Friday 14 October 2011

In Her Own Eighties

Margaret Thatcher was 86 yesterday, but I was too busy getting drunk with my tutees to blog about it.

What was Thatcherism, really? What did she ever actually do? She gave Britain the Single European Act, the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the Exchange Rate Mechanism. She gave Britain the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the Children Act, and the replacement of O-levels with GCSEs, the last so much of a piece with her closure, while she was Education Secretary, of so many grammar schools that there were not enough left at the end for her record ever to be equalled.

During the same period, she raised no objection in Cabinet to the European Communities Act, to the abolition of ancient counties, to metrication and decimalisation, to the de facto decriminalisation of cannabis, to the first attempt at Scottish and Welsh devolution, or to the only ever attempt to withdraw from Ireland, all under a Prime Minister who had previously devastated small and family business by abolishing Resale Price Maintenance. And she gave Britain the destruction of the economic basis of paternal authority.

No Prime Minister, ever, has done more in any one, never mind all, of the causes of European federalism, Irish Republicanism, sheer economic incompetence, police inefficiency and ineffectiveness, the extension of the power of the State into the proper sphere of the family, collapsing educational standards, and everything that underlies or follows from the destruction of paternal authority. She did not come out against a single European currency until a rally 10 and half years after the end of her time as Prime Minister, by which point it was far from clear that she knew what she was saying.

Thereby, the middle classes were transformed from people like her father into people like her son. Her humble origins were massively exaggerated. Her father was a prominent local businessman and politician who ran most of the committees and charities for miles around, sent her to a fee-paying school, and put her through Oxford without a scholarship. She told us, and she really did, that “there is no such thing as society”, in which case there cannot be any such thing as the society that is the family, or the society that is the nation. She turned Britain into the country that Marxists had always said it was, even though, before her, it never actually had been.

Specifically, she sold off national assets at obscenely undervalued prices. Meanwhile, she subjected the rest of the public sector, 40 per cent of the economy, to an unprecedented level of dirigisme. She compelled the local forms of the State to make gifts of considerable capital assets to people who were thus able to enter the property market ahead of private tenants who had saved for their deposits. She invented the Housing Benefit racket, vastly more expensive than maintaining a stock of council housing, and integral to the massively increased benefit dependency of the 1980s. She presided over the rise of Political Correctness, part of that decade’s general moral chaos, which also included her introduction of abortion up to birth, and her mercifully unsuccessful attempts to abolish the special status of Sunday and to end Christian teaching in state schools.

Hers was the assault on the monarchy, since she scorned the Commonwealth, social cohesion, historical continuity and public Christianity, and called the Queen “the sort of person who votes for the SDP”, arrogating to herself the properly monarchical and royal role on the national and international stages, using her most popular supporting newspaper to vilify the Royal Family, and legislating to pre-empt the courts on both sides of the Atlantic by renouncing the British Parliament’s role in the amendment of the Canadian Constitution, as well as, on the instructions of Rupert Murdoch, to abolish the power of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to legislate for individual Australian states, to end the British Government’s consultative role in Australian state-level affairs, and to deprive the Queen’s Australian subjects of their right of appeal to Her Majesty in Council.

Hers was the war against the unions, which cannot have had anything to do with monetarism, since the unions have never controlled the money supply. Hers was the refusal to privatise the Post Office, thank goodness, but against all her stated principles. Hers were the continuing public subsidies to fee-paying schools, to agriculture, to nuclear power, and to mortgage-holders. Without those subsidies, the fourth would hardly have existed, and the other three would not have existed at all. The issue is not whether any of them is a good or a bad thing in itself. The issue is whether “Thatcherism” was compatible with their continuation by means of “market-bucking” public subsidies. It simply was not.

Hers was the ludicrous pretence to have brought down the Soviet Union merely because she happened to be in office when that Union happened to collapse, which it would have done anyway, as predicted by Enoch Powell. But she did make a difference internationally where it was possible to do so, by providing aid and succour to Pinochet’s Chile and to apartheid South Africa. I condemn the former as I condemn Castro, and I condemn the latter as I condemn Mugabe (or Ian Smith, for that matter). No doubt you do, too. But she did not, as she still does not. Hers was the refusal to recognise Muzorewa, holding out for the Soviet-backed Nkomo as if he would have been any better than the Chinese-backed Mugabe, for whom she nevertheless secured a knighthood.

And hers was what amounted to the open invitation to Argentina to invade the Falkland Islands, followed by the (starved) Royal Navy’s having to behave as if the hopelessly out-of-her-depth Prime Minister did not exist, a sort of coup without which those Islands would be Argentine to this day. She had of course been about to sell the ships in question, at a knocked down price, to Argentina. Nor did she experience any electoral bounce as a result of the war that she had caused in the Falklands; on the contrary, the figures make it crystal clear that Conservative Party took fewer actual votes in 1983 than it had done in 1979, and won the 1983 Election only because it faced a divided Opposition.

Was she “the Iron Lady” when, in early 1981, her initial pit closure programme was abandoned within two days of a walkout by the miners? Was she “the Iron Lady” when she had one of her closest allies, Nicholas Ridley, negotiate a transfer of sovereignty over the Falkland Islands to Argentina, to be followed by a lease-back arrangement, until the Islanders, the Labour Party and Tory backbenchers forced her to back down?

