The election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 was one of the most significant in British history. The fact that she was Britain's first female prime minister was one of the contributory factors. However, more significant was the fact that her election marked a rupture with the social-democratic or liberal-conservative Keynesian economic and social policies that dominated the post-war period. The Thatcher governments saw these policies as enemies, the root of Britain's decline and ultimately the cause of the economic crisis of the mid-1970s, which they exploited to achieve popular and electoral success. Thatcher had been part of the Heath cabinet in the early 1970s, which had been forced to abandon a series of radical free market policies in the face of a Miners Strike in 1972. She was determined not to be placed in such a position again. Thatcher was an ideologue rather than a pragmatist. Her ideology – a mixture of free market libertarianism and traditional Conservative social values – was even given a name: ‘Thatcherism’.

This volume seeks to examine the impact of Thatcherism in the fields of welfare and penal policy. It argues that those two areas have becoming increasingly intertwined. Since 1979, the UK has seen the prison population increase dramatically. There have been some periods where the numbers incarcerated have declined but the trend has generally been upward. In developing this analysis, I have used a framework based on Rose's (1994) model of a ‘history of the present’. This requires an investigation ‘from the point of view of a problem that concerns one today, the diverse connections and liaisons that have brought it into existence and given its saliency and its characteristics’ (Rose, 1994: 53).

The prison population is now double what it was in 1979. In addition, there is a hidden incarcerated population in immigration detention centres. Alongside the expansion of imprisonment, the welfare system has become more disciplinary. This volume argues that the Thatcherite legacy in welfare and penal policy has been this punitive turn. The major changes may have been introduced by her successors but there are Thatcherite fingerprints all over them. In shifting the debate towards the right, Thatcher ensured that the Labour Party moved with her.