Discussion: If no Thatcher, who founds political neoliberalism?

Perhaps Enoch Powell if he's more conventional on FP and less Wallaceite on race. (Before you ask, yes, liberal Tories did make that comparison)
 
Ronald Reagan in all likelyhood on the US side of things, but you could add as possibilities some of Maggie's Chancellors - Lawson and Howe. Prime ministers don't go for someone completely different at the steering wheel of the economy.
 
CCM: Thanks. So do you see any other candidate than Thatcher? Keith Joseph, but I don't think he'd be as successful.

Joseph was one of Thatcher's guiding lights so could be said to hav founded it anyway - we're really looking for who FRONTS it...

Who was big enough to have done so in 1980, hardly my best period ? Prior ?

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
RogueBeaver: Time to come clean. You're that Politician who caused a fuss by naming his cat (who subsequently died) Thatcher, aren't you? :rolleyes:
 
Ronald Reagan was already a neoliberal by the time Goldwater (himself a neoliberal) ran for President in sixty-four.

The real question might be who takes the lead of such a movement in the absence of both Thatcher and Reagan.
 
There were no prominent advocates in the US IIRC other than Reagan or Goldwater until the 1970s. Carter, of all people, started the ball rolling with small-scale privatization and deregulation.
 
Joseph was one of Thatcher's guiding lights so could be said to hav founded it

No, Powell was the one who really founded it as a stream of Conservative thinking within the party. All else flowed from him. Joseph was by contrast a deathbed convert.

If you simply take Thatcher out of the equation, then Joseph would have been the de facto head of the right in '75, but if he makes OTL's mistakes then he's already out.

God knows where the right would take it from there. You are probably going to have an identifiable split between the vanilla economic right (Joseph, Howe, Biffen) and the Powellites. (Tebbit, Ridley) Who knows how that would pan out.
 

Hendryk

Banned
You make it sound like Thatcher invented neoliberalism. She didn't, she just implemented it. Big difference, as the concept would be around to be picked up by another politician even without her. By the late 1970s, the sort-of-Keynesian policies that had kept Western economies humming along for three decades were showing their limits, and sooner or later someone would have looked into the alternatives.
 
Bobbis: Preferably both. I know neoliberalism did not appear in Canada until Brian Mulroney was elected Tory leader in 1983 and PM in 1984. It took 16 years of "Trudeaupia" for neoliberalism to become viable here. In the US, I don't see anyone other than Goldwater or Reagan.
 
I don't quite see how the Thatch did found neoliberalism. Bring it to the fore, sure, but create it? There were people working on these ideas for years before hand.

People like Heath and Australia's Malcolm Fraser were adament that they were the ones bringing free enterprise into or back into government. Their claims don't stand up well today.

Likewise the claims that Thatcher was a serious Friedmanite money supply person.

Maybe in this TL (no Thatch, no Reagan) NZ's Roger Douglas stands alone as the one person who tries to implement a non-deformed version of neoliberalism. Kind of like the revolutionaries who insisted they were always non-deformed communists.:D
 
FP= foreign policy. Magniac: Heath was wetter than an Olympic pool, and I don't know enough about Oz to judge Fraser economically.
 
Bobbis: Preferably both. I know neoliberalism did not appear in Canada until Brian Mulroney was elected Tory leader in 1983 and PM in 1984. It took 16 years of "Trudeaupia" for neoliberalism to become viable here. In the US, I don't see anyone other than Goldwater or Reagan.

Willie Whitelaw, or Edward Heath sticks to the Selsdon man
 
Heath was wetter than an Olympic pool, and I don't know enough about Oz to judge Fraser economically.

But he did go into the '70 election campaign promising to stand athwart history.

And Malcolm Fraser boasted that Ayn Rand was his favourite author! (And it's not as if he's a philistine who likes bad literature. He was making an ideological point.)

I think no Thatch/Reagan era means that more attention is paid to the failed market liberal pushes of the likes of Ford, Heath, Clark and Fraser--particularly if there are more Hawke-like progressive governments in the eighties introducing incremental reforms.
 
Maybe it's just me, but I can't see the man who gave the store away to the unions IOTL out-Thatchering Thatcher. In my research for High Wire Eire I didn't find the '70 Tory manifesto including the word "privatization" particularly not after the nationalization of RR.
 
Maybe it's just me, but I can't see the man who gave the store away to the unions IOTL out-Thatchering Thatcher. In my research for High Wire Eire I didn't find the '70 Tory manifesto including the word "privatization" particularly not after the nationalization of RR.

Selsdon is actually pretty important, RB. I read about it even before Internet 2.0 as an undergraduate. The British Right thinktanks consider it a great lost opportunity (a great WI?)

As for 'privatisation', I haven't read the Tory Party's 1970 campaign literature, but I do know that Heath was promising greater efficiency and choice (plus there's also the fact that the 'P' word has never been popular in British electoral politics, save for allowing the voters to buy their own council houses).

I don't think anyone has said anything about Heath being a successful free market advocate.

Anyway, you want to know what is the great economic policy that could have circumvented either Selsdon or Thatcherism? In Place Of Strife.

If IPOS is implemented by a Labour government in the late sixties then the great sore point of British political economics for the seventies is nipped in the bud, and you end up with someone like Hesseltine as Conservative PM in the eighties, followed by someone like G.Bone in the nineties for Labour. There is no Thatcher revolution, as there is no electoral base for a too radical agenda.
 
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