The Battle for Britain is about a nation in transition. The ‘enterprise revolution’ of the 1980s has recast both popular attitudes and national institutions, leaving few aspects of British life untouched. The trade unions have rarely been weaker, but the traditional aristocratic establishment has never been so threatened. The middle class professionals, the arts, the universities, the broadcast media, all are affected by the new radicalism. Britain’s comfortable and complacent illusions, bred in the era of Empire, have finally started to give way to a more realistic view of the modern world and Britain’s place in it. Merit and ability are replacing the values of inherited position. Paternalism, whether of the left or right, is at an end.This is not a book primarily about Mrs Thatcher. It is a book about momentous changes in Britain that ‘Thatcherism’ has made possible. Written by an academic and politician whose own career and thinking has been intimately affected by these changes, it argues that sooner or later the ‘Thatcher revolution’ was inevitable - with or without Mrs Thatcher.Stephen Haseler provides portraits of a generation of establishment politicians whose vision was too firmly rooted in the past. He shows how a small group of radicals around Mrs Thatcher was able to set Britain on a new course. The 1980s has witnessed the arrival of a new middle class, whose individualist self-confidence is a force for progressive social change. Ultimately this will undermine the hold on the popular imagination of Britain’s outdated ancien régime - the Monarchy, the House of Lords, and the Established Church. The real contest now is not between Labour and Conservative or between left and right, but between the old and the new: between those forces who wish to perpetuate an insular, conservative, class-based nation, and those who are creating a new open society, able to compete in Europe and the world. As a result, Britons in the twenty-first century will live in a society that is founded on the more open, liberal and bourgeois models already found elsewhere in the Western world.
