“There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families… It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbour.”
Margaret Thatcher, interview for Woman’s Own, 1987
Margaret Thatcher made this remark partway through her third term as Prime Minister. It became the most quoted line of her premiership. Critics read it as a rejection of collective responsibility for one another. Supporters read it as a call for individuals and families to take charge of their own lives, rather than waiting for the state to act.
That argument, that individuals and families bear the main responsibility for their own welfare rather than the state, sits at the heart of the New Right, a sociological perspective this page introduces, applies and evaluates. By the end, you should be able to test whether Thatcher‘s claim still holds up against the discipline’s evidence.
The main sections of this page are:
- What is the New Right? Origins and Core Ideas
- The New Right and the Family
- The New Right, Welfare and the Underclass
- The New Right and Education: Marketisation and Parentocracy
- The New Right and Crime: Right Realism
- Evaluating the New Right
- Applying the New Right Across the A Level
- Summary
What is the New Right? Origins and Core Ideas
The New Right is not one thinker’s theory. It is a fusion of two older traditions –
Neoliberalism (economic theory associated with Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, arguing that free markets allocate resources better than state planning) supplies its economic ideas.
Neoconservatism (the belief that traditional institutions such as marriage, the nuclear family and religion hold society together) supplies its social ideas.
In Britain, this fusion became government policy under Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990.
In the United States, a similar programme was pursued under President Ronald Reagan. Sociologically, the New Right is best understood as a structural, consensus perspective. Like functionalism, it treats society’s institutions as working best when they perform a shared, functional design. Unlike functionalism, it reaches openly political conclusions about which policies should follow.
Where functionalists such as Talcott Parsons tend to treat the welfare state neutrally, as one more institution meeting a functional need, New Right thinkers treat a large welfare state as actively harmful. In their view, it undermines the very self-reliance and family responsibility it was meant to protect.
| Key terms |
| New Right: a structural, consensus perspective combining free-market economics with traditional social values, influential on UK and US government policy from the late 1970s. |
| Neoliberalism: the economic strand of New Right thinking, arguing that free markets and minimal state intervention produce the best outcomes (Hayek, Friedman). |
| Neoconservatism: the social strand of New Right thinking, defending traditional institutions such as marriage and religion as sources of social order. |
| Laissez-faire economics: an approach in which government intervenes as little as possible in the economy, leaving outcomes to the free market. |
| Meritocracy: a society in which people’s position is decided mainly by their own ability and effort, rather than by their family background. |
Four beliefs recur across almost every New Right application, and each is developed in the sections that follow.
- The state should intervene as little as possible in the economy and in family life.
- Private property and free markets outperform state planning at meeting people’s needs.
- The traditional, married nuclear family is the most effective unit for raising children and maintaining order.
- Welfare should be minimal and targeted, because generous provision breeds a dependency culture rather than solving poverty.
| ANALYSIS — AO2 | EVALUATION — AO3 |
| Functionalism and the New Right share a structural, consensus starting point: both treat institutions as meeting society’s functional needs. The New Right goes further, turning that shared framework into explicit, often controversial policy demands, such as rolling back welfare, that functionalism‘s more descriptive account of institutions does not make. | Peter Saunders (1996) claimed Britain already functions as a meritocracy, so state support beyond a minimum is unnecessary. Richard Breen (1999) reanalysed Saunders‘ own data and found class origin still shapes outcomes strongly. This weakens the “equal opportunity” premise the New Right relies on to justify withdrawing state support. |
| Key Takeaways |
| The New Right combines neoliberalism‘s free-market economics with neoconservatism‘s traditional social values. |
| It is a structural, consensus perspective, closer to functionalism than to Marxism or feminism. |
| It became UK and US government policy under Thatcher and Reagan from the late 1970s. |
| Peter Saunders‘ claim that Britain is a meritocracy has been directly challenged by Richard Breen using the same evidence. |
The New Right and the Family
Thatcher‘s claim that “there is no such thing as society… there are individual men and women, and there are families” places the family, not the state, at the centre of social order. The New Right sees the decline of the traditional nuclear family, through rising divorce, cohabitation and lone parenthood, as a cause of wider social problems such as juvenile crime and low educational achievement, not simply a symptom of them.
