The British swing to the Right began in the late 1960s, not with Thatcher.

Evidence

It has been well installed—a going concern—since the late 1960s. It has developed through a number of different phases. First, the “backlash” against the revolutionary ferment of “1968” and all that. Then, the bold, populist bid by Mr. Powell—speaking over the heads of the party factions to “the people,” helping to construct “the people” in their most patriotic, racist, constitutional disguise. Then—borrowing the clothes of his opponent, in the best Tory tradition—Mr. Heath: a politician instinctively of the soft center, but not averse, in the anxiety-ridden days of the early 1970s, to going to the country with a program to restore “Selsdon Man”—a close cousin of Neanderthal Man—to the center of British politics. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1089

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s concept of organic crisis and Hall’s later ‘authoritarian populism’ framework, and to the economic thought of Thatcher/neoliberalism discussed across these essays.