[D66] that cher thing

[Nord]

http://jacobinmag.com/2013/04/margaret-thatcher-1925-2013/

Margaret Thatcher (1925 – 2013)
4.9.13
by Marc Mulholland
Margaret Thatcher was made by her era more than she made it. But she was 
nonetheless the supreme emblem of her time.
option22

(Loki Muthu / Jacobin)

Margaret Thatcher was a towering figure of the late twentieth century. A 
generation after her fall from power, she remains an extraordinarily 
divisive figure. For some, she freed the individual to rise up and 
prosper without shame. For others, she worshiped greed and with callous 
zeal destroyed traditional working-class communities. But no one doubts 
the impression she made on the tone and texture of British politics and 
her significance as an international actor in the closing stages of the 
Cold War.

As a female leader of a great power in the democratic age, she was a 
path-breaker. In her cultivated style she was something like her 
nation’s no-nonsense maiden aunt: strict but concerned; realistic but 
nostalgic; dismissive of airy notions but possessed of a highly acute 
intelligence; practical but fiercely committed to ideals.

The greater claims that will be made for her, that she defeated trade 
union power and consigned socialism to the dustbin of history, are 
overstated. The social and economic consequences of de-industrialization 
that transformed Britain in the 1980s were set in motion before she was 
Prime Minister and would have taken place in one form or other without 
her, as they did in other advanced countries whether under conservative, 
liberal, or social-democratic administration. But only in Britain could 
the rise of neoliberalism and property-owning democracy be seen as a 
kind of return to the country’s most glorious age — the Victorian era, 
when Britannia ruled the world’s waves and commerce.

Thatcher thought of herself as a product of this superior form of 
society. In these “good old days,” “self-help” ruled and redistribution 
from the thrifty to the feckless and was scorned as debilitation and 
theft. As she said in an interview:

     We were taught to work jolly hard. We were taught to prove 
yourself; we were taught self-reliance; we were taught to live within 
our income. You were taught that cleanliness is next to godliness. You 
were taught self-respect. You were taught always to give a hand to your 
neighbour. You were taught tremendous pride in your country. All of 
these things are Victorian values. They are also perennial values.

Born in 1925, Margaret Hilda Roberts came from a petty bourgeois, 
religiously non-conformist, and traditionally Liberal family. With the 
rise of the Labour Party after the First World War, defenders of 
property and hierarchy coalesced around the Conservative Party, 
stripping Liberals of much of its historic support. But Thatcher 
inherited from her family’s Liberal past a distaste for unearned income 
and privilege, and a suspicion of patrician “wets” from traditional 
ruling elites too lazy or comfortable to govern with a firm hand.

Margaret graduated from Oxford in 1947 in chemistry, a subject that 
suited her forensic cast of mind. Though never one for abstract 
theorizing, she often recalled her encounter with Hayek’s 1944 polemic, 
The Road to Serfdom. Hayek’s Manichean worldview insisted that only 
free-market capitalism or totalitarianism were stable social formations. 
Social democracy only opened the way to the creeping suffocation of 
individual initiative by the state. Individual liberty and social 
equality stood at odds. During the post-war welfare and full-employment 
consensus, Hayek was hardly a guide to practical politics, but his 
work’s long-term appeal to Thatcher was in its simplifying clarity.

After a short time in industry (where she allegedly helped develop soft 
serve ice cream), Margaret married the rich businessman Denis Thatcher 
and became a mother. In 1959 she was elected to Parliament for Finchley. 
She was soon promoted to the lower regions of the “front bench” of the 
Conservative government and, after Labour’s election’s victory in 1964, 
the opposition. Labour at this time was attempting to deal with a 
tightening labour market that pushed up wages and cut profit margins. 
Its imposition of price and wage controls, and increased taxes on upper 
brackets, was characteristically condemned by Thatcher as inclining “not 
only towards socialism, but towards communism.”

