Kevin Meagher
It’s not just the low-fi racism of Oliver Letwin’s 1985
memo to Margaret Thatcher that appalls.
His dismissal of the “bad moral attitudes” of young Black men following the
Broadwater Farm riots also reflects ministerial contempt towards so many other
groups throughout that dismal decade.
Conservative politics in the mid-1980s was about as far
from the ‘One Nation’ variant as it was possible to be.
This was a government
at war with large parts of the country it ran. Truly, an elective dictatorship,
openly contemptuous of those that did not yield to its will.
So the “pampered Scots” were to be pitched against the
“envious” north of England when it came to funding allocations. Black people
were only interested in the “disco and drug trade”.
Northern Ireland’s
border towns should be bombed to
stop republican suspects escaping to Southern Ireland.
The entire city of Liverpool was to be subject to “managed decline” following the Toxteth riots, while the
local football club’s fans were smeared in a vile cover-up over the deaths of
96 of their number at Hillsborough.
As the hapless Lewtin, possessor of an eager mind but
dull wits, currently resides in political no-man’s land, waiting to see if his perfunctory apology is enough to sate the reaction against
his comments, Tory strategists should perhaps ponder what other toxic
memo-bombs he penned during his time running Thatcher’s policy unit.
After all,
this was the mid-80s, when she was at her wildest and the New Right policy
wonks that fuelled her insurgency were unencumbered.
But aside from the trickle of released government papers
of that time, we now also have Lowell Goddard’s wide-ranging inquiry into historic child abuse allegations.
Just what will she unearth in the next few years about what ministers did or
did not know in relation to the slew of allegations about that period?
What we do know is that all the invective and moral
outrage directed towards Margaret Thatcher and her ministers during the 1980s
was not wasted.
We thought the Tories were a heartless, sneering bunch at the
time.
Yesterday’s revelations now make that an evidence-based
assessment.
The thing "conservative" romantics like you ignore is that British conservatism was always like this. Remember the general strike? Remember Churchill and his pal Beaverbrook? There was never a good Toryism that the Conservative Party departed from. They were always like this.
ReplyDeleteKevin has been called many things. But even at a Blue Labour conference, which was where I first met him, I doubt that a conservative romantic was one of them.
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