Robert Harris Quotes

Since the start of the Thatcher economic and fiscal reforms the U.K. economy has expanded five-fold.

Blair worshipped Thatcherism, could see little or no wrong in it, believed that that was what the country needed, thought that there was no alternative, regarded it as a legacy that had to be built on rather than rejected.

In the future, people will blame the Eighties for all societal ills in the same way that people have previously blamed the Sixties. The various Thatcherite Big Bangs - monetarism, deregulation, libertarianism - have been working their way through the culture ever since.

I believe Mrs. Thatcher's emphasis on enterprise was right.

In the 1980s and 1990s, radical change in economic policies fostered by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher put the brakes on government planning and ushered in a new free-market supply-side era and a two-decade boom. That model has been abandoned in the new century. This must be reversed.

In the 1980s and 1990s, anglophone conservatives were motivated by ideas so powerful that they spread from the United States and Britain to the rest of the world: faith in democracy, faith in free markets, faith in free trade.

In the 1980s, we were advised, why don't you follow Reaganomics or Thatcherite economics. We said, yes, there are good points, let's see how we can fit them in the Indian economy. Every country has its own way of moving forward.

I became a Conservative in the late 1980s because I could see that the Conservative party had transformed Britain's economy and our standing in the world compared to Labour in the 1980s.

So all the system was running down and collapsing. Mrs. Thatcher became the leader of the Conservative Party in February 1975, and she clearly wanted to strike out and do something different.

Thatcherism has become bigger than she ever was.

During the 1980s, many people mistook Thatcherism and Reaganism - actually a wild form of liberalism - for conservatism.

I was very identified with and accused of being a neo-liberal with respect to the economy.

I wonder if these people today would think Reagan was a Reagan conservative.

Well, in the past, the size of government was one of the more fundamental dividing lines between Right and Left. The Right was supposed to represent the small government philosophy - limited spending, low taxes. Obviously, things have shifted.

Margaret Thatcher was a 20th century visionary who understood the power of individual freedom versus the tyranny of government collectivism. She was a loyal supporter and friend of the United States and her terms as prime minister were marked as the beginning of the resurgence of the economy of the United Kingdom.

By tradition the Conservatives are, as the name shows, the party of laissez-faire, the opponents of change, the 'go-slows.' The Liberals are the party of change, the 'go-quicks.'

You should be cautious when criticizing the liberalization of economic theory.

Under Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., there was a rewriting of the basic rules of capitalism. These two governments changed the rules governing labour bargaining, weakening trade unions, and they weakened anti-trust enforcement, allowing more monopolies to be created.

Since the end of the 1970s, free-market capitalism has been in, and socialism has been out.

We are all living in a world shaped by Reagan and his ideology of small 'l' liberalism.

Since the 1980s, we've been living in this era, really, of corporate rule, based on this idea that the role of government is to liberate the power of capital so that they can have as much economic growth as quickly as possible, and then all good things will flow from that.

With each step away from communist constructivism to Hayekian capitalism, China has been richly rewarded.

Neoliberalism emerged by defining itself against what it labelled as an unrealistic and unsustainable programme of social welfare and public spending.

Neoliberalism became the leading economic ideology in the U.S. and in the U.K. during Ronald Reagan's and Margaret Thatcher's mandates. In this way, the leaders of the free world offered a viable solution to the economic crisis at the time: competition, deregulation, outsourcing, to name a few buzz words that have since become common place.

Geoffrey Howe's Budget of 1981 is remembered for transforming the economy and delivering economic freedoms to families and businesses.