David Marsland develops this argument in Welfare or Welfare State? (1996). He claims that generous welfare removes the financial and moral pressure on fathers to support their own children, weakening the two-parent family still further. Feminist sociologists respond that this account idealises a patriarchal arrangement that can mask inequality and abuse within marriage.
| Claim about the family | Supporting source | Counter-evidence |
| Generous welfare weakens the two-parent family by reducing pressure on fathers to provide for their children. | David Marsland (1996) | Bill Jordan argues Marsland wrongly blames a dependency culture, when benefits are often too low rather than too generous. |
| A welfare-dependent underclass forms when lone parenthood is not discouraged. | Charles Murray, Losing Ground (1984) and The Emerging British Underclass (1989) | Most lone parents want paid work, and evidence suggests benefits are frequently insufficient rather than overly generous. |
| Married, two-parent families produce the best outcomes for children. | New Right family policy under Margaret Thatcher | Feminist critics argue this idealises a patriarchal model of the family that can obscure inequality or abuse within marriage. |
Table 1: New Right claims about the family, tested against sociological counter-evidence.
Three implications follow from this view of the family.
- Family policy should actively encourage marriage, for example through the tax system.
- Support for lone parents should be conditional, to avoid creating perverse incentives.
- Family breakdown, not poverty alone, is treated as a root cause of wider social problems.
| ANALYSIS — AO2 | EVALUATION — AO3 |
| The New Right‘s view of the family echoes functionalism‘s warm endorsement of the nuclear family, close to Talcott Parsons’ “warm bath” theory of the family’s stabilising role. It goes further than functionalism by treating family breakdown as an active cause of poverty and crime, not just one function among several. | Bill Jordan‘s rebuttal of David Marsland suggests the New Right‘s causal claim, that family breakdown produces an underclass, is asserted more confidently than the evidence supports. The direction of cause and effect, whether poverty causes family stress or family breakdown causes poverty, remains genuinely disputed. |
| Key Takeaways |
| The New Right treats the married nuclear family, not the state, as the basic unit of social order. |
| David Marsland argues generous welfare removes fathers’ financial responsibility for their children. |
| Charles Murray links rising lone parenthood to welfare dependency and juvenile crime. |
| Bill Jordan and feminist sociologists both challenge the New Right‘s causal story about family breakdown. |
| Check your understanding |
| Outline two New Right beliefs about the family. You could: choose two from minimal state support for lone parents, the promotion of marriage, and the family’s stabilising role, and attach a named thinker to each. |
| “The New Right‘s view of the family blames individuals rather than social structures.” To what extent do you agree? You should: state the New Right’s claim using Marsland or Murray, set it against Jordan’s or a feminist counter-argument, then reach an explicit, justified judgement. |
The New Right, Welfare and the Underclass
Charles Murray‘s Losing Ground (1984) argues that US welfare policy, however well-intentioned, created perverse incentives that reduced work effort and encouraged dependency. In 1989, The Sunday Times invited Murray to Britain to test whether the same pattern was emerging here. His resulting pamphlet, The Emerging British Underclass, described himself as “a visitor from a plague area come to see whether the disease is spreading.”
David Marsland extends this argument in Welfare or Welfare State? (1996). He claims that state welfare should be minimal, selective and used only as a last resort, otherwise it erodes not just self-reliance but wider “other-regarding” values such as neighbourliness.
| Key terms |
| Underclass: a group cut off from mainstream society, said by Charles Murray to be shaped by long-term welfare dependency rather than low income alone. |
| Dependency culture: a way of life in which routine reliance on state benefits weakens the incentive to work and to take personal responsibility. |
| Perverse incentive: a feature of a policy that produces the opposite of its intended effect, for example welfare that ends up discouraging the work it is meant to support. |
| Other-regarding values: Marsland’s term for qualities such as neighbourliness and mutual obligation, which he argues are eroded when the state takes over their function. |
| Perspectives | |||
| Perspective | View on welfare and the underclass | Key thinker or study | Main criticism |
| New Right | Welfare should be minimal and targeted. Generous, unconditional benefits create a dependency culture. | Charles Murray (1984, 1989); David Marsland (1996) | Assumes claimants choose dependency; most lone parents want paid work and benefits are often insufficient. |
| Functionalism | Welfare performs a positive function, cushioning economic misfortune and maintaining social solidarity. | Drawing on Émile Durkheim’s concept of social solidarity | Does not explain why welfare provision varies so widely between similar capitalist societies. |
| Marxism | Welfare is a concession that keeps workers loyal to capitalism, without addressing its underlying inequalities. | Ian Gough’s political economy of the welfare state (1979) | Underestimates the genuine, lasting gains welfare has delivered for working-class living standards. |
| Feminism | The welfare state assumes and reinforces women’s unpaid caring role within the family. | Elizabeth Wilson‘s feminist critique of welfare (1977) | The New Right responds that this ignores growing numbers of male claimants and lone fathers. |
Two contrasts stand out when these perspectives are placed side by side.
