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Article: Margaret Thatcher Alcin Bleasdale and the Struggle for Working-Class Identity.
- Article from:
- Journal of Popular Film & Television
- Article date:
- March 22, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Heldref Publications. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Margaret Thatcher challenged much of what had come to be considered "natural" in the long period of consensus politics into which Britain entered after World War II. Her goal, as Stuart Hall expresses it, was to "transform society" (103-04) by creating a new "common sense" based on the market, on distinctions between the productive and the unproductive, private and public, wealth creating and wealth consuming (Gamble 184), and on the privileging of freedom over equality (Hall 189). By so doing she inevitably lent a new sense of urgency and even crisis to perennial debates about national identity, class relationships, and the economic order.
Curiously, though, the ...