Thatcher was appointed Education Secretary when the Conservatives won 
power under Edward Heath in 1970. Heath had promised an unleashing of 
the market to discipline workers and force management to take firmer 
control of their companies. Heath opted for a strategy of exposing the 
increasingly sclerotic British economy to the revivifying shock of 
direct competition by plunging it into the free-trade European Economic 
Community. But domestic crises intensified. Pummeled by the oil shock, 
rising inflation, and industrial militancy, Heath took on the powerful 
National Union of Mineworkers in 1973 and lost. Labour returned in 1974 
with a narrow majority.

Wracked by industrial unrest, with weak governments and turmoil in 
Northern Ireland, the United Kingdom, it was feared, was suffering a 
“crisis of governability.” Parliamentary sovereignty seemed 
short-circuited by cosy trilateral deals between government, trade union 
“barons,” and big business. Escalating inflation encouraged workers to 
demand nominally high pay claims, and management to concede them in the 
expectation that their real value would be whittled away by rising 
prices. A wage-price spiral took hold. Middle-class savers saw their 
money depreciate, and taxes rose to finance government Band-Aid 
intervention.

The British electorate was increasingly disillusioned by the politics of 
soft-corporatism, and the Conservatives saw their chance. Thatcher’s 
mentor, Keith Joseph MP, decried the consensus of welfarism and full 
employment policies pursued by both Labour and Tory post-war governments 
as sapping personal responsibility and energy. He argued that there was 
now an opportunity to turn the tide, and resume the “embourgeoisement” 
of society that he believed had characterized nineteenth-century 
Britain. Thatcher agreed, insisting that being middle class “has never 
been simply a matter of income, but a whole attitude to life, a will to 
take responsibility for oneself.” In 1975, she was elected leader of the 
Conservative Party, as champion of the backbenchers and rank and file 
more than the party’s elite.

Thatcher had particular contempt for the academic discipline of 
sociology mushrooming in 1970s universities, which categorized people by 
class and insisted their aspirations were in conflict with one another. 
Thatcher’s vision of a “classless society” was one of just rewards: hard 
work and talent should be rewarded, indolence and ignorance penalized. 
Only the market was capable of measure virtues. The duty of the state 
was to get out of the way.

The Conservative Party under Thatcher adopted a modified form of 
“monetarism.” By restricting the money supply, inflation would be purged 
from the system. Responsibility would thereby be devolved back from 
government to individuals. In workers insisted on striking they would 
price themselves out of the job market. Managers capitulating to 
workers’ demands would go broke. Dynamic businesses, with workers put in 
their place, would prosper. With savings preserved, investment would be 
free to flow away from obsolete industries towards competitive new 
enterprises.

Thatcher’s steely tones — which won her the nickname “Iron Lady” from 
the Soviet Union — did not at first enthuse the electorate, who feared 
class warfare. Labour’s “Social Contract,” however, only held down the 
wages of poorly organized workers whilst preserving the power of heavily 
unionised workers able to defy wage-restraint. Corporatism no longer 
seemed to preserve social justice, never mind economic efficiency.

In 1979, the poorly-paid rebelled in a series of strikes that left the 
dead unburied and rubbish piling on the streets. This “Winter of 
Discontent” brought Thatcher support — in the 1979 general election, 
even one third of trade unionists voted for the Conservative Party — and 
left an indelible legend of anarchical decline that the Tories exploited 
for years afterwards.

Thatcher’s first term coincided with an international recession. 
Thatcher’s Gladstonian stringency magnified the devastation of Britain’s 
traditional industrial base. Unemployment rose to well over 3 million. 
Riots broke out in inner cities. Thatcher’s legacy was chronic 
under-employment with all the attendant social ills of poverty and 
dependence. To be sure, in all advanced countries, capitalism was 
deindustrialising, mass-production declining and low-skill jobs 
disappearing, with unavoidable social and political consequences. The 
victory of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives in 1979, Ronald Reagan’s 
Republicans in 1980, and Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democrats in 1982 were 
all of an epoch, as was the turn to market solutions by the socialist 
governments of Felipe González in Spain and François Mitterrand in 
France from 1982-3. It was the Communist Bloc’s attempt to shore up its 
industrial architecture that slipped it below the tide mark of 
viability. But it was the very abrasiveness of Thatcher’s determination 
to push through the pain-barrier, her vitriolic celebration of the 
market restructuring, that set her apart.

