Benjamin Thomas

@benjthomas.bsky.social

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Political Ideologies, 20th Century Centre-Right, Neoliberalisms, Thought in Political Parties of UK & DE, Transnational discourses and the conjuncture benjaminjthomas.net

Simplified Administration
significant adversary and the greatest political danger for the Thatcherite strategy is that the pains of transition to the new social and economic order of the 1990s may catapult into office a radical Labour administration pledged to interrupt, slow down, and transform the current restructuring. That is why the miners' strike assumes such importance. After a few more years, if the business logic of MacGregor is pursued, the miners will no longer be numerous or powerful enough to offer significant resistance. The Thatcher government and its allies know this very well. The decision to appoint MacGregor was a decision to accelerate the contraction of the mining industry and eliminate the subsidies, and to challenge the miners to contest the decision. The actual cost of keeping more pits open would not be enormous, but the political cost would be much higher. What the Government seeks is a symbolic affirmation that the logic of restructuring the economy to make all sectors internationally competitive cannot be resisted by any group of workers. Nevertheless the Government treads carefully. It has avoided involving itself too closely in particular managerial decisions. It merely sets the framework in which tough managerial decisions appear realistic and common sense and inescapable.
The political calculation is clear. Unemployment is not expected to fall very much, it might even rise slightly. This does not bother the Government. The unemployed are ignored. Lawson hardly referred to them in his budget speech. But for those in work, still the majority, substantial reductions in direct or indirect taxes will be made available. Tax cuts do not automatically buy votes, but tax increases are almost always unpopular. The aim of making tax cuts the Government's central economic objective is to provide tangible evidence that the economy is improving, that it is being well managed, that Britain at last really is on the right track. Howe made the control of inflation the Government's chief objective. This opened him to the charge of being a doctrinaire monetarist, wedded to an intellectual theory of how the economy worked
As a result despite the rise in unemployment and the collapse of manufacturing output and investment which brought the Government much temporary unpopularity the Government was still able to preserve its image as a Government which was planning for long term recovery and which would persevere with its policies whatever the short term costs. By 1982 the Thatcher government had already established this image. The severity of the slump, although unanticipated by the Thatcher cabinet, was used very adroitly to ram home the basic Thatcherite message: 'Things could not be allowed to go on as they were. Thirty years of neglect and misguided policies cannot be put right overnight. But the problems are too serious to be ignored any longer. Everyone knows they have to be tackled.' The Falklands war did not create this message or the Government's reputation for toughness, but it did make many voters believe that the Thatcher government was serious about seeing its policies through. The political message of the Falklands war was that persistence and resolution paid.
Yet perhaps the terms of this debate are misconceived. The Thatcher government has to be distinguished from the New Right, and Thatcherism as an ideology from Thatcherism as a set of policies and decisions. It is after all inconceivable that the New Right could be completely successful in all their aims. No political force ever is. But success is not to be measured by the actual achievement of all objectives, but rather by the extent to which a significant proportion of both the objectives and the priorities and the means to achieve them advanced by a particular group become endorsed and shared by other groups within the society. The progress of collectivist and socialist ideas in social policy and to a lesser extent in economic policy in this century is a striking example of this process, and the New Right constantly refer to it in their writings. The real question to ask about Thatcherism, therefore, is how far is it creating this kind of broader consensus for its policies and objectives. This is perhaps the hardest question of all to answer about contemporary British politics because the battle is joined at many separate points so that there is not one but many battles in progress and assessments of the overall picture are constantly changing. Electoral contests and trends of electoral opinion, the shifting fortunes of the political parties and the political leaders are only one barometer, although often the one paid most attention. Of critical importance also is what is happening to attitudes and behaviour in schools, factories, offices, shops, hospitals and a host of other institutions. Our knowledge of these trends is often unreliable and very incomplete, but the real long term success or failure of Thatcherism will be registered here. At the public level of parties and elections it is clear that Thatcherism has had some success with the open conversion of the leader of the SDP to the principles of the social market economy and his acceptance
