Tony Blair’s rebranding, and despite her not having been in office for almost seven years, the British economy was still trying to recover from the recession caused by Thatcherite policies. While definitively a light-hearted comedy the film still played heavily with the ideas of the latter, involving a group of six recently unemployed northern men banding together to help each other out of their dire economic situations by creating their own strip-tease act. Upon first watching, the comedic aspects seem to make up the bulk of the film, and it may not appear to be the most politically weighted. However, the audacity of the film’s optimism at such a calamitous time, and the nuanced politics of the group define it undoubtedly as an example of protest cinema, undeniably going against the grain of the ideals of Tory Britain that everyone had become accustomed to. Thatcher’s demonization of any form of collectivism that was rendered as “uncontrollable mob activity” in her speeches is, as this essay will argue, at direct odds with The Full Monty’s ethos of community, and while their specific mob consisted of only six men, the film arguably packs enough punch for the thousands the word ‘mob’ implies, outright defying the notions of individualism and a ‘classless’ society that the politicians of the day pushed relentlessly (McGlynn, 2016: 313). The movie opens with a short film entitled Sheffield – City on the Move (1971, J. and M. L. Coulthard) embedded into the screen, the decidedly southern English brogue of the voiceover artist going on to wax poetic about the city’s fundamental place in the booming steel industry, laid over various images of groups of men hard at work, accompanied by more clean and romanticised views of the towns. Cut to twenty-five years later, we meet two of our main characters, Gaz (Robert Carlyle) and Dave (Mark Addy), along with Gaz’s son Nathan (Wim Snape), as they explore an abandoned steel mill they once worked at, in the middle of looking for parts they could sell. It is these particularly grim circumstances that our leads find themselves stumbling upon a male strip show, seeing how many women are in the audience and deciding perhaps there could be enough money in that to help them out of their financial strife, at least for the moment. Despite there being no direct mention of her in the film, the average viewer at the time of the film’s release was aware that the closing down of the steel mill was a direct result of Margaret Thatcher’s governmental policies. During her time in office, the steel industry in Britain went from being a workforce over one hundred and fifty thousand strong, to in 1988 supporting only fifty-five thousand workers (Deans, 2016). The privatisation of the industry in that year, and the closing of some of the largest steelworks sites was catastrophic for the country, and in the early nineties unemployment rates skyrocketed (Anon, 2013). Thatcher’s penchant for privatisation (as steel was not the only industry in which this happened) seemed to flow with her general idea of society – her idea being that there was not one. In one interview given by her, she was quoted as saying, “who is society? There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to ourselves first” (Moore, 2010). This idea was bordering >