- New Right and Marxist accounts both criticise the welfare state, but for opposite reasons: one blames it for undermining self-reliance, the other for propping up an unequal system.
- Functionalist and feminist accounts both stress welfare’s supportive function, but disagree sharply about who that support really benefits.
| ANALYSIS — AO2 | EVALUATION — AO3 |
| The New Right and Marxism reach the same negative verdict on the welfare state through opposite reasoning. The New Right sees dependency as the problem; Marxism sees the welfare state as too weak a fix for capitalism’s inequality. | From April 2026, the UK government removed the two-child limit on Universal Credit. Its own data show fewer than half of affected families have no parent in work, and many already do paid work, which weakens the Murray-style claim that generous benefits are the chief driver of large low-income families. |
| Key Takeaways |
| Charles Murray‘s Losing Ground (1984) is the founding statement of New Right thinking on welfare dependency. |
| Murray applied the same underclass thesis to Britain in 1989, describing himself as a ‘visitor from a plague area’. |
| David Marsland argues welfare should be minimal, selective and a last resort. |
| Functionalist, Marxist and feminist perspectives all challenge the New Right‘s account of why welfare exists. |
| The 2026 removal of the UK’s two-child benefit limit reopened this debate in current policy. |
| Check your understanding |
| Explain what is meant by a ‘dependency culture‘. You could: define the term, then illustrate it using Murray’s or Marsland’s argument about welfare incentives. |
| Evaluate the New Right‘s explanation of the underclass. You should: state Murray’s claim, use one perspective from the table above as a counter-argument, cite the 2026 two-child limit evidence, then reach a judgement. |
The New Right and Education: Marketisation and Parentocracy
Marketisation means introducing market principles, competition, choice and published performance data, into public services such as education. In England and Wales, the Education Reform Act 1988, steered through Parliament by Education Secretary Kenneth Baker under Margaret Thatcher, introduced a National Curriculum alongside league tables, open enrolment and school-level budgets, forcing schools to compete for pupils.
In the United States, John Chubb and Terry Moe made the fullest academic case for this approach in Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools (1990). They argued that democratic, bureaucratic control was the real cause of school failure, and proposed a voucher system giving parents public funding to choose between public, private and charter schools.
Not every writer on marketisation supports it. Phillip Brown‘s The Third Wave (1990) coined the term parentocracy to describe its likely outcome: a system in which a child’s education increasingly reflects parental wealth and wishes rather than pupil ability and effort. Brown and Stephen Ball both use this idea to show how choice can widen, rather than close, inequality between schools.
| Key terms |
| Marketisation: introducing market principles, competition, choice and published performance data, into public services such as education. |
| Parentocracy: Phillip Brown’s term for a system in which a child’s education increasingly reflects parental wealth and wishes rather than pupil ability and effort. |
| League tables: published rankings of schools’ exam results, intended to help parents compare schools and to drive competition between them. |
| Voucher system: a policy, proposed by Chubb and Moe, giving parents public funding to spend at a public, private or charter school of their choice. |
| Policy | Introduced by | Intended effect |
| League tables of exam results | Education Reform Act 1988 (Kenneth Baker, under Margaret Thatcher) | Let parents compare schools and choose the best-performing one. |
| Open enrolment and parental choice | Education Reform Act 1988 | Force schools to compete for pupils, raising standards through competition. |
| School vouchers | Proposed by Chubb and Moe (1990) in the United States | Give parents public funding to choose a public, private or charter school. |
Table 2: Marketisation policies and their intended effects.
The pattern across these policies raises two points worth remembering.
- All three policies assume parents act as informed, rational consumers of education.