“Wets” pondered whether it would be advisable to U-turn, but Thatcher 
scorned these grandees of the civil service, Church of England, 
Oxbridge, the BBC, and the old Tory establishment. Too comfortably 
ensconced in their inherited privilege, they failed to see the need for 
hard choices and sacrifice. They lacked the petty bourgeois’ virtues. 
Thatcher always preferred the company of self-made businessmen from 
outside the charmed circles of British life — she was particularly warm 
to those of Jewish background. She did not consider the old ruling 
elites to be “one of us.” In a legendary 1980 speech, she firmly 
rebuffed these faint-hearted: “To those waiting with bated breath for 
that favorite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to 
say, you turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.” She would not 
be another Heath.

Thatcher’s first term was striking in her assault on the time-honored 
habits of consensus and fudge. Her mix of rhetoric and policy was, 
almost uniquely in British political history, dignified by an “-ism”: 
“Thatcherism” was coined by Nigel Lawson, future Chancellor of the 
Exchequer, in 1981.

The popularity of Thatcher’s government at first waned, but she was 
arguably saved by the invasion of the British-owned Falkland Islands by 
the Argentinian military junta in 1983, and their subsequent liberation 
by a British Task Force. The Task Force could quite easily have come to 
grief, and the cost in life on both sides was substantial, but 
Thatcher’s gamble paid off. The attendant burst of British national 
chauvinism chimed with her values and propelled her party up the polls.

Alan Budd, a Thatcher advisor, in 1992 recalled that monetarism was “a 
very, very good way to raise unemployment and raising unemployment was 
an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working 
classes. So what was engineered there, in Marxist terms, was a crisis of 
capitalism which recreated a reserve army of labor and has allowed the 
capitalist to make high profits ever since.”

Thatcher also had a positive program, however. Council houses were sold 
off to their occupiers at discounted prices. As local authorities were 
not allowed to use the receipts to build new homes property values 
spiralled in a tightening market. The privatization of publicly owned 
industries was calculated to encourage widespread share-ownership. This 
was social engineering to political ends. As the London School of 
Economics academic Rodney Barker writes, “If each acre in the hands of 
the peasantry was another musket for the defence of property, it seemed 
as if each Telecom share passed down through the middle-class might be 
another vote for the defence of the New Right.” This was the prosperity 
of asset inflation rather than substantial productivity gains. There was 
no economic miracle.

Under the Thatcher governments, annual economic growth averaged 1.8 per 
cent, a figure below that for the 1960s and 1970s and below the OECD 
average, in spite of the dividends from North Sea Oil. But there’s no 
doubt that Thatcher’s rhetoric of aspiration chimed with even working 
class voters, particularly given the parlous state of the opposition. In 
the 1987 general election, almost 50 per cent of Conservative support 
came from the working class. Two-thirds of the skilled and 50 per cent 
of the semi-skilled and unskilled working class voters declined to 
support Labour. Only half of the unemployed voters supported Labour. 
Anti-Tory voters, always a majority of the electorate in the Thatcher 
years, were fatally divided between opposition parties.

 From 1983, the economy began to recover, and from 1987, as taxes were 
slashed, the economy boomed, though in a particularly unsustainable way. 
It was to collapse into severe recession in 1988. Even with the largesse 
of North Sea Oil, Britain was living beyond its means. An excessive 
prioritization of finance over manufacture, a deformation that has 
marked the economy ever since, was entrenched.

Still, as the economy recovered, Thatcher’s self-confidence grew. 
Anti-trade union laws were successively ratcheted up, and most of the 
nationalized industries were sold off. In 1984-5, she faced down miners 
in a year-long dispute over pit closures. Accelerated pit closures 
probably made little economic sense: a more paced run-down would have 
avoided the heavy burden placed on welfare resources by men 
precipitously thrown out of work in the country’s many one-industry 
towns. But the symbolic value of facing down the union that had 
humiliated the Tories in 1974 was too attractive to resist, particularly 
since it was led by the old-style radical socialist, Arthur Scargill. 
The political use of the police during the Miners’ strike, as a force of 
repression rather than even-handed enforcers of public order, was 
evidence enough that Thatcherite anti-statism had its limits.

