Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Instead New Labour’s campaign, aimed almost exclusively at marginal, ‘soft’ Conservative voters, inveighed against high taxes, corruption and inefficiency—the very objects of Mrs. Thatcher’s own attacks a generation before. If Tony Blair and his colleagues drew a discreet veil over the Thatcherite era, this was not by chance. Blair’s successes rested squarely upon a threefold inheritance from Mrs. (now Lady) Thatcher. First, she ‘normalized’ the radical dismantling of the public sector in industry and services and its replacement with the ‘privatized’, entrepreneurial Britain whose praises Blair sang with such gusto. Second, and in the process, she had destroyed the old Labour Party and facilitated the task of those who fought to reform it: Blair had merely to reap the rewards of their work. And third, as we have seen, her asperity and her intolerance of dissent and disagreement had fractured her own party and rendered it unelectable.