A new article with Dr James Silverwood describing our analysis of industrial policy over the decade of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative premiership in the United Kingdom, published in BJPIR.

What’s it about?

Selective industrial policy in the United Kingdom is conventionally believed to have vanished prior to the global financial crisis.

However in this article, we argue that industrial policy did not vanish.

Rather it remained an intrinsic, if seldom acknowledged, element of neoliberal statecraft.

The basis of this is a subterfuge. We conceptualise it as a ‘dual industrial policy’.

We look closely at the Thatcher governments, and find that throughout this time, actions explicitly endorsed by governments as industrial policy generally corresponded with neoliberalism’s hostility to intervention.

These conveniently distracted attention from a second set of policies which were intended to affect the allocation of resources between economic activity, but which were never codified by government as industrial policy,

Our analysis of official government publications and expenditure revealed that industrial policy expenditure under Thatcher was far higher than customarily reported.

It is our argument that this understanding of the United Kingdom’s approach has important implications for debates about neoliberal resilience, especially neoliberalism’s capacity to conscript apparently contradictory ideas.

Full citation:

Woodward, R., & Silverwood, J. (2022). What We Do in the Shadows: dual industrial policy during the Thatcher governments, 1979–1990. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 13691481221077854. Link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13691481221077854