Martin Pugh on the popularity of the welfare state

• British Social Attitudes: The 1987 Report edited by Roger Jowell, Sharon Witherspoon and Lindsay Brock
  Gower, 260 pp, £28.50, October 1987, ISBN 0 556 00740 9
• Educational Opportunity and Social Change in England by Michael Sanderson
  Faber, 164 pp, £3.95, September 1987, ISBN 0 571 14876 X
• Wealth and Inequality in Britain by W.D. Rubinstein
  Faber, 167 pp, £3.95, August 1986, ISBN 0 571 13924 8
• A Property-Owning Democracy? Housing in Britain by M.J. Daunton
  Faber, 148 pp, £3.95, September 1987, ISBN 0 571 14615 5
• The Government of Space: Town Planning in Modern Society by Alison Ravetz
  Faber, 154 pp, £3.95, August 1986, ISBN 0 571 14568 X

One of the few growth areas in Britain today is the Thatcher industry. Battalions of journalists, political scientists and ‘contemporary historians’ are busily exploiting the phenomenon of ‘Thatcherism’ by analysing its origins, meaning and impact. No doubt, from the perspective of the British political élite, cocooned in the hothouse atmosphere of Whitehall-Westminster, it appears a very real thing. But peer below the froth into the minds of ordinary people, and the Thatcher revolution – even after eight and a half years of upheaval – is remarkably difficult to detect. This is the most striking message which emerges from the 1987 Report on British Social Attitudes, issued by Social and Community Planning, an independent institute founded in 1969. One of the great merits of the SCPR survey is that it poses many of the same questions to its sample from one year to the next: as a result, it is able to identify real, if gradual, shifts in popular attitudes, as opposed to the short-term vacillations which are the stuff of most opinion polling and social science.