Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May and Industrial Strategy: What the discursive appeal to industrial strategy by Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May might tell us about the prospect for radical policy change or continuity

Theresa May’s speech on July 11th 2016, delivered at the launch of her national campaign to become leader of the Conservative Party, was notable for its assertion that a government under her leadership would implement ‘a proper industrial strategy to get the whole economy firing’. May’s intervention on industrial strategy has served to reenergise the debate among British political economists pertaining to the role of industrial strategy in the modernisation of the United Kingdom economy with particular emphasis on whether the formation of the May government heralds the prospect for radical change or continuity in industrial strategy. This blog compares the discursive basis of the appeal to industrial strategy by Theresa May in her July speech with two speeches made by Margaret Thatcher forty years earlier in 1976. It explores what the differences in discourse between the two Prime Ministers and leaders of the Conservative party may mean for the prospect for change and continuity in industrial strategy.