After Thatcher

In the Times Literary Supplement, Ferdinand Mount (a former policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher) reviews four recent biographies of Thatcher and ends up writing a short biography of his own.

What emerges is that Thatcher’s death has proved a catharsis for her closest allies. They are writing in far more forthright terms than her political opponents, who pulled their punches for fear of seeming disrespectful.

And herein lies a clue to Thatcher’s downfall. She treated her colleagues like shit and most of them ended up loathing her. She was consequently brought down by her own party and not her opponents. Thatcher’s opponents merely disagreed with her, but for her allies it was personal.

The real legacy of Margaret Thatcher

A lot of rubbish was said and written about Margaret Thatcher immediately after her death. The consensus was depressingly deferential – partly in the spirit of “never speak ill of the dead”; partly due to her supporters seeking to exploit the mourning to reinforce her legacy; partly due to her opponents being overwhelmingly defeatist; but mainly because, although the economic orthodoxy she established has crashed in flames, no one has any idea what to do next.

The few who dared to criticise her openly were no better. Many of these critics descended into appropriately 1980s-period SWP-style gesture politics (the ‘Ding Dong’ song and mock funerals and all that).

What was missing was some serious analysis and an historical perspective, and two commentators have helped to remedy that lack.

In the New Statesman, John Gray, ostensibly reviewing a book about Edmund Burke, observes that Thatcher sought to shake up Britain but that the results were far from those she expected and in some ways the opposite of what she wanted:

As a consequence of her leadership, the Conservative Party is in some ways weaker than it has ever been. Turning it into an instrument of her personal will, she triggered a coup that has left every subsequent Tory leader on permanent probation. Alienating Scotland, she virtually wiped out her party north of the border and planted a large question mark over the Union. Within England, her indifference to the human costs of de-industrialisation deepened the north-south divide. The result is a hollowed-out and shrunken party that faces huge obstacles in ever again forming a government. For someone who has been described as the greatest Conservative leader since Churchill, it’s quite a list of achievements. If you wanted to shake up Britain and change it beyond recognition, Thatcher was, of all postwar leaders, the one mostly likely to have this effect.

In short, Thatcher instituted the very kind of revolutionary politics that Conservatives were meant to oppose. Her politics is no longer a solution to anything but the present political establishment remains mesmerised by her legacy and unable to snap out of it.

TV documentary maker Adam Curtis, meanwhile, has a theory about why the pundits were incapable of analysing Thatcher after her death. As a corrective, he has put up a film he made in 1995 about Thatcher called The Attic:

It’s about how she constructed a fake ghostly version of Britain’s past, and then used it to maintain her power. But also how she became possessed and haunted by this vision.

I’m putting it up as a bit of a corrective to the terrifying wonk-fest that took over after Mrs Thatcher died. A conveyor belt of Think Tank pundits and allied operatives poured into the TV studios and together they built a fortress around Mrs Thatcher’s memory that was rooted in theories about economics.

They did this because economics is the only language that wonks understand. It’s a view of the world where they see the voters – the people who put Mrs Thatcher in power – as simplified consumption-driven robots.

What was missing was the fact that Mrs Thatcher was also a powerful romantic politician who created a strange but compelling story about Britain’s past that connected with the imagination of millions of people. It was fake, but it was incredibly powerful because she believed it. And the power of her belief raised up ghostly dreams from Britain’s past that still live in people’s imaginations – long after she fell from power.

The problem with wonks is that they can’t deal with emotion and feeling, and they don’t like stories. It means that they cannot connect at all with the feelings and imaginations of the voters. Yet the think-tankers have built a sarcophagus of economic discourse around Westminster.

What we are waiting for is a politician to come along who can connect with our imaginations and inspire us about political ideas instead of boring us to tears.

I fear that emotional politician might be a bloke called Nigel, propping up the bar with a pint and a fag and a thing about foreigners. In the meantime, here is the film:

Thatcher and UKIP – the ‘patriots’ who hate Britain

Nigel Farage likes to boast that UKIP rather than the present-day Conservative Party represents the true spirit of Margaret Thatcher.

