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government union pressure for increases in wages was expressed through strikes and unrest. Agreement between governments and workers, without which the Keynesian circle could not function, was breaking down.
    Despite the pressure on Keynesian economic measures, prime ministers from Attlee to Wilson had accepted, to a greater or lesser extent, the need for government to be involved in industry, wages and prices. This ‘collectivist’ consensus, supporting bargaining through unions and collective responsibility between workers and government, was perhaps the legacy of the landslide Labour victory in 1945. That had been a vote for a new and different way of arranging society, and equality was fundamental. It was deeply embedded in British thinking. Politically, there was still no real ideological challenge to this basic principle.
    Harold Macmillan had announced the first application for Britain to join the EEC in 1961, but this attempt was vetoed by the French President General de Gaulle in 1963. Edward Heath was intimately involved in Britain’s negotiations for membership. In 1971, the House of Commons voted in favour of membership, and Britain joined in 1973. Membership had been confirmed in a referendum called by the Wilson government in 1975. Controversies over Europe were to plague the Conservative Party in the 1990s under Major.
    Collectivism or Keynesian were not ideologies or principles that Margaret Thatcher agreed with. Her childhood ethic of hard work and success may have given her grounding in individualism. Certainly Alfred Roberts helped others, but he did not do so by losing or threatening his own position. ‘Charity begins at home’ ensures that what is given is only given after individual and family needs are well catered for. Personally, she was well suited to ideologies that stressed individual gains and individual work. Her first action as Secretary for Education had been to try and slow down the growth of large comprehensive schools. She had a deep distrust of socialists, started by her reading of Hayek at Oxford, made personal by the defeat of her father by socialists in Grantham in 1952, and supported by her visit to Soviet Russia. Her personal views had little outlet in previous years: although Robert Blake describes the Heath manifesto of 1970 as a ‘right wing’ document, 1 the actions of the government in office were to continue to support industry and to bargain, where possible, with the unions.
    The ideological argument against collectivism was first put forward by Keith Joseph. He spoke about the ‘socialist danger’ of previous governments, including Conservative ones. These ideas were far more in tune with Margaret Thatcher’s instincts, where individual equality and freedom depended not on the actions of the government but in the hard work and enterprise of the individual; where full employment was not a goal but an evil, because it took away the incentive to work hard; where rights to education and housing took away a man’s basic duty to care for himself and his own family; and where the taxation and government spending needed to support welfare arrangements was money the individual should have the right to spend themselves. This alternative drew on the economic ideas of Milton Friedman, and became known as ‘monetarism’. Here, inflation is seen as happening because the government allows the supply of money in the economy to grow by providing subsidies for industry and wage rises. A government’s sole responsibility is to reduce the amount of money in the economy by reducing spending. This action, coupled with valuing individual enterprise and avoiding any form of collectivism, is the foundation of the philosophy that Keith Joseph was speaking about, Margaret Thatcher implemented and which became known as ‘Thatcherism’.
    On that morning in 1975, these ideas were new and unpopular. Keith Joseph had begun to move away from