... after themselves so could be the reason why they were reluctant to do anything about the obvious unemployment problem. For the Conservatives the most important area of economic policy was inflation. They revolved their whole policy around the reduction of inflation with the introduction of Monetarism. By reducing inflation the Conservatives believed that businesses would become more competitive and that by making the economy more competitive it would benefit industry as a whole. In the fight to reduce inflation and control the money supply the Government raised interest rates and cut public spending wherever possible this of course further added to unemployment. The Conservatives dropped monetarism in 1983 as they found their targets for the monetary supply near on impossible to attain. Although monetarism was scrapped the commitment to keeping down inflation was not and the Government achieved minor success in this area mainly due to the recession and mass ...

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