And he is right, but probably not in a way he would like you to think. Because the dirty secret about Thatcher and UKIP is that, for all their flag-waving jingoism, both dislike their own country.

Thatcher’s contempt for much of Britain emerges clearly in a remarkable essay by Andrew O’Hagan in The New York Review of Books:

...by the end she left Britain a greedier and seedier place. Despite the pomp and circumstance of her funeral and the many plaudits she has garnered since her death, her great experiment actually didn’t work: the people who could get rich got richer, of course, but she and her followers had no plan to relieve the economic misery that befell the others, the people who were now forced to live on state benefits, which continued to grow. It is the communities of the other—where no new investment took hold, where no new jobs came to replace the ones that were scrapped—that continue to fester in modern Britain.

There was a country that died, the one in which the classes felt a little responsible for one another, survived wars together, a country in which young people used to have options outside the service industry or the gambling fraternity. And you can still see that country dying every day of the week on television. Gap-toothed and overlagered, unemployed and proud of nothing, the great-grandsons and daughters of the respectable working class are seen screaming at each other on The Jeremy Kyle Show, a tribute to Thatcher’s legacy and her impact on British social cohesion.

It was an impressive work of social engineering but ultimately a dreadful one. She created a population that is more dependent and less productive. She made us more individual but less cooperative. It must have looked heroic on paper or in the essays of Milton Friedman. But what she did was incredibly coarse in practice: she ground the unions down but left workers with no alternative form of self-esteem or protection, and the result, today, is a workforce of the alienated. She boasted of setting people free but British working people have never been more enslaved to the whims of fashion, corporate greed, and agism than they are now. A young person from a former mining community where there might have been classes in the evenings and a sense of propriety, decency, modesty, and community can now only hope for a place in “the zone”—the world of the “haves”—by winning a celebrity contest or by thriving on the black market.

Thatcher was a divisive figure because she governed only for her own kind:

She couldn’t hold the nation together, indeed she drove it apart, and that is because she didn’t really believe in the nation except as a sentimental or martial entity. That’s the strangest legacy of all about Maggie: if you listen to those who loved her and thought she was manifestly right, you find, after a while, that you are with people who don’t know their own country and don’t like it either. They think they like it because they don’t like Europe, but in fact, they abjure both. They like their own lives, of course, and their own kind, but they imagine the rest of Britain is mainly an unspeakable place of aliens and scroungers. This feeling borrows heavily from Thatcher and her notion that there is no such thing as society. We heard it recently from George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, when he spoke about people who are dependent on housing benefits, and you can find the same stuff every day in those apocalyptic screeds against the poor that adorn the Daily Mail...

None of her acolytes will grasp the irony of her political life: that, with Thatcherism, she set out to save the soul of the nation and ended up selling it off to the cheapest bidder.

Thatcher’s contempt for Britain and the British thrives in the present-day Conservative Party. It can be found in the recent book Britannia Unchained, in which a group of new Tory MPs condemned British workers as “among the worst idlers in the world”, adding that “too many people in Britain prefer a lie-in to hard work”.

This tirade of abuse prompted Robin McGhee to ask in Prospect magazine, “Conservatism in 2013 faces an existential problem: how can it reconcile free markets with traditional values?”. The authors of Britannia Unchained, like Thatcher, have clearly resolved this dilemma in favour of the former, and have thus ceased to be ‘conservative’ in the true sense of the word.

Ironically, UKIP has made a similar choice. Despite its claims to patriotism, UKIP actually has little time for most British people or the Britain of today. This emerged in a recent article in the Observer by Andrew Rawnsley, where he recounts a telling anecdote about UKIP voters:

All the main parties have cause to be anxious about Ukip and so all have been trying to understand the rise of the Farageists. One way they do this is to put together focus groups of voters who have switched to Ukip to try to fathom why these people are attracted to Nigel Farage’s gang. One senior party strategist says he listened in some wonderment as his focus group of Ukip voters spent an entire 90-minute session wailing and gnashing their teeth about the state of Britain. Not a good word did they have to say about the country today. At the end of the session, he thanked them for their time, and said he had one more question. Was there anything about Britain that made them feel proud? There was a silence. Then one man leant forward and said: “The past.” The rest of the group nodded in agreement.