Cool header image for the article. Thatcher as a spider with the UK in her web
Zelenskyy repeatedly drew on the Churchill and WWII narratives to render Ukraine’s situation intelligible to a British audience by embedding it within familiar narratives. In his first address to the UK Parliament, he declared: ‘We do not want to lose what we have, what is ours – Ukraine. Just as you did not want to lose your island when the Nazis were preparing to start the battle for your great power, the Battle for Britain’ (Zelenskyy, 8 March 2022). Here, he grounded Ukraine’s experience in one of Britain’s most enduring national myths – the story of standing alone against tyranny. He positioned Ukraine’s defence of its sovereignty as a contemporary counterpart to Britain’s wartime resistance, allowing UK audiences to make sense of Ukraine’s struggle through a familiar narrative story of the Battle of Britain. Narratives such as this were used throughout all of Zelenskyy’s speeches to make sense of Ukraine’s wartime experience for his UK audience. For example, in Zelenskyy’s last speech analysed for this research project, he stated: 80 years ago, Manchester survived the Christmas Blitz. This spring, the whole of Ukraine survived the Easter Blitz. 80 years ago, the Nazis razed Coventry. This year, the Ruscists created dozens of new Coventries in Ukraine. These are Bucha, Irpin, Borodyanka, Kharkiv, Mariupol. (Zelenskyy, 25 October 2024) Here, he used the Blitz to help the UK audience understand Ukraine’s wartime experience, explaining the suffering Ukraine is going through at the hands of Russia as similar to the suffering the United Kingdom endured during the Blitz. During the interview, our participant revealed that he read a book about the Blitz and personal stories of experiencing it, and, relatedly, Zelenskyy read a book about Churchill. He identified parallels between the United Kingdom then and Ukraine now and used them to inform his work, making sense of Ukraine’s current experience for the UK audience.
Person specification A. Essential: 1. Hold a degree at doctoral level in either Islamic Studies or Islamic Sciences, or in Christian Theology; 2. Have an established record in published scholarly research commensurate with the stage of their career, suitable to be considered as potentially eligible for inclusion in any research excellence exercise in which the University of Oxford engages; 3. Have a commitment to the religious tradition to which they belong, and be an active participant in their worshipping community;* 4. Have an appropriate familiarity with the Scriptures of their religious tradition.*
05 October 2025 - Revised Manuscript Submitted 05 October 2025 - With Journal Administrator 06 October 2025 - With Editor 21 March 2026 - Out for Review
I sent it to The Political Quarterly, the joint editors being Leonard Woolf and William Robson (Professor of Public Administration at LSE). This proved to be a mistake. Robson rang me up and berated me for sending what appeared to be ‘a piece of liberal propaganda’ which a good solid Socialist periodical could not possibly publish. It was in vain that I argued that James Meade, who had given this negative tax proposal a run for its money in his recent writings, was a member of the Labour Party. The ‘piece of propaganda’ was firmly rejected and remained unpublished, never to see the light of day.
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/essays/55680/the-blair-paradox
The Social Economy and the Democratic State: A new policy agenda Edited by Pete Alcock, Andrew Gamble, Ian Gough, Phil Lee, Alan Walker 'the Sheffield Group' foreword by David Blunkett MP
At the end of 2025, Modern British History published Charles Troup’s article ‘Roads to Economization: Valuing Life, Limb, and Leisure in the Social Democratic State’, which was awarded the 2024 Duncan Tanner Essay Prize. The article, which is well worth the read, draws on the work of Elizabeth Popp Berman’s Thinking Like an Economist, to challenge the established history of neoliberalism in Britain, identifying practices and policies in British public administration commonly associated with neoliberalism as predating Thatcher’s governments from 1979 and Thatcherism. Initially, I felt certain bemusement. At the beginning of 2025 I had published my own article, well worth the read, which draws on the work of Elizabeth Popp Berman’s Thinking Like an Economist to challenge the established history of neoliberalism in Britain, identifying practices and policies in British public administration commonly associated with neoliberalism as predating Thatcher’s governments from 1979 and Thatcherism. The more I thought about the articles, the more I was struck by a contrast. While Troup positions their article as against neoliberalism as explanation, I tend to see my article is broadly compatible and instead a modification of the neoliberalism argument. In spite of ostensibly similar arguments, we arrive at very different conclusions. Comparing my article to Troup’s can help explore where I see an important distinction that might be worth sharing.
