TL;DRAbstract
If one looks at Thatcherism through the prism of Enoch Powell, it becomes clear what Thatcherism is not: it is not a conservative philosophy of the nation. For Powell, the nation-state was the ‘ultimate political reality’. There was ‘no political reality beyond it’. In an effort to salvage that reality, Powell in 1963 argued for what he called a ‘new patriotism’ – oriented towards entrepreneurship and a post-imperial national pride. Five years later, it was again ‘the nation’ that took precedence, when he spoke of future national disintegration due to the supposedly unbreachable divide of racism. For Powell, civil society once ‘lost’ could not be found. In contrast, for Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s ‘reawakening’ was beyond itself, a reawakening of ‘the values and traditions on which Western civilization, and prosperity, are based’. Britain or Britishness came to be synonymous not with that fragile ‘web of understood relationships’ but with a set of values – with the ‘spirit of trade’ a
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If one looks at Thatcherism through the prism of Enoch Powell, it becomes clear what Thatcherism is not: it is not a conservative philosophy of the nation. For Powell, the nation-state was the ‘ultimate political reality’. There was ‘no political reality beyond it’. In an effort to salvage that reality, Powell in 1963 argued for what he called a ‘new patriotism’ – oriented towards entrepreneurship and a post-imperial national pride. Five years later, it was again ‘the nation’ that took precedence, when he spoke of future national disintegration due to the supposedly unbreachable divide of racism. For Powell, civil society once ‘lost’ could not be found. In contrast, for Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s ‘reawakening’ was beyond itself, a reawakening of ‘the values and traditions on which Western civilization, and prosperity, are based’. Britain or Britishness came to be synonymous not with that fragile ‘web of understood relationships’ but with a set of values – with the ‘spirit of trade’ a
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