In his previous book, The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain (2005), Guy Ortolano revealed the political stakes in a debate between the intellectuals C. P. Snow and F. R. Leavis and teased out broad, far-reaching conclusions about the nature of Britain's recent intellectual politics. In Thatcher's Progress, he adopts a similar methodological approach. At the heart of this book is the town of Milton Keynes and its Development Corporation, the crown jewel of the 1946 New Towns Act, and the most significant component of a program that produced more towns than did any European country outside the Soviet Union (5). The scale and ambition of those designing, constructing, and managing Milton Keynes makes the town the perfect lens through which to explore what Ortolano terms the “spatial politics” of social democracy (3). The New Towns Act of 1946 highlighted the social democratic state's commitment to balancing the population, a process Ortolano characterizes as “a spatial Keynesianism akin to macroeconomic management” (42). More importantly, as a major public sector–led infrastructure project that spanned the postwar period, the construction of Milton Keynes offers unique insights into the ideological formation, content, and fortunes of both social democracy and market liberalism. Ortolano sets out to explore how a project conceived and delivered by the social democratic state could eventually serve as an agent of market liberalism. In a similar way to recent work by Jon Lawrence (Me, Me, Me? The Search for Community in Post-war England, 2019), Thatcher's Progress highlights how on either side of the 1970s “history remained untidy: individualism existed before, and community persisted after” (257).

To analyze this untidiness, Ortolano anchors his chapters on Margaret Thatcher's visit to Milton Keynes on 25 September 1979. Thatcher's journey took in housing developments, public art projects, community centers, and a shiny new shopping building, and Ortolano uses these as jumping-off points for discussions of planning, architecture, consulting, and housing among others. Each chapter complicates the idea of a simple binary between manifestations of social democracy on the one hand, and market liberalism on the other. For example, Ortolano explores the Development Corporation's role as a prized consultant on global urban planning in the 1970s, a decade where the corporation provided advice on projects in Egypt, Thailand, Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago, Oman, and elsewhere. Here, Ortolano claims, is evidence of “less a sclerotic economy and state than a dynamic social democracy, which—as the 1980s commenced—still had life in yet” (211). Chapters on planning and architecture point to a similar social democratic dynamism in the late 1960s and 1970s, a period that many historians pinpoint as the beginning of the ideology's fundamental decline. Narratives hastening to the decline of planning ignore its experiments and departures in the face of seemingly existential challenges, for example the indeterminacy and flexibility of the Non-Plan movement. Similar histories of architecture work to conceal the popularity of Welfare State Modernism, characterizing it as an “artificial departure from a natural state of affairs” the correction of which would have to wait until the rise of the market (129). This detailed, empirical study of one particular state-led project, therefore, allows Ortolano to critique some fundamental myths about the welfare state, social democracy, the rise of the market, and Thatcherism. The construction of Milton Keynes was a space where visions of a social democratic future were contested, implemented, and developed; an urban landscape that points to social democracy's ability to survive and adapt in seemingly hostile times. The New Towns program should make historians wary of taking rhetoric about a “Thatcherite Revolution” at face value. For example, as Ortolano's analysis of “Right-to-Buy” demonstrates, with Thatcher approaching Number Ten public authorities like Milton Keynes actively sought more buyers for homes. Market manipulations and information campaigns resembled “top-down social engineering” as much as they did “bottom-up social revolution” (243).

Thatcher's Progress therefore encourages historians of postwar Britain to consider the shift from social democracy to market liberalism through the metaphor of the horizon. While “seemingly fixed, yet constantly churning, the horizon conveys the experience of living in a world that seemed forever, even as its foundations were always shifting” (33–34). Building on the work of Emily Robinson, Camilla Schofield, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, and Natalie Thomlinson (“Telling Stories about Post-war Britain: Popular Individualism and the ‘Crisis’ of the 1970s,” Twentieth Century British History 28, no. 2 [2017]: 268–304), this reading renders emergent priorities—individualism, consumerism, or home ownership—as further steps in social democracy's ideological development rather than its eclipse. Yet ultimately, Ortolano acknowledges that “however deeply social democracy was lived, market liberalism did displace it” (28). This, he claims, was achieved when even its opponents came to accommodate the market's priorities (28). It would have been interesting to explore further why this shift took place: to consider how this army of postwar experts—planners, architects, social workers—were granted so much authority in places like Milton Keynes; to probe why this started to unravel in the late 1960s; and to interrogate further why these professionals internalized the logic of an intruding market. If the immediate postwar decades can be interpreted as a “meritocratic moment”—a period characterized by the promises of an equality of opportunity state, delivering ever-increasing growth and facilitating the rise of a classless, socially mobile society, all managed by meritocratically selected experts—how does the shifting fortunes of New Towns like Milton Keynes reflect this moment and its demise. In other words, to seek to connect the story Ortolano tells in Thatcher's Progress with the “eclipse of the meritocratic moment” (G. Ortolano, The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature and Cultural Politics in Post-War Britain, [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009], pp. 220–54), which concludes Two Cultures. In spite of these questions, Thatcher's Progress will be essential reading for a diverse range of scholars—from those interested in the history of urban space, architecture, and housing to those concerned with questions of identity, transnational intellectual politics, or the legacies of empire—and its approach will encourage every historian of postwar Britain to reconsider linear narratives which flatten social democracy's vibrant history.