- The same rational-actor assumption reappears in right realism‘s account of crime, discussed below.
| ANALYSIS — AO2 | EVALUATION — AO3 |
| Marketisation assumes parents act as rational, well-informed consumers, the same rational-actor model right realism later applies to offenders in the crime section below. | Phillip Brown‘s own research found that parentocracy in practice widens rather than narrows inequality, since better-off parents are best placed to exploit choice and league tables. This challenges the New Right‘s claim that competition automatically benefits all pupils equally. |
| Key Takeaways |
| Marketisation introduces competition, choice and published performance data into education. |
| The Education Reform Act 1988, under Kenneth Baker and Margaret Thatcher, combined a National Curriculum with market mechanisms. |
| Chubb and Moe (1990) proposed school vouchers as the fullest expression of market-based education reform. |
| Phillip Brown‘s concept of parentocracy suggests marketisation can deepen inequality rather than reduce it. |
The New Right and Crime: Right Realism
Right realism applies New Right thinking to crime and deviance. It sits alongside the perspective’s core beliefs on the specification’s core list, and shares its distrust of purely structural explanations for social problems.
James Q. Wilson and George Kelling‘s article Broken Windows, published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1982, argued that visible signs of disorder, such as an unrepaired broken window, signal that no one is in control of an area. Left unaddressed, this invites further petty crime and, eventually, more serious offending. The article became the intellectual basis for zero-tolerance, order-maintenance policing.
James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein‘s Crime and Human Nature (1985) went further, arguing that offenders make a rational choice to commit crime, weighing likely rewards against likely costs, and that biological and social factors such as low impulse control raise the likelihood that someone will offend.
| Key terms |
| Right realism: a New Right approach to crime that treats offending as a rational choice, best tackled through policing and deterrence rather than by addressing its structural causes. |
| Rational choice theory: the idea that offenders weigh up the likely rewards and costs of a crime before deciding whether to commit it. |
| Broken windows theory: Wilson and Kelling’s argument that visible disorder, such as an unrepaired window, signals a lack of control and invites further, more serious crime. |
| Zero-tolerance policing: an approach that targets minor disorder and offences strictly, on the assumption that this prevents more serious crime later. |
| Situational crime prevention: reducing crime by changing the immediate environment, for example through better lighting or CCTV, to raise the perceived cost of offending. |
| Cause of crime | Explanation | Key thinkers |
| Rational choice | Offenders weigh likely rewards against likely costs before acting. | James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein (1985) |
| Biological and social factors | Traits such as low impulse control and poor socialisation raise the likelihood of offending. | James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein (1985) |
| Environmental disorder | Visible signs of disorder signal an area is not controlled, inviting further crime. | James Q. Wilson and George Kelling (1982) |
Table 3: Right realist explanations of crime.
Two policy responses follow directly from this table.
- Zero-tolerance policing targets minor disorder before it escalates into more serious offending.
- Situational crime prevention (such as better lighting or CCTV) raises the perceived cost of offending, discouraging the rational-choice offender described above.
| ANALYSIS — AO2 | EVALUATION — AO3 |
| Right realism shares the New Right‘s wider suspicion of purely structural explanations, shifting the emphasis from poverty and inequality onto individual choice and the immediate environment. | Left realists such as John Lea and Jock Young argue right realism ignores the wider social causes of relative deprivation, and critics note that broken windows policing has led to disproportionate stop-and-search of some communities, so it may treat symptoms rather than root causes. |
| Key Takeaways |
| Right realism is the New Right‘s application of its ideas to crime and deviance. |
| Wilson and Kelling‘s Broken Windows (1982) linked visible disorder to escalating crime. |
| Wilson and Herrnstein‘s Crime and Human Nature (1985) treats offending as a rational choice shaped by biology and socialisation. |
| Left realists argue right realism neglects the structural causes of relative deprivation. |
| Check your understanding |
| Explain the broken windows thesis. You could: define the thesis, then link it to zero-tolerance policing using Wilson and Kelling (1982) as your evidence. |
| To what extent does right realism offer a convincing explanation of crime? You should: state the right realist claim, use a left realist or structural counter-argument, then reach a judgement about which is more convincing and why. |
Evaluating the New Right
The case for and against the New Right can be summarised as follows, before reaching an overall judgement.
The case for
- Peter Saunders‘ data suggested Britain functions as a genuine meritocracy, rewarding ability and effort.
- Thatcher and Reagan‘s electoral success shows New Right ideas found real public support, not just elite backing.
- The broken windows approach is credited by some criminologists with contributing to falling crime rates in several cities where it was applied.
The case against
- Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray‘s The Bell Curve (1994) was widely condemned by social scientists for reviving genetic determinist arguments linking intelligence, race and class.
- Richard Breen‘s (1999) reanalysis of Saunders‘ own data found that class origin still shapes people’s outcomes strongly, undermining the meritocracy claim.
