Revisiting New Right citizenship discourse in Thatcher’s Britain

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine the rationales that Thatcher’s Britain employed in dealing with immigration and multicultural policies. With a focus on the responsible political elite hypothesis, I trace the role of New Right citizenship discourse as a combined reflection of elite behaviors as well as mass concerns. I analyze various writings and remarks of Enoch Powell as a precursor of the New Right, and those of Margaret Thatcher as an executor of the New Right, discourses of the reconstruction of the British nation and the bringing back of the active citizen as the main campaign of the New Right, and the emergence of two nations and controversies over the cause of this cleavage as a probable policy outcome of the New Right. Through the theoretical account of New Right citizenship as an unstable combination of libertarian individualism and republican conservatism, I offer an interpretation of post-war Britain that can explain the relationship between the shift toward neo-liberalism and shifts in immigration conceptions and multicultural policies.