Martin Jacques was the editor of Marxism Today 1977-1991. MT became famous for, amongst other things, its pathbreaking analysis of Thatcherism. As a result, the magazine gained an important following among Thatcherites. In March this year they established a new online journal Thatcherism Today, its name being a tribute to Marxism Today. Its founder and editor Tim Aker invited Martin Jacques to write the opening article for its launch edition. The article is below.
Is Thatcherism still relevant? Martin Jacques
What has Thatcherism got to offer the UK, or indeed the world, in 2026, more than 35 years after Margaret Thatcher left office and nearly half a century since she was in full political bloom? The times are certainly very different: the two-party system, which reigned supreme throughout the twentieth century and well into this, is now fighting for survival, while the Conservative Party is struggling to survive as a major political force. Even more consequentially, the US has turned rogue and is in the process of ditching the post-1945 global order, which was largely its creation, abandoning the Atlantic Alliance, and turning its back on NATO. Meanwhile, China has, for over a decade, been the largest economy in the world as measured by GDP according to primary purchasing power and is fast emerging as the global leader. It is China’s rise which has destabilised America, leading to the phenomenon of Donald Trump, an American president who is likely to be of far greater historical consequence than Ronald Reagan, Thatcher’s soulmate, and who is presiding over the biggest shift in US politics since Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Not only has the world changed profoundly since the Thatcherite era, but the global changes we are now witnessing are of far greater consequence than those of the Thatcherite revolution. This is not to belittle the latter but to recognise that the present changes are global in scale and implication in a way that the Thatcherite revolution was not. The old order is dying, and the nature and terms of the new order are the subject of a huge global contest between China and the United States. This is why we live at a time of such acute global instability and unpredictability. In one way or another, the whole world is affected by and engulfed in this process, no nation can stand aside, be it concerning the future of NATO, Trump’s Western hemispheric expansionism, US tariffs, or China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
In retrospect, the global crisis started with the 2008 financial crisis, which emanated from the US, and is likely to last at least two more decades. For historical context, the last such struggle over the nature of the global order began in 1931 when the UK, the established global hegemon at the time, was forced to quit the gold standard and only reached a conclusion in 1945 when the US emerged as the new global hegemon, with the usurped UK now its very junior partner. The current dethroning of America is well underway but it still has a long way to go. Such shifts in the tectonic plates are prolonged, volatile, and turbulent processes, comprising many different phases and forms. The sheer radicalism of Trump’s project is a measure of the depth of America’s crisis as global hegemon.
Living in 2026, it is important to recognise the difference between the global existential crisis that we are now engulfed in and a domestic political project which succeeded in transforming British politics in the last quarter of the twentieth century and beyond.
The novelty of Thatcherism, when it burst on the domestic political scene from the mid-70s, should not be underestimated. Prior to that, the two major parties, Conservative and Labour, shared a great deal in terms of policy and attitude. Consensus politics aptly described the political scene between the end of the war and the mid-seventies. On becoming Conservative leader in 1975, Thatcher challenged that consensus, which had been the overarching post-1945 political response to the Second World War. She took issue with the welfare state, attacked the unions, praised the market and called for a reduction in the role and size of the state. We are now so familiar with these arguments that it is easy to forget just how radical they were in the seventies and eighties. In challenging the postwar consensus, she took on not just the Labour Party but the broad swathe of opinion in the Conservative Party that was committed to postwar social-democratic and liberal thinking, namely the so-called ‘wets’. Even more challengingly, these ideas informed much of British society.
In the 1979 election campaign, Thatcher fought a very different kind of election campaign to previous ones in the post-1945 period, the exception being the 1945 election, which was dominated by a huge groundswell of popular opinion demanding a very different Britain from that of the interwar period. Otherwise, elections had typically been fought with great caution, with campaigns largely targeted at a relatively small band of floating voters somewhere in the middle. Campaigns were short-term, narrowly conceived, and devoid of any big ideas. Thatcher’s campaign in 1979 was completely different; it was fought around big themes and big ideas. It was not just about winning the election but creating a different popular climate that would provide a fertile environment for a new kind of programme. Its aim was no less than a paradigm shift in the country.
No other modern British political leader has sought to shift the terms of political debate and policy in the way that Thatcher succeeded in doing. In 1945 the Second World War rather than Clement Atlee was the key factor in creating the new postwar desire for radical change. To this day, no other postwar British leader has come to assume hegemonic leadership over politics, society, and culture in the manner of Thatcher. Blair, in this context, cannot compare with Thatcher. He was derivative of Thatcher, a child of Thatcherism; he operated within, and was a disciple of, the same Thatcherite paradigm. New Labour was a Labour version of Thatcherism. Such hegemonic leadership requires a different kind of intellectual and philosophical vision, a capacity for strategic thinking, great courage, a very strong leader, and finely developed political skills, all of which Thatcher possessed in abundance.
The legacy of the Thatcherite revolution is still with us. It changed Britain profoundly, notably in the rise of a more individualistic mentality, the marketisation of society, the valorisation of money, the privatisation of the economy, and the retreat of nationalisation. In important respects it made the economy more efficient, more open to new sectors, and more responsive to the era of post-Fordism. But it also led to new dilemmas; the privatised public utilities created more problems than they solved, as exemplified by British Gas, the private rail companies, and most scandalously of all, the privatised water companies. The sale of council houses without a complementary programme of social housing has led to a grave crisis of affordable housing. While the failure to intervene in the areas most damaged by deindustrialisation has left them permanently damaged and their populations undermined.
To what extent is Thatcherism still able to offer a net positive with regard to Britain’s future or is its potential now largely exhausted. I would argue the latter. We live in very different times requiring very different responses and very different priorities and choices. Take the question of the state. The rise of China is intimately bound up with the success of the Chinese state. In stark contrast, Thatcher was confronted with the failure of the Soviet Union and the abject failure of the Soviet state. Or take America. The state is central to the Trump project, most obviously in its retreat from free trade and the imposition of the US’s highest tariffs for over a century. Tariffs represent a retreat not just from the idea of a domestic free market, but from a commitment to a global free market. Globalisation was at the very heart of the Reagan-Thatcher neo-liberal project of the 1980s but the US is now in headlong retreat from such ideas.
Does this mean that Thatcherism now has little or nothing to offer? I think not. Take myself as an example; or Marxism Today, the magazine I edited between 1977 and 1991. It was the first to use the term Thatcherism in a famous article by Stuart Hall entitled ‘The Great Moving Right Show’ which was published in January 1979 and in which he began to elaborate the concept of Thatcherism. Marxism Today, which was heavily influenced by the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, for over a decade sought to understand the nature of Thatcherism, the most important political project of the time in the UK and more widely in the West.
We did not subscribe to it, we were not Thatcherites, but we respected Thatcherism as the most creative and most important political project of the time, and Margaret Thatcher as its leader. We learnt a huge amount from it. For me, seeking to understand Thatcherism was a great education – about politics, about leadership, about how society might be changed. In this sense, Thatcherism remains hugely relevant, whatever the era, whatever the nature of the times. The same goes for all great political projects, whether of the right or the left: they are rich in lessons for the times in which we live, even if those times are very different.
Martin Jacques was the editor of Marxism Today between 1977 and 1991, the most influential political magazine of the 1980s. He was a major architect of its work on Thatcherism. Since the late 90s he has been working on China and East Asia. He is the author of the global best-seller ‘When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order’. His new book on China will be published next year.