- Bill Jordan‘s critique of Marsland suggests the New Right overstates how generous UK welfare provision actually is.
Reaching a judgement
| ANALYSIS — AO2 | EVALUATION — AO3 |
| Across family, welfare, education and crime, the New Right consistently explains social problems as the product of individual or institutional incentives rather than of unequal social structures, a position closer to functionalism‘s consensus view than to Marxist or feminist conflict theories. | The Bell Curve controversy and Breen‘s reanalysis of Saunders both suggest the New Right‘s evidence base is more contested than its confident policy conclusions imply. Its account is a genuine and influential contribution to sociology, but not one that should be accepted without testing its claims against the counter-evidence set out across this page. |
| Key Takeaways |
| Saunders‘ meritocracy thesis and the Thatcher/Reagan governments are the New Right‘s strongest evidence. |
| The Bell Curve (1994) remains the most heavily criticised New Right-adjacent text, for its genetic determinism. |
| Breen (1999) directly challenges Saunders‘ meritocracy claim using Saunders‘ own data. |
| A balanced judgement treats the New Right as influential but empirically contested, not as settled fact. |
Applying the New Right Across the A Level
The New Right is examinable well beyond its “home” ground of welfare and the family. The table below demonstrates this with named evidence across six further A Level Sociology topics, showing why it is worth revising as a perspective in its own right rather than only inside a single topic.
Some applications, such as marketisation in education, are well established. Others, such as the link to culture and identity, are less obvious and reward students who can make the connection explicitly in an exam answer.
| A Level topic | How the New Right applies | Key thinkers |
| Education (3.1.1) | Marketisation, introducing competition and league tables, was meant to force schools to compete and drive up standards. | Chubb and Moe (1990) |
| Education (3.1.1) | Parentocracy means a child’s schooling increasingly reflects parental wealth and wishes rather than pupil ability and effort. | Phillip Brown (1990) and Stephen Ball |
| Education (3.1.1) | The Education Reform Act combined a National Curriculum with market mechanisms such as parental choice and school budgets. | Margaret Thatcher and Kenneth Baker (1988) |
| Families and Households (3.2.2) | The married, two-parent nuclear family is presented as the bedrock of a stable, self-reliant society. | Margaret Thatcher (1987) and Roger Scruton |
| Families and Households (3.2.2) | Generous welfare is blamed for reducing the financial pressure on fathers to support their own children. | David Marsland (1996) and Charles Murray (1984) |
| Families and Households (3.2.2) | Rising lone parenthood is linked to welfare dependency and to poorer outcomes for children. | Charles Murray (1984) and David Marsland (1996) |
| Culture and Identity (3.2.1) | Identity should be built on effort and self-reliance rather than on state support or group membership. | Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman |
| Culture and Identity (3.2.1) | Right to Buy turned council tenants into home owners, tying identity and status to private property. | Margaret Thatcher and Peter Saunders (1990) |
| Culture and Identity (3.2.1) | A meritocratic culture, where ability and effort determine status, is presented as fairer than one based on inherited class position. | Peter Saunders (1996) and Friedrich Hayek |
| The Media (3.2.7) | The Peacock Report recommended increasing competition and market forces in broadcasting rather than relying on the licence fee. | Alan Peacock and Margaret Thatcher (1986) |
| The Media (3.2.7) | Deregulating broadcasting was meant to give viewers more choice and force broadcasters to compete for audiences. | Alan Peacock and Samuel Brittan (1986) |
| The Media (3.2.7) | A free market in media ownership is preferred to state subsidy or control, echoing the New Right‘s wider preference for competition. | Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman |
| Beliefs in Society (3.2.5) | Traditional religion and inherited moral authority are treated as sources of social cohesion worth defending against permissiveness. | Roger Scruton (1980) and Christie Davies (1975) |
| Beliefs in Society (3.2.5) | The loosening of moral and legal sanctions in the 1960s is blamed for weakening shared standards of behaviour. | Christie Davies (1975) and David Marsland |
| Beliefs in Society (3.2.5) | A shared moral consensus, once maintained by religion and tradition, is treated as necessary for order, echoing the family argument above. | Roger Scruton and Margaret Thatcher (1987) |
| Crime and Deviance (3.3.1) | Offenders are treated as rational actors who weigh likely rewards against likely costs before offending. | James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein (1985) |
| Crime and Deviance (3.3.1) | Visible signs of disorder, such as an unrepaired broken window, signal that no one is in control and invite further crime. | James Q. Wilson and George Kelling (1982) |
| Crime and Deviance (3.3.1) | Zero-tolerance policing targets minor disorder to prevent escalation into more serious offending. | James Q. Wilson and George Kelling (1982) |
Table 4: The New Right applied across six A Level Sociology topics.