The past they yearn for is imaginary, of course – a rose-tinted view of the 1950s. One suspects that if most UKIP voters were plonked down in the real 1950s, they would soon baulk at the thick smog, Teddy Boys and lack of choice in the shops – that is, if they weren’t already dead because of the retarded state of medical science.

Admittedly, they would not be as angry as they are with the Britain of today. Like Thatcher, they hate everyone who isn’t like them. And you cannot call yourself a patriot if you hold most of your fellow countrymen in contempt.

But there’s another irony about UKIP. The profound sense of loss that elderly UKIP voters feel is rooted in the erosion of society, an increasing sense of insecurity and a decline in traditional values. Those destructive trends are the result of Thatcher’s economistic values, where nothing matters anymore apart from the bottom line.

What has UKIP to say about this destruction? Far from wanting to rebuild social cohesion, UKIP supports precisely the sort of extreme laissez-faire policies that destroyed so much of the traditional Britain its elderly supporters mourn. It is doubtful that many UKIP supporters’ sense of security would be enhanced if UKIP stripped them of the welfare state, employment protection or health and safety regulations, and gave big business even more freedom to let rip.

Daniel Trilling made a similar observation in the New Statesman. Although UKIP appeals to “a more profound feeling of disenfranchisement”, its policies would make that problem worse:

The irony is that the kind of “independence” Ukip offers – opening Britain further still to the ravages of market forces – would intensify the process. Far from being anti-establishment, Ukip’s leaders want the same as the elite they condemn, only more so.

Is it patriotic to want a Britain organised for the benefit of a wealthy few and where everyone else is left to sink or swim? So long as Nigel Farage can keep the level of debate closer to the gut than the brain, it is a question he will not have to answer.

The price of everything and the value of nothing

It’s official. The Secretary of State for Culture is a philistine.

Maria Miller will deliver a speech at the British Museum today:

British culture should be presented as a “commodity” and “compelling product” to sell at home and abroad, the culture secretary, Maria Miller, will argue in her first speech on the arts since taking up the job in September.

It has taken Miller seven months since becoming culture secretary to deliver a speech setting out her philosophy, and it turns out that she knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

It is this economistic outlook that is the true heritage of Margaret Thatcher. Instead of attacking the corpse of a dead prime minister, critics should focus on the zombie of her ideas.

Small businessmen with small minds

Small business interests ought to enjoy more sympathy from Liberal Democrats. After all, they represent a Liberal ideal of small-scale, local economic power and are a preferable form of enterprise to large corporations.

Why do Liberal Democrats retain a lingering suspicion? The probable reason is a fear that small businesspeople are not just Tories but Poujadists, the sort of people Eric Idle moaned about in Monty Python’s Travel Agent sketch:

“...you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic camera and Dr. Scholl sandals and last Tuesday’s Daily Express and he drones on and on and on about how Mr. Smith should be running this country and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak and then he throws up over the Cuba Libres...”

These suspicions will not have been allayed by the response of the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) to the mock funeral of Margaret Thatcher held last week in the former coal mining village of Goldthorpe in South Yorkshire.

The FSB alleges that the Goldthorpe protest, which was broadcast around the world, will deter foreign investors from investing in Yorkshire.

[The FSB’s claim dominated last Friday’s edition of BBC1’s Yorkshire area local news programme Look North, which for some reason is not available to view on the BBC iPlayer.]

It is highly unlikely any foreign investor will be deterred, since such one-off protests would have no bearing on the sort of considerations investors normally make. There has been no serious investment in Goldthorpe since the pit closed in 1994. This suggests that the lack of investment has more deep-seated reasons, such as poor infrastructure, low levels of educational attainment and high crime.

People living in and around Goldthorpe must feel strongly resentful at their economic predicament, so last week’s emotional outburst was understandable. But their mock funeral, along with all the other anti-Thatcher protests last week, was a futile gesture. It was pointless because Thatcher has been out of power for 22 years. The point now is to contest the ideology not the person, and that requires a completely different strategy.

