It is worth noting that UK national politics since 1979 have been strongly signalled in terms of their departure from the past. Thus Mrs Thatcher was associated with a grouping which was defined as new, the political new Right. The Labour government that followed the years of Thatcherism first under Mrs Thatcher and then Mr Major determinedly rebadged itself as New Labour, pursuing a new third way (‘not state, not market’), committed to ‘modernisation’ (strange perhaps in a self-consciously post-modern age). The Conservative/LibDem coalition in power between 2010 and 2015 presented its policies as an innovative meld of those of its two constituent parties. Interestingly in his acceptance speech as Prime Minister of a majority Conservative government in 2015, David Cameron broke with this tradition, stressing his commitment to old style ‘one nation’ Toryism. Yet he promised in his manifesto what the Institute for Fiscal Studies described as the deepest cuts in welfare and the state for 80 years (Emmerson, 2015). Writing in 1985, Peter Taylor-Gooby explored two competing analyses of the Thatcher welfare reforms (Taylor-Gooby, 1985). One understood them as revolutionary, the other as an incremental extension of previous Conservative thinking. Whichever we accept, both acknowledge the ground-breaking nature of Thatcher’s policies and plans for welfare, either pushing further than before, or in a different direction.

There is no question that for those, like me, who grew up under the welfare state, Mrs Thatcher’s policies and those of her successors, have felt like a break with the past. The talk has constantly been of ending old shibboleths, ‘breaking out of the box’, challenging ‘sacred cows’ and questioning old assumptions. There has truly been radical change in the UK. Specifically there has been a constant questioning of the ‘welfare state’. Our economic base has fundamentally altered.