John Hudson

A longer version of this piece originally appeared in Policy World.

Remember, remember the 28th November… 1990. On this day, some fifteen years ago, and after more than eleven years as Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher’s period of power came to an end. After scraping through the first round ballet of the Conservative Party leadership race - where Michael Heseltine dealt her a fatal blow by gathering the support of more than forty percent of MPs - she eventually announced her intention to stand down on the morning of 22nd November and formally handed over power to John Major almost a week later when he topped a second poll of Conservative MPs.

It goes without saying that her premiership was one of dramatic and often traumatic social and economic change. I was part of the generation dubbed ‘Thatcher’s Children’, a term often invoked but rarely analysed. The idea that a whole generation have grown up with a more selfish set of attitudes because of the values at the heart of government during their formative years remains a powerful one and ‘Thatcher’s children’ is a widely understood – if sometimes throwaway - phrase that is regularly used in everyday speech. Indeed, last year, the then President of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NAS/UWT), Pat Lerew, blamed the group’s ‘devil take the hindmost’ attitudes for classroom indiscipline and the lack of respect shown to teachers. She told delegates at the NAS/UWT conference that: ‘Today’s parents were growing up in the 1980s, Thatcher’s children, when there was no such thing as society and it was everyone for themselves, when anything that had a monetary value was sold and anything that had no monetary value was therefore of no value […] Small wonder then that the children of the day grew up with attitudes that have manifested themselves in their own children.’ (see: Ward and Woodward, 2004).

Yet, while the term is commonly understood, it is less clear whom the term applies to. Martin Powell and John Stewart (2005) had a different group of people in mind – and less dramatic concerns - when, in a recent issue of Social Policy & Society, they worried that the academic world of ‘social policy has lost its ‘historical imagination’, with many students – Thatcher’s children, and in a few years Major’s children – not being exposed to social policy history’. When novelist Malcom Bradbury penned a piece on ‘Mrs Thatcher’s Children’ for the New York Times way back in 1988 he had yet another group in mind as he explored the values and lifestyle of the wealthy yuppies who ‘belong to her post-Industrial Revolution, her high-tech, innovation-driven, banking-led world [and] have made their dreams, careers, fortunes, and sometimes misfortunes, in the Thatcher era’.

All this begs the question ‘who are Thatcher’s Children?’ The people Bradbury described were hardly children – most being in their thirties and some in their forties during the Thatcher era - and almost all had done their growing up long before Thatcher came to power. While many academics are inclined to use the term as Powell and Stewart do when talking of their undergraduate students – often when bemoaning their lack of perspective or lack of sympathy for particular social groups or social policies - the truth is that few current students have any memory whatsoever of the Thatcher years; indeed, those 18 year olds who entered university this autumn had yet to start school when Mrs Thatcher left office and, outside of the circle of mature students, only those candidates with truly remarkable abilities of recall will have any first hand memories of the Thatcher era. Of course, Thatcher’s influence reverberates beyond the time she spent in power and the values of today’s teenagers are likely to have been heavily shaped by both the policies she introduced and the values of friends and family who lived through the Thatcher era; then again, much the same applies to the Major years, the Callaghan years, the Wilson years and so on.

If the term means anything, then surely it applies – as used by Lerew - to those who were children during the Thatcher era: people whose formative years spanned the period 1979-90, whose memories of Prime Ministers before Thatcher are at best hazy and whose first opportunity to cast a vote came after the Iron Lady had left office. In other words, Thatcher’s children are those who are aged around 25-35 today, many of whom, as Lerew observed, are now parents with children of their own.

A quick exploration of the British Social Attitudes allows us to compare the attitudes of Thatcher’s children with those of the rest of the country’s adult population. While the analysis here is rather crude, the data offers us some interesting discussion points.

Firstly, it is worth noting that – despite the hype offered in some quarters - the differences between the Thatcher generation and the rest are often very small and sometimes as good as non-existent. For instance, there is hardly a cigarette paper between the two on opinion about the gap between rich and poor, with 85% in both groups thinking it too large, 1% too small and the rest about right (these figures disregard ‘don’t knows’). Similarly, in both groups around a third agree strongly with the proposition that people who break the law should be given stiffer sentences and around 30% strongly agree that for some crimes the death penalty is the most appropriate sentence. Indeed, the survey’s composite left-right scale showed no discernable difference in the traditional left-right political leanings of Thatcher’s children.

Graph 1

In terms of support for the welfare state, the survey again found much to unite the two groups. So, for instance, in both groups around 85% agree that ‘large numbers of people these days falsely claim benefits’ and just under 80% believe the government should spend the same or less on supporting the unemployed. In fact, the survey’s composite welfare scale – which aims to measure the respondent’s degree of sympathy towards the welfare state - shows almost identical mean figures for the two groups.

Graph 2

However, the survey data does highlight some differences between the groups. In broad political terms, there seems to be a slight but significant lowering of interest in public affairs, with a smaller percentage of Thatcher’s children describing themselves as having much interest in what is going on in politics and fewer having ever written to a Member of Parliament. (Interestingly, despite common suggestions that the younger generation are now more inclined towards direct action, there is little difference between the groups in terms of having ever participated at demonstrations, though more of Thatcher’s children seem willing to go on a march if they were to be suitably angered by an issue.)