The Conservatives handily won two further terms, in 1983 and 1987, 
against a demoralized and divided opposition. While most politicians are 
softened by a long period in office, Thatcher was radicalized. Sometimes 
her activist instinct led her in directions she later regretted. The 
1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, arrived at under the “shadow of the gunman” 
(as she put it in her memoirs), she later regretted as a concession to 
Irish disloyalists, all the more galling in that she had ruthlessly 
faced down the republican hunger strikers in 1981 and survived a serious 
assassination attempt by the IRA in 1984. She reverted to purely 
military measures against the IRA, and the peace process had to await 
her departure.

Thatcher was careful in her political handling of the welfare state and 
the National Health Service. By 1990 taxes as a share of GDP had 
actually increased compared to 1979 (from 35.5 per cent to 37.5 per 
cent) though the burden had been shifted from progressive income taxes 
to regressive taxes on consumption. Still, her long-term intentions were 
clear. Society had to be re-moralized, and this meant refocusing it from 
state-welfare to purposeful individuals providing for themselves and 
their families. As she famously put it in an interview:

     I think we have gone through a period when too many children and 
people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the 
Government’s job to cope with it!’ … and so they are casting their 
problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There 
are individual men and women and there are families and no government 
can do anything except through people and people look to themselves 
first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look 
after our neighbour.

The re-moralization of British society was not evident, however. Instead 
escalating inequality and the gambling ethics of the stock-market 
wealthy promoted narrowly materialistic individualism, a vapid 
“loadsamoney” culture much at odds with Thatcher’s genuinely held 
“Victorian values.” Tory distress at the social consequences of vulgar 
consumerism took reactionary form, with demonization of single-parent 
families and discriminatory legislation against gays.

Internationally, Thatcher was a close ally to Reagan in America, but 
never a mere sycophant. She ignored American warmth for the 
anti-Communist Junta in Argentina during the Falklands Conflict, and she 
rebuked the US invasion of Grenada, a member of the British 
Commonwealth, in 1983. Trans-Atlantic solidarity was more a more obvious 
feature of the Thatcher years, however, reversing a long cooling of 
relations since Britain had stayed out of the Vietnam War. Thatcher 
fully supported Reagan’s “Second Cold War” and delighted in dismissing 
pacifist protests at the stationing of US nuclear missiles in Britain. 
When America bombed Libya in 1986 Thatcher allowed US warplanes to use 
Britain as a base. Gaddafi retaliated by supplying the IRA with Semtex 
explosives.

In Mikhail Gorbachev, Thatcher saw a leader struggling to move the 
Soviet Union beyond its economic and political reliance on a passive 
industrial working class. Intuitively, she felt that his attempts to 
incentivize a putative Soviet bourgeoisie, the technical intelligentsia 
and managerial strata, would open the road to capitalist restoration and 
Western victory in the Cold War. He was, she declared, a man the West 
could “do business with.” Only in her hostility to German reunification 
— Thatcher was of the Second World War generation, after all — was she 
out of step with the construction of George H. W. Bush’s “New World Order.”

Thatcher’s cumulative radicalization finally put an end to her long 
tenure in office. Her highest ambition was to restore civic 
responsibility at the local level. However, the progressive rates system 
meant that while local authority expenditure was decided democratically 
it was financed disproportionately by the rich. There was every 
incentive for the poor to elect high-spending councils who would pay for 
services by hitting the rich hard.

Thatcher, outraged by so-called “loony-left councils,” responded by 
emasculating local democracy, empowering unelected quangos and the 
central government, and imposing rate-caps. This was only a stop-gap, 
however. With her Community Charge — better known as the Poll Tax — she 
planned to restore responsibility to local electorates. The tax burden 
would be basically equalized for each individual voter, encouraging a 
sense of responsibility and due regard for sober economy in the polling 
booth.

