When I was reminded that today is the anniversary of Margaret Thatcher's resignation as Prime Minister, my first thought was "How do we celebrate?" And I will be raising a glass tonight in memory of having finally got rid of her as PM. But overall I think it's occasion for a more sober and reflective reaction. Because although we got rid of her, we didn't get rid of her legacy. We didn't then and we still haven't now.
She did some good things - freeing up the economy in general was a good thing. She went too far in this. An example is the licence given to bankers to drive us into recession by not giving a damn about prudence. Her opposition to Communism was a good thing - and eventually vindicated - but again she went much too far in vindictiveness towards any philosophy that didn't chime with hers. Women's rights didn't get too far under her reign.
But overall the worst part of her legacy is one we have hardly escaped at all, and it doesn't look as if we will in the foreseeable future. That is the pernicious poison that entered the nation's soul - a philosophy that greed was good as long as you could find a way of dressing it up, a view that the only person that counts is "me" (while all the time pontificating about family values, as long as they were for other people - remember Cecil Parkinson and his secretary). The sheer nastiness and hypocrisy of her reign was mirrored in the actions and activities of thousands of others, and was worked out in the enrichment of half the country at the expense of the other, poorer half. That viciousness is still alive in the attitudes of many people in this country today - not just Conservatives, though sadly many of them seem to echo those ideas and nonprinciples.
I will raise a glass to the end of Thatcher's reign, but unfortunately not to the end of Thatcherism.
Showing posts with label thatcher. Show all posts
Showing posts with label thatcher. Show all posts
Saturday, 28 November 2009
Monday, 25 February 2008
Portillo on Thatcher disappoints
I was disappointed by Portillo on Thatcher. I started watching with a sense of anticipation that we'd get some incisive reminiscing and analysis from him and from his interviewees, largely fed by a Radio Five interview earlier in the day which made it sound a lot better than it actually turned out.
First of all, there was a minor irritation that he talked about “us” all the time as if the Conservative Party represented all of Britain, which we know it doesn't – largely because of Mrs T. At times I wondered if I was watching a party political broadcast. We got about fifteen minutes of puff about how well David Cameron is doing in moving on from her legacy and modernising the party. If you call modernising not having a single policy position to stand on, I suppose you might have a point.
But mostly I was disappointed because I think the portrait of her downfall and the aftermath is just plain wrong, and I'm surprised because I thought Portillo (nowadays) was more intelligent than that. Partly it's because biography is always a thin form of history, but largely it's because even the biography refuses to acknowledge feet of clay. Patten and Clarke both said that the party's problems since Thatcher's downfall all stem from the brutal way in which they got rid of her, and Portillo clearly agrees with this. But as Ming Campbell pointed out while sharing Radio Five with Michael Portillo, removals of leaders are always brutal. The party performed with perfect logic – Thatcher had become an electoral liability – it was obvious that with her in power they would lose, and so they acted to remove her. And they succeeded in getting themselves re-elected. That's what parties do. Portillo recounts the moment at the subsequent party conference (I think) when he thinks the party suddeny realised what they'd done – thrown out a leader who'd won them three elections. The rose tinted view of the loyalist, I think. The MPS who retained their seats after she was ousted always knew exactly what they'd done.
Portillo and his interviewees found it impossible to understand why she went for the poll tax the way she did. They could not see that it was part of a pattern in the way she conducted herself and her relations with colleagues. They pointed out that she was very good at doing what was possible rather than necessarily what she wanted to do – which is true, but they alluded to her combative nature without noticing the gradually increasing effect that had on her choice of battle and choice of allies. Though there were many who tried to argue her out of the poll tax, she'd steadily got rid of genuine dissent with the cabinet and the government, and the consequences of that in terms of group think must eventually show.
They also discussed how she conspired against John Major thus exacerbating the split in the party between Thatcherites and everybody else, but they were still unable to bring themselves to blame her – it was still in their eyes the way she was removed that was the problem rather than the lady herself. They actually said on the programme that she was divisive for Major, but still could not acknowledge that that was culpable behaviour. John Patten made one of the programme's few really insightful remarks when he said that by that time Thatcherism and Euroscepticism were absolutely one and the same thing. Somebody – it might have been David Mellor – said that she arrived at the only time in the twentieth century when the country was ready for her, when there was a sense of crisis around, and battles had to be fought. But Portillo failed to move on from that to the point where the battles have been fought and the country wants to be at peace. And Margaret Thatcher had to go on fighting battles regardless.