The obsequious tributes to Thatcher need countering, principally to challenge the widespread fallacies that Thatcher’s policies were inevitable and that her legacy remains permanent. But none of the street protests articulated any coherent criticism. Instead, they seemed to consist of warmed-over SWP slogans from the 1980s.

So the key thing about the protests is that they were ineffectual. Talking them up serves only to salvage them. Which is precisely the mistake made by the FSB.

The FSB succeeded only in extending the media coverage of the Goldthorpe protests by an extra day. It is behaving as if it were playing a computer game set in the 1980s called ‘Fantasy Union Bashing’. It has confirmed the worst suspicions about the political prejudices of small business people. This may be unfair, but the FSB should have considered the consequences for its reputation before it spoke.

Thatcher: a picture paints a thousand words

The Poke has assembled a splendid collection of Twitpics to mark this special day. And one picture in particular is a symbol of all that Margaret Thatcher stood for:

Large crowds gather in Leeds city centre to watch Lady Thatcher’s funeral

Thatcherism is not a Thousand Year Reich

In today’s Guardian, John Harris wonders what happened to that extinct species, the One Nation Tory. He finds a revealing statement by Margaret Thatcher (quoted in a book by Ian Gilmour, one of her cabinet ‘wets’):

“Do not say it is time for something else! Thatcherism is not for a decade. It is for centuries!”

Thatcher said this in 1990, towards the end of her premiership when she was already going round the bend. Nevertheless, the idea that Thatcherism is permanent or inevitable is widely held, even among her opponents.

The apologias by juvenile right-wingers among the comments on Liberal Democrat Voice are only to be expected, but others who ought to know better have been equally fatalistic. Here for example is Paddy Ashdown, speaking in last week’s debate in the House of Lords:

At the time when she did those things, they needed to be done.

Historical inevitability? I never knew Paddy was a Marxist.

More often, inevitability is cloaked in a false notion of pragmatism, where the Thatcher settlement is viewed as so permanent as to be beyond ideology. This has led to the current fad for managerialism, which suggests that most mainstream politicians have given up on offering real political choice.

There is a difference between agreeing with Thatcher and being mesmerised by her. It is time for people to snap out of it.

In politics, nothing is inevitable or permanent. If that were the case, there would be no need for politics. We always have a choice and, the sooner that is recognised, the healthier our politics will be.

Thatcher and alcohol

One extraordinary thing about Margaret Thatcher’s death is that there has been no mention anywhere in the media of her alcoholism.

It was an open secret in Westminster that, by the end of her premiership, she was putting away a bottle of scotch a day (or rather, night, since she was notorious for staying up very late). I heard from a reputable source in the mid-1990s that she was receiving medical treatment for alcoholism.

Her husband Denis’s fondness for a G&T was well known but there was never any mention of his wife’s heavy drinking. As with Charles Kennedy’s problem before it burst into the open, it was known about but not talked about.

Media reticence was understandable while Thatcher was alive, for fear of a defamation lawsuit. Now she is dead, the continuing taboo is hard to explain.

Grantham keeps calm and carries on

I visited Margaret Thatcher’s hometown of Grantham yesterday, not to sign the book of condolences but to do the weekly shopping at Morrisons.

There was no outward sign of any mourning. There was no makeshift shrine of flowers and teddy bears outside the corner shop where Thatcher grew up (the shop is now occupied by a chiropractic business called Living Health).

Why the local stoicism? Following the Lincolnshire earthquake of 2008, the Guardian noted:

Stoicism is in keeping with the character of a county which, despite being England’s second-biggest, does not like to make a fuss.

In the 1983 general election, I was Liberal candidate for Grantham and, in the course of canvassing, met several local people who knew Margaret Roberts (as she then was) before she left for Oxford University, never to return. None of them had a good word to say for her. They still gave the Tories a big majority, though (the sitting MP was Douglas Hogg before he bought the infamous manor house with the moat).

One of the more bizarre occurrences during the campaign was at a house meeting one evening. In those days, Grantham’s local cinema (the Paragon) was an independent family-run business. The manager went out and about with a Super 8 camera and made his own newsreels. He asked if he could film the meeting. I prepared to conduct an interview, only to discover when the manager turned up that he made his newsreels with no sound. Had I known in advance this was to be a silent film, I could have organised a custard pie fight or tied the Tory agent to a railway track. In any event, I am probably the last Liberal candidate in British political history to feature in a silent newsreel.

