25 years late, in fact.
In 2015, that long after the 1980s ended in actual fact, British politics will finally move beyond them.
For at least the first 10 of the 13 New Labour years, the revisionist Left of that decade was in Government rather than, as at the time, in Opposition. It looks perfectly ridiculous now, of course, when an almost 1970s-like three fifths of the population have decided that they are working-class after all.
The crowd from Marxism Today, to which Tony Blair even contributed; from New Times; from Demos, at the launch of which Blair was the only politician present: that crowd fully celebrated the consumer capitalism of the Thatcher Era in all its vulgarity, as the bingeing and belching under Blair made only too abundantly clear. It wanted, and eventually it delivered, Thatcherism without the vestiges of Toryism, and without the contradictions in Thatcher's own personality.
By contrast, the SDP looked on in horror, although it, too, has ended up accepting the Thatcher project as irreversible. There are now more former SDP members as Conservative than as Liberal Democrat Ministers in a Coalition which is, so to speak, a right reunion. After 13 years of rule by Marxism Today, then, five years of rule by the SDP.
And then, at so very long last, the 1980s will finally come to an end.
Cuddly Thatcherism? The old harridan's policies without the nasty suburban edge that typified the real deal? Sounds about right.
ReplyDeleteNot even that. Without the aristocratic social conscience, or the strain of Tory municipal populism, or the Burkean traditionalism and concern for organic communities, or the Disraelian foreign policy realism, or everything that could broadly be described as Christian Democracy.
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