ABSTRACT
To save the country they believed they would have to wage war against much of it. According to the New Right, for 35 years the Tory Party had built bridges for its enemies and then retreated as those enemies used them to advance still further. ‘Consensus’ had really been one long surrender after another (Green, 2002: 216–18). The New Right therefore regarded their attacks as merely as overdue counterattacks (Green, 2002: 235–9; Dorey, 2011: 126–37). The unions had declared war. Local councils had been building their mini-socialist empires. Hooligans had lost respect for authority. And behind it all was the weak welfare parent, indulging the horrid behaviour of its brawling infants. No more. The harmony that Thatcher invoked when misquoting St. Francis of Assisi was to come by defeating your enemies, not by buying them off as Heath had done. In setting out to refight the battles of the 1970s Thatcherism would thus be a curious, inverted reflection of the fears and hatreds it projected out onto the world.