The problem the party faces is that there is still a very solid rump of people, both MPs and members, who believe that Margaret Thatcher had all the right answers and are determined to follow her prescriptions, and her manner, to the last. That and the fact that the country contains more voters who hate her than who like her. I think that until the conservative party actually realises that, and genuinely puts some distance between them and her they will have a hard time. This programme suggests that that point has still not come, because although plenty was said about her failings, Portillo and his chums still could not bring themselves to say that she stopped being the solution and became the problem.
First of all, there was a minor irritation that he talked about “us” all the time as if the Conservative Party represented all of Britain, which we know it doesn't – largely because of Mrs T. At times I wondered if I was watching a party political broadcast. We got about fifteen minutes of puff about how well David Cameron is doing in moving on from her legacy and modernising the party. If you call modernising not having a single policy position to stand on, I suppose you might have a point.
But mostly I was disappointed because I think the portrait of her downfall and the aftermath is just plain wrong, and I'm surprised because I thought Portillo (nowadays) was more intelligent than that. Partly it's because biography is always a thin form of history, but largely it's because even the biography refuses to acknowledge feet of clay. Patten and Clarke both said that the party's problems since Thatcher's downfall all stem from the brutal way in which they got rid of her, and Portillo clearly agrees with this. But as Ming Campbell pointed out while sharing Radio Five with Michael Portillo, removals of leaders are always brutal. The party performed with perfect logic – Thatcher had become an electoral liability – it was obvious that with her in power they would lose, and so they acted to remove her. And they succeeded in getting themselves re-elected. That's what parties do. Portillo recounts the moment at the subsequent party conference (I think) when he thinks the party suddeny realised what they'd done – thrown out a leader who'd won them three elections. The rose tinted view of the loyalist, I think. The MPS who retained their seats after she was ousted always knew exactly what they'd done.
Portillo and his interviewees found it impossible to understand why she went for the poll tax the way she did. They could not see that it was part of a pattern in the way she conducted herself and her relations with colleagues. They pointed out that she was very good at doing what was possible rather than necessarily what she wanted to do – which is true, but they alluded to her combative nature without noticing the gradually increasing effect that had on her choice of battle and choice of allies. Though there were many who tried to argue her out of the poll tax, she'd steadily got rid of genuine dissent with the cabinet and the government, and the consequences of that in terms of group think must eventually show.
They also discussed how she conspired against John Major thus exacerbating the split in the party between Thatcherites and everybody else, but they were still unable to bring themselves to blame her – it was still in their eyes the way she was removed that was the problem rather than the lady herself. They actually said on the programme that she was divisive for Major, but still could not acknowledge that that was culpable behaviour. John Patten made one of the programme's few really insightful remarks when he said that by that time Thatcherism and Euroscepticism were absolutely one and the same thing. Somebody – it might have been David Mellor – said that she arrived at the only time in the twentieth century when the country was ready for her, when there was a sense of crisis around, and battles had to be fought. But Portillo failed to move on from that to the point where the battles have been fought and the country wants to be at peace. And Margaret Thatcher had to go on fighting battles regardless.
The problem the party faces is that there is still a very solid rump of people, both MPs and members, who believe that Margaret Thatcher had all the right answers and are determined to follow her prescriptions, and her manner, to the last. That and the fact that the country contains more voters who hate her than who like her. I think that until the conservative party actually realises that, and genuinely puts some distance between them and her they will have a hard time. This programme suggests that that point has still not come, because although plenty was said about her failings, Portillo and his chums still could not bring themselves to say that she stopped being the solution and became the problem.
Sunday, 4 November 2007
Margaret Thatcher
For a long, long time I've had trouble making up my mind about Margaret Thatcher. I was actually glad when she came to power, because she removed Labour. That gladness very quickly turned to dislike and slowly into a hatred of all she stood for. That has been replaced equally slowly in recent years by a more tempered assessment of a person who is a very complex character.
Simon Jenkins, in Thatcher and Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts, argues that she carried out two revolutions - an economic one, which benefitted the country enormously, and a centralisation of power, which didn't.
(He then argues that the second revolution needs to be undone by a concerted decentralisation of power to regions, cities, boroughs, parishes, etc. Given that this has consistently been a central plank of Liberal Democrat policy since before he cut his political teeth, it's interesting that he seems to dislike the LibDems so much.)
