstacles. (Namely, the unions still thought they should be allowed to do whatever the hell they wanted, and people still had a tolerance for it.)

Unless you have a politically prehistoric POD, I don’t think you can get Thatcherism in the fifties. At all. The earliest, I think, you could contrive something even vaguely like Thatcherism with a post-war POD would be the mid-to-late sixties. But you would have to be very creative.

So not sure really. Having the Conservatives lose in ‘59, or thereabouts, might be an interesting one. How about trying to wrangle Peter Thorneycroft into the leadership?
 
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