Eine dieser Anekdoten bezieht sich noch auf die Zeit, bevor sie als einfache Abgeordnete für den Wahlkreis Finchley ins Unterhaus einzog. Thatcher hatte Chemie studiert und arbeitete nach ihrem Abschluss Anfang der 50er Jahre unter anderem in der Lebensmittelindustrie. In diesem Zusammenhang, so die Erzählung, soll sie mit ihrer Forschungsarbeit zur Entwicklung des Soft-Eis beigetragen haben. Auch wenn sich die Geschichte nicht zweifelsfrei bestätigen lässt, ist sie zu gut, um sie unerwähnt zu lassen, denn bekanntlich war Thatcher als Politikerin das Gegenteil von soft. Bereits 1976, als sie noch als Parteichefin der Conservative Party die Opposition anführte, verlieh ihr Radio Moskau nach einer geharnischten Rede nach allen Regeln der Kunst des Kalten Krieges den Spitznamen ›Eiserne Lady‹.
Nigel Ashford, Mark Hudson and Edward Locke - Federation of Conservative Students; Johan Bengt-Pahlsson - Fria Moderata Student Forbundt; Michel Claris and Patrick d'Humieres - Generation Sociale et Liberale; Michael Fisher - Fine Gael; Søren Høgehaven and Peter Stub Jorgensen - Danmarks Konservative Studerende; Jørn Johansen, Hans Kristian Lehmann and John Arthur Lunde - Norges Konservative Studenter Forbund; Rainer Taubert - Ring Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten
Image of Nigel Ashford w/ IHS badge from Wikipedia
European Democrat Students Executives in the 1970s - extract from Thuss and Bauer 'Students on the right way' (2012)
Scott Hamilton, from the cover of Conservatism, Christian Democracy and the dynamics of transformation: Traditions, cooperation and influence in North-West Europe, 1945-91 (2025)
... the Tories have arguably done more than simply reshape themselves: rather, they seem to have transformed themselves from a mainstream centre-right party into an ersatz radical right-wing populist outfit...
The chancellor also said she had received positive feedback after deciding to “get rid of” the chair of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) Marcus Bokkerink in January. Former Amazon UK boss Doug Gurr was appointed in his place, on an interim basis. That leadership shake-up, Reeves said, had led to a “massive step-change” that was welcomed by firms. “Previously businesses, all the time – especially in tech – had been raising concerns about the CMA. That has changed a lot.” Reeves acknowledged there was more to do in the City, including with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). However, she threw her weight behind chief executive, Nikhil Rathi, who was approved for a second five-year term in April. “When I wrote to regulators and asked: ‘What can you do to drive growth?’ … Nikhil responded positively to that. And that’s why we reappointed him to carry on heading up FCA.”
Where liberty is safer - for the moment
A cautionary lesson for Mrs Thatcher
Dear Mr Coats: You may know of this Centre which has been set up by Sir Keith Joseph and Mrs Margaret Thatcher to do some basic thinking about longer term politics with particular reference to the social market economy. One area of work we are developing is on inflation and the particular topic within this is to gather together information on how countries which have had to reform their monetary systems i.e. Germany after the war, went about it. Sir Paul Chambers discussed this with us the other day (he was responsible for a lot of the German change) and it was suggested that we ought to look at other countries' experience. As an economic historian perhaps you may know of good sources of information or a person who may help us on this matter. Your assistance with this would be much appreciated. Yours sincerely, Simon Webley Consultant Director of Studies
The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Rise of the Social Market Economy (1979)
Conservatism, Christian Democracy and the dynamics of transformation: Traditions, cooperation and influence in North-West Europe, 1945-91 Edited by Gary Love and Christian Egander Skov
Image from the Tottenham Hotspur website of their N17 merchandise range. N17 here refers to the postal code for Tottenham. Incidentally, the list of proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK includes Revolutionary Organization 17 November which is referred to on the list as N17.