PS: The title of this post is a cliché but it seemed only appropriate, given that almost every shop in Grantham still appears to be selling “Keep Calm and Carry On” coffee mugs. This slogan has rapidly become the “You don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps” de nos jours.

Thatcher: Local newspaper gets to the heart of the matter

Bexley Times: “Former Dartford candidate Margaret Thatcher dies”

Lord Bonkers pays tribute to Margaret Thatcher

I first met the young Margaret Roberts (as she then was) because I was in the habit of buying my dog biscuits from her father’s shop in Grantham and she would sometimes serve me.

This evening of all evenings is not an occasion to record that she generally kept her thumb on the scales.

Read more from Lord Bonkers on Liberal England.

Margaret Thatcher – humbug alert

Few wish to speak ill of the dead. And so with the death today of Margaret Thatcher, even most of her fiercest opponents are being generous in their tributes and any criticism is muted (although Liberal Democrat Voice’s insistence on “tributes only” is going too far).

There will doubtless be a few ill-judged reactions in poor taste but don’t waste your disapproval on them. Instead, watch out for the unscrupulous politicians who exploit the memory of Thatcher to justify what they are doing now. Because however much today’s politicians pay fulsome tribute to Thatcher, they are actually deeply uncomfortable with her main attribute.

Whatever you thought of her ideology, the key thing about Thatcher was that she had an ideology. She was a conviction politician with a clear vision of what she wanted to achieve. Her famous statement “there is no alternative” (‘TINA’) was an expression of that conviction, not of consensus politics or convergence on a mythical ‘centre ground’. Her conviction was based on a moral idea of right and wrong, not on the bogus grounds that her preferences were obvious or inevitable. Thatcher’s agenda was above board, not smuggled in under the guise of non-ideological ‘pragmatism’. She thought radical change was possible; she did not accept conventional wisdom as a given and never attempted to merge into an homogeneous political class. She welcomed argument and did not respect people who always agreed with her. This is the antithesis of what mainstream politicians believe today.

Thatcher’s convictions have left an appalling legacy and many of the major problems we face today, such as the consequences of financial deregulation or inflated house prices, can be traced back to decisions of her government. But the problem was that her convictions were wrong rather than that they were convictions per se. It will require convictions of equal strength to challenge the consensus she created.

So as you listen to the tributes between now and the funeral, beware of the politicians who invoke Thatcher and ‘TINA’ to justify the status quo without providing any kind of substantive argument. Anyone who suggests that Thatcher’s victories in the 1980s mean we have no choice today will reveal that they do not understand Margaret Thatcher’s conviction politics and do not understand why, by severely limiting the range of political options, they are undermining democracy.

Postscript: As predicted, Francis Maude appeared on Monday evening’s edition of BBC2 Newsnight, arguing that Thatcher had settled a whole host of political issues in perpetuity.

Why the Tea Party is breaking apart

On Three Worlds (the campaignstrategy.org blog), Chris Rose reports an analysis by Pat Dade showing that America’s right-wing Tea Party (the Republican party-within-a-party) consists of two very different wings, libertarians and religious conservatives. Antagonism between these two groups is causing a sharp drop in support.

The two groups have very different values:

The Libertarians... scored highly on power, achievement, pleasure and self-direction, whereas the Religious Conservatives scored highly on benevolence, tradition, propriety and security.

What unites them is narrow: a rejection of fairness and universalism (a belief in the universality of the human experience and a consequent belief in human unity and solidarity). It is perverse that what unites them is opposition to values that are central to Christianity.

The Three Worlds post ends by noting that the differences between Britain’s two coalition parties are just as great, but this misses a more pertinent point: the division within the Conservative Party. Since the arrival of Margaret Thatcher, a more libertarian group primarily concerned with market forces and individualism has supplanted a more traditional group primarily concerned with upholding tradition and community. So much so that it is questionable whether the Conservative Party can any longer be accurately described as a ‘conservative’ party.