The British swing to the Right predates Thatcher by a decade

Evidence

No one seriously concerned with the development of Left political strategies in the present situation can afford to ignore the “swing to the Right” which is taking place. We may not yet fully understand its extent, specific character, causes, or effects. There is still some debate as to whether it is likely to be short-lived or long-term, a movement of the surface or something more deeply lodged in the body politic. But the tendency is hard to deny. It no longer looks like a temporary swing of the pendulum in political fortunes. Indeed, it would be wrong to identify the rise of the radical Right solely with the success in the political party stakes of Mrs. Thatcher and the hard-edged cronies she has borne with her into high office inside the Conservative Party. Mrs. Thatcher has given the “swing to the Right” a powerful impetus and a distinctive personal stamp, but the deeper movement which finds in her its personification has—when properly analyzed—a much longer trajectory. 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. It was this Heath version of the backlash—a chillingly reactionary specter in its own way—which the miners and others stopped in its tracks. But they did not cut short the underlying movement. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1089

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Hall’s Gramscian analysis elsewhere in the book — Thatcher as the condensation of a longer organic shift rather than an episodic leader.