British Politics: Thatcherism and Reaganomics

The polarization of the British political system can be traced back to the movement of Thatcherism. Thatcherism can be seen as the conviction politics, economic, social policy, and is the political movement that can even resemble Reaganomics. Just like Reaganomics, Thatcherism is considered a conservative movement that emphasizes heavily on the free markets, restraining government spending, privatization, deregulation, and tax cuts. These are the policies that Margaret Thatcher focused on; this political movement took place between 1979 and 1990 while she was the Prime Minister of the British Government. These policies ended up becoming the British Conservative party’s policy platform; this is similar to Reaganomics where the United States Conservative party keeps referring back to Reagan’s economic policy. This Paper will examine the policy structure of Thatcherism and comparing it to Reaganomics to show how both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan changed the political structure in Great Britain and the United States while they were in power and after.

First let’s take a look at Thatcherism, before we examine and compare the Reaganomics policies. Thatcherism policy key goal is to promote an economic aspect of lowering inflation, creating a small state, and free markets by creating a control of the money supply, ensuring constraints on the labor movement and privatization transferring ownership of business, agency, public service, and even public property from the public sector to the private sector. Nigel Lawson was the Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1983 to 1989 he suggested that Thatcherism promotes, “Free markets, Financial discipline, firm control over public expenditure, tax cuts, nationalism, ‘Victorian values’ (of th...

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