Expenditure by Ideas Matter, formerly Battle of Ideas
In this context then, we can understand the EPP and its adoption of the concept of the social market economy as neither a deliberate shift to neoliberalism, nor a concerted move to the political right, nor any of the other rationalist accounts put forward in the institutionalist literature. Recall that the institutional histories centring on the EPP explain its position with reference to changes in the institutional form of the European Parliament, being pivot to build coalitions with liberals and conservatives, political distancing from socialism, the crisis of the welfare state and the influence of major politicians. In function, those developments may have resulted from semantic change, but they are not explanations for them. Instead, we see that the programme and its language reflected the ideas and dynamics of the broader transnational European Christian democratic political network. Discursively, the adoption of social market language coincided with attempts by both the left and right of the network to rejuvenate Christian democracy amid cultural and political changes, a focus on the future, a return to Christianity, and the longstanding factions around liberalism and social Catholicism. Given the language of social markets had been adopted much more widely in West Germany than just among Christian democrats, the return to core Christian democratic concepts is worthy of note.
Scholarship on the EPP and transnational institutions of the centre-right and Christian democracy, their formation and ideas has developed significantly in recent years. This is in part due to the opening of archival holdings, but also due to research funding from the institutions themselves and active scholarship from current and former members. The institutions which have garnered the most interest in this literature are the EPP and the European Democrat Union, a centre-right organization that arose at a similar time. Both substantively and methodologically, these works respond to earlier scholarship on European integration that focused on the importance of particular individuals or national interests. Instead, the focus of this newer literature is on institutions as actors within international and supranational political spaces, as well as spaces themselves where politics play out. The institutions, and the supranational, international and transnational politics they relate to, become the core actors and subjects of a European history. Here, studies of Christian democracy and the centre-right reflect methodological trends in the study of contemporary European history.
While the social market economy has been claimed as a universal value at the European level, it originates from a particular West German discourse of Christian democratic politics and economics. This article explores a key moment in this move from the particular to the claimed universal, the adoption of the concept at the supranational level in the first Political Programme of the European People’s Party (EPP). It argues that the invocation of the concept is best understood contextualized in the discourse and political networks of European Christian democrats, and their pursuit of ideological renewal, rather than through the narrow institutional interests of the EPP.
Ohne Kohle und ohne Montan-Mitbestimmung gäbe es auch keine soziale Marktwirtschaft. Und ohne soziale Marktwirtschaft gäbe es nicht das, was uns bei aller Unterschiedlichkeit der Standpunkte immer wieder zusammenführt. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/files/document/print/fr/speech_18_6904/SPEECH_18_6904_DE.pdf
Human rights advocates have plenty of specific policy demands. But is there more the UK could do to defend the system as a whole? For Gearty, Labour’s contortions reflect “the weakness that is at the core of Britain’s standing in the world, which voters can never be told about, because British voters continue to believe that this country is a world power”. The trouble, according to Gearty, is that these contortions only make the problem worse. “Britain has little credibility for three reasons,” he said. “One, it is seen as the child of America, with no independent engagement. Two, Britain is an imperial nation that has not yet addressed what imperialism meant; it still largely believes that it granted independence to grateful global south entities. And three, having left Europe, it has no strategic vision of anything.”
Die Frage: "Zeigen die Pollen in den Unterabtheilungen der Familien charakteristische Unterschiede", kann man weder mit einem einfachen Ja, noch mit einem Nein beantworten.