Logical in theory, the Poll Tax demonstrated Thatcher’s departure from 
her previous sure touch for popular opinion. The idea that “the rich man 
in his castle, the poor man at his gate, shall each pay an equal rate” 
outraged people’s sense of natural justice. That the Poll Tax was rolled 
out first in Scotland added insult to injury, and the Tories were pushed 
to near extinction in the country. As the Poll Tax was introduced to 
England, it was met by mass non-payment — primarily organised by 
Militant, a radical group to the left of Labour — and, in March 1990, 
serious riots in London. Thatcher was now a liability to the 
Conservative Party, as the Poll Tax could not realistically be replaced 
while she remained prime minister. Labour was consistently ahead in the 
opinion polls.

Thatcher’s defenestration was occasioned by inter-Tory disputes over 
Europe. Thatcher cooperated with the European Community, but was never 
an enthusiast. She feared that left-wingers, defeated within their 
nation-states, were attempting to use the Community to bring in social 
democracy at a continental level. Jacques Delors, after all, a leading 
architect of the European single market, had been a minister in 
Mitterand’s left-Keynesian government in France.

On 1 November 1990, Deputy Prime Minister Geoffrey Howe resigned over 
Thatcher’s refusal to name a date for joining the Exchange Rate 
Mechanism, a precursor to the Euro. The next day Michael Heseltine, a 
populist Tory who had earlier resigned from the cabinet, challenged 
Thatcher for leadership of the party. Thatcher won the contest, but not 
by a secure majority. Rather than contest a second round, she was 
unwillingly persuaded by ministers to resign. She was replaced by John 
Major, who won the 1992 election but presided over a government of 
deflating authority and collapsing support.

Conservatism’s electoral appeal had historically rested primarily on 
popular confidence in the traditional elites. Thatcher’s cultural 
revolution had attacked this very governing caste and its institutions 
as complacent consensus builders presiding over British decline. Since 
the 1920s, there had been solid working-class bloc that preferred the 
Tory Party to Labour as a disinterested and experienced repository of 
expertise in goverance. But Thatcherism eroded the deference to natural 
authority that wed many working class voters to the propertied classes. 
Voters were less likely to vote for a Tory Party on the grounds of its 
historical competence in government after Thatcher had lambasted the 
failure of Britain’s hereditary leadership caste.

 From the 1980s, Labour escaped its close association with “over-mighty” 
trade unions, now crushed by Thatcherism and de-industrialization. 
Thatcherism’s politics of acquisitiveness destroyed the lustre of an 
elite once seemingly committed to noblesse oblige and “one-nation” 
politics. Voting became instrumental, with a patina of sentimentality. 
New Labour was able to present itself as competent to deliver the free 
market goods, with just enough progressive rhetoric to assuage the guilt 
of voters demoralized by the rampant selfishness of the Thatcher years 
and John Major’s tawdry coda.

Thatcher resigned from the House of Commons in 1992. She was an often 
uncomfortable presence still for Tory leaders as she crafted her own 
legend of impregnable principle opposed to the compromises of lesser 
mortals. Her anti-Europeanism, always held in check while in office, 
grew apace thereafter, and tore at the entrails of the Conservative 
Party. John Major was overheard muttering imprecations against the 
Thatcherite “bastards” who dogged his steps. When Tony Blair came to 
power in the 1997 New Labour landslide, he invited Thatcher to Number 
10, an act of fealty that sickened old Labour stalwarts who had seen 
their communities devastated in the 1980s.

Ill-health meant that Baroness Thatcher, as she now was, slipped into 
silence, but the Tories in opposition seemed sick with ideology, frantic 
to expatiate its betrayal of the “Iron Lady.” David Cameron from 2005 
turned course, and rebranded the party by explicitly dumping parts of 
Thatcher’s legacy. He rejected her denial of “society” and spoke indeed 
of the need for a “Big Society”. This was not enough to restore the 
Tories as the “natural party of government” — Thatcher had destroyed 
that — but the Conservative-LibDem Coalition that came to power in 2010 
proposed to continue Thatcher’s project by finally destroying the 
“culture of welfarism.”

Thatcher was perhaps made by her era more than she made it. But she was 
nonetheless an inescapable figure, the supreme emblem of her time. For 
the Right, she is part of the pantheon, only below Winston Churchill in 
the twentieth century. For the Left she personifies the triumph of the 
populist capitalism, and they must take her measure even when seeking to 
prove that, after all, there was and is an alternative.