Toby Young writes much truer than he knows, about the fundamental and ultimate anarchism, not of Thatcher, but of Thatcherism.
While Ed West is wrong that Blue Labour is marginalised (look at the noises being made in order to get out the vote for next month's famous victory), but nevertheless makes some important Postliberal points.
I often wonder why so many punk rockers hated Thatcher precisely because Thatcherism seems rather compatible with some aspects of the punk ethos, for example, attraction to anti-state, anarchist thought. A good number of rock and roll musicians were/are right-wingers of the libertarian variety.
ReplyDeleteA good number of rock and roll musicians were/are right-wingers"
ReplyDeleteDid a butterfly just flutter out of your head when you wrote that?
They certainly were. Those who were not common-or-garden proto-Thatcherite tax exiles were David Bowie and Eric Clapton, far out on the Right.
ReplyDeleteBeyond a certain rather self-concious fringe, there has never been anything left-wing about rock'n'roll. Very far from it, in fact. Very far from it indeed.
Anonymous,
ReplyDeleteOff the top of my head I can name Ted Nugent, Frank Zappa, Johnny Ramone, Alice Cooper and Joe Perry as being on the Right, broadly defined.
Is this surprising? I mean, getting back to the issue of anarchism, doesn’t the ideology of the free market dovetail nicely with sex, drugs and rock'n'roll?
To certain youth at the time wasn’t the Old Labour/One Nation Tory consensus that Thatcherism supplanted the very definition of a stodgy, old-fashioned Establishment?
"doesn’t the ideology of the free market dovetail nicely with sex, drugs and rock'n'roll?"
ReplyDeleteIts not an "ideology" but an economic system (we've tried the alternatives and they didn't work too well) and could you please tell me the last time we had a free market?
Certainly not the protectionist EU which spends most of its farming budget subsidising French agriculture and pours out enough regulations to drown any business not employing 500 full-time accountants and lawyers.
Certainly not under Thatcher-she heavily regulated the financial sector.
Insider trading was made illegal in 1980.
The life insurance industry, which had been almost free of regulation since 1870, was re-regulated from 1980 to 1982.
Bank deposit insurance was introduced in 1979.
The sale of investment and insurance products came under statutory regulation from 1986.
She sold off our utilities to a tiny monopolistic cartel who've dominated them ever since, free from competition.
If you think any of this is a "free market", you just aren't worth conversing with.
Even Noam Chomsky recently said he has no idea if Adam Smith's ideas would work, since they've never been tried.
Anonymous,
ReplyDeleteThere are certainly free market ideologies or schools of thought, for example the Austrian School of Economics. Yes, capitalism has always had a statist element, as it does today in the neoliberal era, but we still have markets. The existence of regulations does not make an economy a totally planned economy like the USSR.
If we are talking purely about political philosophy, doesn't a free market philosophy lend itself more easily to a free market in drugs, sex, pornography, etc.? If not, how do strict proponents of a free market argue against those things? It is probably possible to do so, but I would assume it would require some sort of state intervention.
The point is not that Thatcher or any actually existing capitalist politician or government created the free market utopia which has never existed and may never exist, but that the ideology and rhetoric of Thatcherism and similar ideologies lend themselves to philosophical anarchism.