Guy Ortolano: Thatcher's Progress: From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism through an English New Town
Book launch
All are welcome to attend a buffet lunch beforehand, at 12.30pm.
During the quarter of a century after the Second World War, the British
state designated thirty-two new towns across England, Scotland, Wales,
and Northern Ireland. Why, even before selling council houses or
denationalizing public industries, did Margaret Thatcher’s government
begin to privatise these new towns? By examining the most ambitious of
these projects, Milton Keynes, this talk revises our understanding of
British social democracy, arguing that the new towns comprised the
spatial dimension of the welfare state. Following the Prime Minister’s
progress on a tour through Milton Keynes on 25 September 1979, Ortolano
alights at successive stops to examine the broader histories of urban
planning, modernist architecture, and international consulting.
Thatcher’s journey reveals a dynamic social democracy during its decade
of crisis, while also indicating how public sector actors begrudgingly
accommodated the alternative priorities of market liberalism.