On transportation, the campaign’s signature proposal was to make buses free, with the MTA being compensated for the lost revenue. In 2023, the city’s Independent Budget Office estimated that this would cost about $650 million per year. Some transit advocates are skeptical of this proposal, arguing that improving service is more important than reducing fares, and that scarce transit dollars would be better spent elsewhere. On the other hand, free buses are not just about reducing costs to riders—without the need to collect fares, buses would move faster. (To be sure, if more people start using buses for short trips, that could cut the other way.) Whether or not free buses are the ideal transit policy, they have another important virtue: like a freeze in regulated rents, they would be an unambiguous promise made good on, a directly visible gain the administration could deliver relatively quickly. Legibility, simplicity, and universality are underrated virtues in policymaking. Other transportation policies might be better on paper. But it’s unlikely they would do as much to maintain support for the administration or build momentum for further reforms. Ironically, the criticism directed at this proposal by the Cuomo campaign and others may have made it more effective in this respect. $650 million is a lot, but it’s not an enormous amount in the scale of the city’s budget. And if the result is a free public service that people had been told was impossible, that will ease the path toward other, perhaps more ambitious, improvements. The discovery that we can have nice things is a powerful force to get people to demand more. Changes to the way the city’s streets are used should also be within the city’s power. More busways, less free parking, closing blocks with schools to cars during school hours—these are reforms that will provoke anger initially but, like congestion pricing, are likely to become much more popular once they are in place.
PIAE MEMORIAE MONUMENTUM MORTUIS SACRUM TRIUM BELLORUM FATO OPPRESSIS NON IN VANUM - MCMLIX
In the first case this would mean the Labour Party abandoning Clause IV; accepting the priority given to the control of inflation; renouncing protectionism whether in the form of tariffs, quotas or subsidies to shield any sector of the British economy from the need to be internationally competitive; and accepting a much smaller state sector, with lower taxation, selective rather than universal welfare provision, as well as the permanent weakening of trade union organisation and the institutions of popular sovereignty lessening their ability to intervene in the outcomes of free markets. No-one really expects the Labour Party to head down this road
The limitations faced by the Prime Minister have been reflected in her tactics in Cabinet, described by John Biffen as 'Stalinist'; she hectors, manipulates discussion, uses feminine wiles, sums up discussions at the beginning rather than at the end, and seeks to out-argue all opposition. The clause 'uses feminine wiles' is highlighted
As Grimond puts it: 'those who fear a violently chauvinistic Germany should remember that the one way to avoid this is to build her into European Unity ... People in the position of the Germans are apt to show their worst side if treated as pariahs or sent to Coventry'.
Those words serve a warning that the euphoria and commitment of the hustings can never replace the disciplines of daily administration. Constantly to be reminded of that is the challenge to these Benches. The contents of the Queen's Speech, I believe, live up to the concern of my hon. Friend. The Treasury Bench must balance a policy of reform and a sense of continuity. That is the hallmark of British public life. In so doing, over the past four years or so we have shifted the centre ground in British politics, and we invite the Opposition to accommodate themselves to the new landscape. Thus I conclude on the prospective fortunes of the Opposition. This Parliament will be decisive for the Labour party. The proposition can be put simply. Are the Labour Benches prepared to make substantial adjustments, or do they cling to the ancestral faiths? When German Socialism was in crisis a generation ago the reaction was fundamental. In the Bad Godesberg programme in 1959 the German Socialists specifically disavowed any Marxist connection and accepted the broad framework of the social market economy. That challenge awaits the Labour Benches.
