Living in a world Margaret Thatcher created

　

　

Even those, John Campbell suggests, who have little or no memory of Margaret Thatcher, live in a world she created; and from which there is no going back.

Thatcher-haters and devotees alike we all live under the shadow of her thought umbrella.

Tacking our sails back to nearly 30 years ago, crossing the Rubicon was not something the electorate wished to do. At the time of the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands in 1982, her government was in low water. That invasion (‘salvation in the South Atlantic’) had two consequences: it made support for the government almost a patriotic duty, and Thatcher’s self-estimation and confidence were enormously increased.

This victory emboldened her. It was the success of the privatisation – a word she did not particularly like – of BT and British Gas which set the whole thing going...then there was the enforced sale of council housing.

In the UK the Labout Party dominated by the Trade Unions realised that the European Union with its love of restrcitve rules was much more liekly to protect workers in the UK than Thatcher began to embrace the EU with fervour. 

Once Labour began to turn to the EU, Thatcher began to turn against it. The hostility to Europe grew as she perceived herself to be a world figure: Europe was not only un-Thatcherite, it was provincial.

It is imprtoatn her government to paint was never as subservient to American policy as that uber casuist Tony Blair's. (he got elected on a ticket of being for the 'workers' he is now like most of his 'brothers' a multi-billionaire and a 'property tycoon, a 'religious' life indeed)

Thatcher loathed not just Labour, but all local government,

Campbell makes the point that Thatcher’s Thatcherism was based on a number of paradoxes. Many are now well known. There is the paradox of the woman who wanted to free the people and disarm the state but left us yet more burdened by an increasingly bullying and authoritarian state; who advocated prudence, saving and hard work but who bequeathed us a hedonistic and debt-laden economy; who gave up being a research chemist – presumably, in Thatcherite terms, a ‘useful’ occupation – in order to become a lawyer; who wanted a classless society free of Old Etonian types yet created hereditary peers and did not protest when her husband was made a baronet, a hereditary honour which ensured that her son became Sir Mark; who promoted a benignly neutral market but ruthlessly engineered it to serve the interests of some at the expense of others; who wished to promote a vigorous entrepreneurial class which was, like the East African Asians or the Jews (whose support in her Finchley constituency she always cultivated), most likely to come from outside, but who was at the same time determined to preserve the country’s racial and cultural homogeneity whatever the economic cost.  Does such a serious politician like that exist today?

Her fundamental aim was to destroy the Labour Party and ‘socialism’, not to transform the British economy. If the destruction of socialism also transformed the economy, well and good, but that was for her a second-order achievement.

Socialism was to be destroyed by a major restructuring of the electorate: in effect, the destruction of the old industrial working class. Its destruction was not at first consciously willed. The disappearance of much of British industry in the early 1980s was not intended, but it was an acceptable result of the policies of deflation and deregulation; and was then turned to advantage. The ideological attack on the working class was, I think, willed.

It involved an attack on the idea of the working class – indeed, on class as a concept. People were, via home ownership or popular capitalism, encouraged to think of themselves as not working class, whatever they actually were. The market thus disciplined some, and provided a bonanza for others.

The economy was treated not as a productive mechanism but as a lottery, with many winners. The problem with such a policy was that it created a wildly unstable economy which Thatcher’s chancellors found increasingly difficult to control, and in which many of the apparent winners later became aggrieved losers.