Françoise Boucek analyses some of the pivotal rebellions within Thatcher’s Conservative party in her recent book. Though she had major policy successes, Thatcher created damaging factionalism within her own party. Its effects have been long-lasting.
Thatcher drove a wedge in the Conservative Party on the issue of Europe making it harder for her successors to keep the party together and slashing the odds of another Conservative majority any time soon. The factionalism Thatcher created on Europe in the late 1980s devastated John Major’s premiership. Since then euroscepticism has redefined new cohorts of Conservative MPs and forced David Cameron to promise a referendum on Britain’s EU membership to appease rebels. Crucially, this fracture has alienated many Conservative voters and made space for the UK Independence Party (UKIP) on the Conservatives’ right flank.
Thatcher’s anti-Europe stance dates back to the 1986 Westland Affair which drove Michael Heseltine out of cabinet. His defection revealed a widening gulf between Thatcherite Conservatives with liberal and anti-Europe views and pro-European interventionist Conservatives like Heseltine. This internal conflict sowed the seeds for a future leadership challenge.
Thatcher failed to convert the Conservative Party to Thatcherism despite taming the unions and saving Britain from economic collapse. She won a third triumphant election victory in 1987, a feat not achieved by any British Prime Minister since 1827. But her subsequent term in office was wasted. Isolated in No 10, she focused on divisive issues such as the poll tax and European Monetary Union (EMU) driving a wedge within her own party instead of between Conservatives and Labour.
Thatcher was enthusiastic about removing European trade barriers indeed calling it ‘Thatcherism on a European scale’. She signed up to the 1986 Single European Act (SEA) to create a single European market by 1992 and used European summits to grand-stand. However, to Thatcher European integration was a threat to Britain’s sovereignty and she had deep reservations about the extension of majority voting in Council (seen as a surrender of Britain’s veto), greater legislative powers for the European Parliament and European competence in foreign and security policy and she was hostile to Britain’s membership of the European Monetary System.
With British trade unions vanquished and the evil Soviet empire gone Thatcher turned to the European Union as her next foe. Her rhetoric on Europe became aggressive forcing Conservatives to choose between Thatcherism and Europe. To her Jacques Delors’ expansion of the European Commission’s authority was ‘creeping socialism through the back door’ and the single European market was ‘Fortress Europe’. Her 1988 speech at the College of Europe in Bruges exposed Conservative disunity prompting the formation of the Bruges Group a mainly Conservative eurosceptic advocacy group still in existence today.
Mistrust took hold of the Conservative Party but Thatcher ignored warnings of leadership challenges and drove her former comrades-in-arms Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson out of government. Howe’s resignation speech in the House of Commons in November 1990 was the tipping point for her downfall. He deplored her inability to unite the party on Europe and prompted Heseltine to make a bid for the leadership and ‘chart a new course on Europe.’ Heseltine cleverly transformed the context of the leadership race by focusing on the deeply unpopular poll tax which Thatcher had to abandon after violent riots in March 1990. By November that year she was perceived as an electoral liability pushing cabinet colleagues to discourage her from fighting the second round of voting in the leadership race which they feared she would lose. She was ousted by her own backbenchers despite grassroots support and a 100-seat majority.
Her successor John Major struggled to restore party unity throughout the Conservatives’ last parliament as Thatcher energised her anti-Europe crusade by helping launch the Referendum Party to fight the 1997 election. The Conservatives’ reduced majority in 1992 increased the leverage of a minority eurosceptic faction. Contentious European legislation incentivised these dissidents to question Major’s authority at critical junctures. I analyse some of these pivotal rebellions as strategic games in my recent book Factional Politics: How Dominant Parties Implode or Stabilize (Palgrave). In majoritarian democracies like Westminster, a heavy burden of party discipline falls on the party leader. This can be a strength or weakness depending on the leader’s conflict resolution capacity. Here Thatcher’s performance was damaging and its effects are long-lasting.
Françoise Boucek (Oct 2012) Factional Politics: How Dominant Parties Implode or Stabilize (Palgrave Macmillan) http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=276749
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Françoise Boucek is a Teaching Fellow in European Politics in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London, a Visiting Professor at the University of Witten Herdecke (Germany) and an Associate of the LSE Public Policy Group. A political scientist, she gained her PhD from LSE and researches chiefly on party politics in advanced industrial countries.
