This book tells the story of the rise of Margaret Thatcher in the context of crises assailing Britain in the 1970s and how her ascent to power ushered in the neoliberal era.
Forging the Iron Lady details her journey from relative obscurity to the pinnacle of power as a collective, as well as personal, tale and how an uncertain chain of events, influenced through ideas and political agency opened the path to certain outcomes while throwing up barriers to others. It is her origin story as the Iron Lady. It examines a dramatic phase in her political advance and how the tumultuous politics of the 1970s shaped her as a politician and her political ideals, and how the conditions necessary to bring about major political-economic change were created, leading to three decades of neoliberalism. In doing so, this book offers a better understanding of the political conditions needed for a change in political-economic orders.
This book is of key interest to scholars, students and readers of British politics and history, Thatcherism, political parties, elections, executive and elite politics.
This book tells the story of the rise of Margaret Thatcher in the context of crises assailing Britain in the 1970s and how her ascent to power ushered in the neoliberal era.
1. Thatcher, Crisis, and Transformation
2. The British Disease and the
Postwar Consensus
3. The Tragedy of Ted Heath
4. The Grocer and the Grocers
Daughter
5. Labour and the Death of Consensus
6. Cautious Margaret
7. Tell Me
How
8. No Confidence
9. Context, Contingency, and Conditions for Change
Terrence Casey is Professor of Political Science at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana, USA. He is also Senior Fellow at the Centre for British Politics at the University of Hull, UK.