An Ideology of Class: Neo-Liberalism and the Trade Unions, c.1930-79

This chapter examines the attitude of the free market right to organised labour and this movement's role in legitimising the radical late twentieth century shift in the governing ideology of British industrial relations. It charts the history of the neo-liberal right’s opposition to trade unionism, from neo-liberalism’s earliest years as a subterranean movement against the collectivist politics of the 1930s and 1940s to the intellectual formation of Thatcherism in the 1970s.