The hon. Member for Gordon (Mr. Bruce) made an interesting observation about the need—which always seems to be expressed by the Liberal party—for consensus. To a certain extent, in a way that he may not like, I agree with the hon. Gentleman. If we had to have a consensus, I should like to consider the consensus that the German Chancellors of the Exchequer delivered for their economy throughout the post-war period. If I have a favourite economist and a favourite Chancellor of the Exchequer, the economist would be Euchen [sic] and the Chancellor of the Exchequer would be Erhard. Germany developed a social market economy in four crucial years, on principles established between 1948 and 1953, in which it said that its economy would be based on the pursuit of sound financial policies and on the importance of open markets and competition, and that nothing in the social market economy should damage incentives to work.
Lord Glasman: How Catholic Social Teaching rescued me from an academic crisis
At a time of great world turmoil and danger, a podcast series of truly profound conversations with twelve leading minds from across the world dares to reach far deeper than most into the philosophies, contradictions, errors and delusions of the age, and pulls together new strands of hope, amidst the current universal pessimism, gloom and general distrust of all by all. These are the trends which will have far more impact on our lives than any national government of any colour. · Are our democratic processes being fundamentally weakened by communications technology? Can our nation states hold together? Will the centre hold against polarised division , extremism and abuse? Can democratic capitalism be made to work for everyone? · Have the international rules-based order, and its supporting institutions, broken down, and what repairs or replaces it? · Has democracy of the old kind peaked and will the authoritarian methods and illiberal standards of bogus democracy prevail? · Just where are the new paths of hope and optimism and how do we find and follow them? Can the tide be turned? First Series Contributors; Baroness Onora O’Neill, Justice Stephen Breyer, Jesse Norman, Lord Robert Skidelsky, Bill Browder, Professor Joe Nye, Matt Ridley, Baroness Cathy Ashton, Sir Ferdinand Mount, Professor Jeremy Black, Professor Parag Khanna, James Vitali. More to come. All in conversation with David Howell.
Screenshot of David Howell tweets: I was appointed Minister for the Civil Service in 1970 and over time we succeeded in bringing total central civil service down from just under 800k to eventually 500k approx we have today. But it took 8-10 years! Why? Why so long to turn the Whitehall 'tanker' round? Because ONLY way to cut numbers is to cut functions, which takes years, and put them in the private sector under competition where possible. Neither Reeves nor her inquisitors have grasped this. What happened in 1970-80 was that numbers rose at first then, after brief Blair/Brown bump, settled well down as most nationalised and state owner industries were removed from public sector. After 1 mill Covid spike, now back around 500 again.
The neo-Austrian model is vastly superior to the Walrasian model, in regarding the operation of the market as a dynamic process, and in taking seriously the problem of disequilibrium. However, in attempting to make the model more realistic, the neo-Austrians have to abandon the rigour of the Walrasian system, with the result that they have no rational way of establishing their fundamental proposition of the beneficence of the market, which rests on nothing more than faith. In recognising that the market can never achieve equilibrium, the neo-Austrians abandon the possibility of demonstrating the rationality of a market solution since, even if the market process is an *expression* of the interaction of individual preferences, there is no way of showing that the market outcome is in any sense a *realisation* of those preferences. In particular, because the neo-Austrians have no way of conceptualising the formal properties of their model, they have no way of establishing the supposedly stabilising character of entrepreneurial activity, and so the socially beneficial character of entrepreneurial freedom. In short, the neo-Austrians offer a more realistic model of exchange, but the conclusions they draw from it have no rational foundation. This is why in practice the neo-Austrian defence of the market rests primarily on their critique of the bureaucratic irrationality of the state, and above all of state socialism, and on the associated claim that the freedom of the market is the necessary and sufficient condition for political freedom and democratic participation.
Finally, Keus ensured neoliberal influence in liberal circles by developing ties with the prominent journalist Henk Lunshof, who worked for the leading newspaper De Telegraaf before a temporary publication ban shut it down due to allegations that it had been an instrument of collaboration with the German occupier. Lunshof, who had joined the Mont Pelerin Society in 1950 together with Keus, co-founded the conservative weekly Elsevier after the war but left the publication when Keus offered him a job as editor-in-chief of De Nederlander.