Graph 3

In social policy terms, there are some slight differences over priorities for public spending – Thatcher’s children placing a little more emphasis on education – but the significance of these differences are somewhat moot given that these two items are easily the top two priorities for both groups and the overall rank ordering of spending priorities shows no major differences. More interesting, perhaps, are differences between the two groups with regard to social support for specific groups within the society: Thatcher’s children are less supportive of increases in spending on benefits for retired people than the rest of the nation – though both feel more should spent (66% amongst Thatcher’s children against 75% for the rest) - and for increases in spending on benefits for disabled people who cannot work (though again with a majority favouring more: 61% amongst Thatcher’s children against 71% for the rest).

Graph 4

So far, so true the stereotype perhaps? This may be so, but if we look at attitudes towards support for some other groups in society we see a more complex picture emerging. With regards to social support for parents working on low incomes we see the picture reversed, with Thatcher’s children being slightly more in favour of increased spending (71% against 68%) but with twice as many being in favour of much more spending here (14% against 7%). Moreover, in terms of social support for single parents, Thatcher’s children prove to be much more supportive of increases in expenditure with 52% of them in favour of such action compared to just 34% amongst others.

Graph 5

These differing attitudes towards social support may in part be attributable to the two groups’ chances of falling into the specified client groups: Thatcher’s children are more likely to be working parents with young children and are still some way from retirement for instance. However, they also hint at a third area where there are some clear differences between the two groups: attitudes towards family forms and family life. So, for example, Thatcher’s children have a much more relaxed view towards marriage (with more than twice as many of them when compared to the rest of the population strongly agreeing that it is ‘all right for a couple to live together without intending to get married’) and differing views on the impact of female employment on children and family life (Thatcher’s children are around half as likely to agree that pre-school children suffer when their mother works for instance). Indeed, the survey’s libertarian-authoritarian scale – which aims to gauge adherence to ‘traditional values’ – is the only of one its three composite measures that shows any sort of generational patterning, with Thatcher’s children showing a small but significant shift away from authoritarian social views.

Graph 6

In short, Thatcher’s children show clear signs of being more socially liberal than their forbearers and a majority of them are clearly in support of increasing state expenditure in many policy areas and, indeed, favour it more heavily than other generations in key areas. While there are certainly areas in which they are less supportive of the welfare state than other generations, it is worth noting that their position is far from straightforward. Indeed, when asked whether the creation of the welfare state is one of Britain’s proudest achievements, they are less likely to agree with this proposition than previous generations but few regard it is a failure either; instead, they are much more likely to say the neither disagree or agree with what is a rather crude question - a reflection of their more complex position perhaps? Either way, the evidence does little to support the picture of a generation whose hearts and minds have been captured by Mrs Thatcher’s extolling of ‘Victorian’ social values and economic libertarianism.

Graph 7

In many ways this is hardly surprising. As the more astute reviews of her legacy have observed, Mrs Thatcher lives on not in the values of a single generation that grew up with her as their Prime Minister, but in the institutions she created and removed and the policy programmes she instituted and eradicated. How, of course, could it be any other way? If her influence on values was so great, then surely we should all, as Nick Assinder (2004) observed, be ‘Thatcher’s children and grandchildren’ now rather than just one cohort of us? It is puzzling too that it should so often be presumed that those of this generation who grew up outside of the bubble of prosperity Thatcher created mainly in South East England should be so fond of her values. Might it not, on the contrary, be that many of the twenty- and thirty-somethings who witnessed first hand the impacts of unemployment, the miners’ strike and rising inequality on their own parents are instead driven towards greater support for strong social policies? As North East based film maker Craig Hornby recently said when being interviewed about his documentary on the collapse of mining in the region, A Century of Stone, ‘I’m one of Thatcher’s children. I left school in 1983 and I’d like to thank her for giving me something to rebel against’.

Hornby’s usage goes against the grain of its popular understanding. So too does much of the statistical evidence. Fifteen years after Mrs Thatcher left office, perhaps its time to kick into touch the idea that ‘her children’ are carrying forward Thatcherite values.

References & Sources:

Assinder, N (2004) ‘Are We All Thatcher’s Children Now?’, BBC News Online, May 5th, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3670179.stm

Bradbury, M (1988) ‘Mrs Thatcher’s Children’, New York Times, December 11th.

National Centre for Social Research (2004) British Social Attitudes Survey, 2002 [computer file]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive [distributor], March 2004. SN: 4838.

Newton, K (2004) ‘The hills are alive’, The [Middlesbrough] Evening Gazette, October 8th.

Powell, M and Stewart, J (2005) ‘History and Social Policy’, Social Policy & Society, 4 (3), pp293-4.

Ward, L and Woodward, W (2004) ‘Thatcher’s children are today’s parents - and we’re paying price, say teachers’, The Guardian, April 13th.