Reading across the table, several patterns stand out.
- Margaret Thatcher and David Marsland recur across family, education, culture and beliefs, showing how tightly government policy and academic New Right argument were linked.
- Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman appear wherever the topic touches free markets directly: culture and identity, and the media.
- The crime and deviance rows stretch the New Right furthest from its family and welfare ‘home ground’, into psychology and situational choice.
- Roger Scruton is the only thinker introduced solely through the Beliefs in Society application, showing how the perspective reaches into topics beyond its usual welfare and family focus.
| ANALYSIS — AO2 | EVALUATION — AO3 |
| The table shows the New Right operating consistently as a structural, consensus perspective: whether the topic is schools, broadcasting or crime, the recurring move is to prefer market competition and individual responsibility over state provision or explanations rooted in inequality. | Applications vary in strength. The education and crime applications rest on substantial empirical research (Chubb and Moe; Wilson and Herrnstein), while the culture and identity application is more speculative, drawing on general neoliberal principle rather than a dedicated empirical study of identity itself. |
| Key Takeaways |
| The New Right can be applied credibly to at least six A Level Sociology topics beyond welfare and the family. |
| Margaret Thatcher and David Marsland are the most frequently recurring named thinkers across topics. |
| The crime and deviance application, right realism, is the New Right‘s most developed topic-specific extension. |
| Not every application is equally strong; some rest on firmer evidence than others. |
| Check your understanding |
| Choose two topics from the table above and explain how the New Right applies to each. You could: pick two rows from different topics, name the thinker(s) given, and explain the mechanism in your own words. |
| Assess how convincing the New Right‘s application to culture and identity is, compared with its application to crime and deviance. You should: compare the strength of evidence behind each application (Hayek/Friedman’s general principle versus Wilson and Herrnstein’s empirical study), then reach a judgement. |
Specification links: AQA 7192 3.1.1 (Education); 3.2.2 (Families and Households); 3.2.1 (Culture and Identity); 3.2.7 (The Media); 3.2.5 (Beliefs in Society); 3.3.1 (Crime and Deviance); 3.1.3 and 3.3.2 (Theory and Methods).
In Summary
Return to Thatcher‘s claim that “there is no such thing as society… there are individual men and women, and there are families.” From April 2026, the UK government removed the two-child limit on Universal Credit, lifting an estimated 450,000 children out of poverty. Its own figures show that more than half of the families affected already had someone in paid work.
That reform sits uneasily with the New Right‘s core claim that generous benefits, rather than low pay or family size, chiefly explain hardship. It does not disprove the New Right‘s wider argument, but it shows the underlying empirical claim about dependency is still being tested against real policy, four decades after Thatcher‘s remark.
Reaching a judgement
| ANALYSIS — AO2 | EVALUATION — AO3 |
| The New Right offers a coherent, structural, consensus account of society, one that treats free markets and traditional family responsibility as the surest route to social order, and that has shaped real government policy in Britain and the United States since the late 1970s. | Set against evidence from Breen (1999) on meritocracy, Jordan on welfare dependency, and 2026’s own welfare reform data, the New Right‘s confident causal claims are better treated as a strongly argued position within an ongoing debate than as an established fact. |
| Key Takeaways |
| The New Right is a structural, consensus perspective fusing neoliberal economics with neoconservative social values. |
| It has produced influential, testable claims about welfare, the family, education and crime. |
| Its strongest evidence (Saunders on meritocracy) and its most heavily criticised claim (The Bell Curve) sit within the same body of work. |
| Current UK welfare policy, including the 2026 removal of the two-child limit, continues to test its central claims about dependency. |
| Check your understanding |
| In your own words, explain what Thatcher meant by ‘there is no such thing as society’. You could: use the fuller quotation above, not just the famous opening line, to explain the point about individual and family responsibility. |
| ‘The New Right‘s account of social problems is more convincing than its critics allow.’ Discuss. You should: draw evidence from at least two of the topic sections above, name the thinkers on both sides, and reach an explicit final judgement. |
Not quite right with the New Right? Try this . . .
