Resumen de Great Britain: from "Thatcherism" to "Blairism"
Elena Oliete Aldea, José Francisco Fernández Sánchez, Celia Margaret Wallhead Salway
The year 2007 marks the tenth anniversary of the victory of Tony Blair's New Labour at the General Election after eighteen years of Conservative rule. It is also the time when, just before resigning the leadership, his popularity has reached the lowest level in the opinion polls. The participants in this round table thought this was a good opportunity not only to assess his legacy but to examine the development in British politics during the last thirty years. The aim of the present debate was to analyse in what direction the country had evolved under the influence of the most important politicians of the period, Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair, and to offer a complete picture of the state of the nation after three decades of change in the institutional and social structure of the country. Our interventions divided the period chronologically. Elena Oliete, from the University of Zaragoza, examined the impact in Britain of Thatcherism as an economic creed and a political project. Secondly, Dr José Francisco Fernández, from the University of Almería, focused on the period between Thatcher's resignation in November 1990 and Tony Blair's landslide victory in 1997. Finally Dr Celia Wallhead, from the University of Granada, made a revision of the Blair years (1997-2007). What follows is a brief summary of our talks, which were a preliminary step to a lively and fruitful debate on British politics.
