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The Changing Tide – Some Recent Studies of Thatcherism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Abstract

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Review Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

1 While the Conservative party has been well served by historians (notably Robert Blake and John Ramsden) and featured in general works on British political parties (such as Robert Mackenzie's classic but dated study), no major political scientist before Philip Norton seems to have devoted a work exclusively to the party. This is in contrast to the numerous works about the Labour party.

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18 I now think it might be preferable to turn the triad into a quartet by distinguishing the ‘free’ (or degree of competition in the labour market) from the ‘collective’ (or degree of organization of the market) in ‘bargaining’. ‘Collectivity’ is low in the United States where a relatively low proportion of the labour-force and none of the employers are organized into unions but competition in the labour market is high. The reverse is the case in Sweden. Yet both countries over the postwar period as a whole have been more economically successful than the United Kingdom. I hope that this ‘impossible triad’ formulation is compatible with either a Keynesian or a monetarist analysis. Although a monetarist presumably would resist the implication that the rate of unemployment that does not accelerate inflation could be reduced by constraining competition among unions (i.e. reducing the ‘free’ in ‘free collective bargaining’), he would hold that unions as such (i.e. the ‘collective’ in ‘free collective bargaining’) by forcing wages above the competitive equilibrium price create unemployment. Interestingly the impossibility of the triad seems to be independent of capitalism: both communism (and presumably feudalism) have no place for free collective bargaining and apparently achieve a high level of price stability and a low level of unemployment (although also a low level of economic growth).

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