Was she “the Iron Lady” when, within a few months of election on clear commitments with regard to Rhodesia, she simply abandoned them at the Commonwealth Conference in Lusaka? Was she “the Iron Lady” when, having claimed that Britain would never give up Hong Kong, she took barely 24 hours to return to Planet Earth and effect a complete U-turn? Was she “the Iron Lady” when she took just as little time to move from public opposition to public support of Spanish accession to the Western European Union? Was she “the Iron Lady” when she gave up monetarism completely during her second term?

There are many other aspects of any Thatcherism properly so called, and they all present her in about as positive a light. None of them, nor any of the above, was unwitting, or forced on her by any sort of bullying, or whatever else her apologists insist was the case. Rather, they were exactly what she intended. Other than the subsidies to agriculture (then as now) and to nuclear power (now, if not necessarily then), I deplore and despise every aspect of her above record and legacy, for unashamedly Old Labour reasons. Indeed, the definition of New Labour is to support and to celebrate that record and legacy, because it did exactly as it was intended to do: it entrenched, in and through the economic sphere, the social revolution of the 1960s. You should not so support or celebrate unless you wish to be considered New Labour.

But then again, who cares these days? Or, rather, who really ought to care? She has now been out of office for nearly twice as long as she was in. People have already voted in a General Election who were not born when she left. The next Leader of her own party may be one such, the Leader after that is almost certain to be. By the time of a 2015 General Election, she is most unlikely to be alive.

People born in the 1990s are now entering university and the world of work. Entirely dispassionately, they will ask who was Prime Minister when the principle of unanimity in the Council of Ministers was surrendered, or when the police were first deluged with paperwork, or when O-levels were replaced with GCSEs, or when the dole became something that large numbers of people claimed for years on end. Among so very many other things.

They might even ask why, if the 1970s were so bad, there was no Conservative landslide in 1979, when that party only just scraped in, and would not have done so if there had been an even swing throughout the country. Or they might ask about how the combined Labour and SDP votes were higher than the Conservative vote both in 1983 and in 1987. They might even ask why her own party got rid of her and then went on to win an Election that it had been expected to lose. Get over her.

13 comments:

  1. "Rather, they were exactly what she intended." - after britain was finally on the road to recovery after the second world war she systematically destroyed everything our grandparents fought for [in a crippled economy] she was a pasty for the ruling elite, or ruling 1% as my grandmother called them, her plans are culminating around the globe today, but will politicians even bother to move money making back to the government that can create our money debt free, stopping the national debt & income tax in one fell swoop [the very first step in recovery] or will they continue with their aquiescence & destruction of the global economy because their personally gravy train is to profitable? we are all thatchers babies whether we like it or not

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  2. And you were in for college lunch today. Had you just not been home?

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  3. You will have observed that I was not wearing black tie to lunch. The very idea, of course.

    On topic, please.

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  4. If you've got "tutees", how come Damian Thompson dismissed you on the spot for faking your CV?

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  5. Views like this got you taken off the Telegraph, whatever instantly falsifiable cover story the Thompson creature might put about. I reckon he is funded by the same people who fund Adam Werrity, talk about wheels within wheels and cliques within cliques. Thompson is now beyond parody, picking up sloppy seconds from the New Statesman in the form of Dan Hodges.

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  6. Well, that started off on topic. So we are getting there, slowly but surely.

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  7. She was patron of a forcibly deregistered charity run by Liam Fox and with the sole employee being Adam Werrity. He was paid by all sorts of shady people to promote Thatcherism and the Israeli Far Right as an alternative, off the books Special Adviser travelling the world with the British Defence Secretary. As you have said before, a party within the party. A party under the patronage of Margaret Thatcher. With Damian Thompson and Telegraph Blogs as its Militant? It sure looks that way. And let's not be cute, there is a strongly gay element to all of this, as there always was to the cliques around Thatcher.

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  8. Simon Heffer is still as in love with the Lady as he ever was, but the uber-Thatcherite, uber-neocon Nile Gardiner lasted only two or three days on Right Minds and it employs the paleocon godfather Thomas Fleming to give its resident American view. Definitely worth watching.

    Someone like Ed West, to name only one of the most obvious, is probably only hanging on at Telegraph Blogs because everybody expects Thompson to be sacked sooner rather than later. When even Charles Moore has used his column on the paper to denounce capitalism as anticonservative, the rigidly enforced party line on the blogs site is just an embarrassment.

    But funded by Werrity's backers in the weird 80s theme park of Hard Right gaiety? I have absolutely no doubt about it. I don't know why I never noticed it before.

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  9. Good to see you socking to them on Tom Chivers's latest outing for his post calling for drug legalisation. A logical conclusion of Thatcherism, as you have long been the leading voice pointing out. Love the way you called Peter Hitchens "the Leader of Old Labour in many ways, including this one." Suspect he would agree with you on that.

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  10. If “there is no such thing as society” (and yes, Margaret Thatcher really did say that), then there can be no such thing as the society that is the family, or the society that is the nation.

    There cannot be a “free” market generally but not in drugs, prostitution or pornography. There cannot be unrestricted global movement of goods, services or capital but not of labour.

    American domination is no more acceptable that European federalism. The economic decadence of the 1980s is no more acceptable that the social decadence of the 1960s.

    Will RightMinds ever publish anyone British who says that, as even Peter does not quite, at least as yet? That will be the true test of it.

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  11. "Will RightMinds ever publish anyone British who says that, as even Peter does not quite, at least as yet? That will be the true test of it."

    That will truly be the test of it. Its an absolute criminal scandal that you seem to have been blacklisted by the British media by the gayboy zionist atheist mafia Thompson and Kamm.

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  12. No, it isn't, and no I haven't been.

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