Thinking about that crystallised some thoughts which have been on their way for some time. In my view, Margaret Thatcher did carry out two revolutions, but one was not the one Jenkins thinks it is. The first revolution is the economic and industrial one, on which most people are pretty much agreed nowadays - it needed doing, and because Thatcher did it so far and so fast, we now have a much stronger economy than we might have had. (And incidentally one that is so far out of kilter with most of our colleagues in the European Union that it is at the root of most of our squabbles with them, along with an outdated English view of the meaning of nationhood.)
One of the characteristics of a revolution is that it starts and it stops. In other words the whole process is subsumed under that heading. I think the economic revolution under Thatcher was more or less that. Very little had happened prior to her in the way of noticing that the world economy had changed and the industrial hegemony of developed countries was on the way out. Very little had happened to take on board the fact of the information revolution with its implication that services, and the movement and manipulation of information, would be a priceless asset in years to come. Arguably Thatcher only went part of the way on that one, because the big revolution in IT, particularly the web and mobile technology, was still to come. But she transformed Britain's economic landscape from predominantly an industrial one to a much more mixed economy with a large, probably dominant, service sector. That movement, and the deregulation that accompanied it, largely finished when Thatcher left office. Any movements since can be better described as tinkering rather than revolutionary, and in some senses there has been a reversal, with more rather than less regulatory burden on business, as well as a (slightly) higher burden of tax. Interestingly there is not a big argument about tax today. There are lots of little ones, which people keep trying to turn into big ones, but all the main players seem to be more or less agreed as to the general level of taxation.
So the economic revolution was, and remains, a revolution. What about the centralisation revolution? I'm not so sure about that. It's very complicated because in one way Thatcher decentralised mightily, by selling off state owned industry. She did centralise political power, and taxing power, by bringing powers in to the centre from local government, but I don't see that as being revolutionary. Central government already supported local government to a very significant extent through the rate support grant - I don't have the figures to hand. She put the squeeze on deliberately and for specific purposes - to reduce spending and to reduce the power of Labour strongholds. But she didn't go much beyond that, and, furthermore, the tightening of control was extended by subsequent governments, and indeed went much further than Thatcher had ever envisaged - the whole surveillance revolution was after her time. So I would call the centralisation thing a significant step, perhaps a very significant one, but not a revolution.
But I do think there was a second revolution. It was a more personal one, and one which remains an issue today. I'll summarise it first and then try to describe in more detail what I mean. It was the introduction of a spirit of nastiness into British and particularly English life which still stains it today.
Margaret Thatcher herself was/is a nasty person. She is capable of warmth and charm, but her default mode is nastier than that. She epitomises the manner of early non-conformist capitalism brilliantly summarised by Hugo Young as "aggressive thrift". She was very strong minded indeed, and she was correct to a fault. She was happiest when in a fight with someone. She seemed, according again to Young, to be incapable of reaching a decision without having an argument first. In other words, she had to fight. Arguably the economic revolution carried out under her leadership could have been achieved at much less human cost. But I believe she didn't just count the suffering of the workers as worth it, she actually wanted to make them suffer. I have no doubt that she believed she was doing right - but it's a very old testament, and very flawed view of the nature of the world.
I note that I oscillate between past and present tense when speaking about her. This is itself significant. The person "Margaret Thatcher" is definitely a "was". There is a live person, who "is", whose name is "Lady Thatcher". But, shorn of her power, Lady Thatcher is irrelevant. It was the wielding of power with single minded and utterly focussed will that made Margaret Thatcher the force she was. And she is no longer that force.
Margaret Thatcher was the complete hypocrite. She led a very correct life herself. She never strayed from her marriage, and she never took a bribe. And you can be absolutely sure that she would never have taken one. But she presided over a cabinet that became utterly corrupt under her tutelage. She actively encouraged that corruption by energetically supporting every one of her ministers until it became evident that they could not survive. And she was always so self righteous about it. Most of the evidence came out under Major, when it seemed hardly a month went by without some Tory being found with his hands in someone else's underwear or someone else's wallet. But it was Margaret Thatcher who set the tone. It was Thatcher's government that was enthusiastically selling weaponry to Iraq during the 1980s and it was her proteges who were apparently ready to see innocent business people go to jail rather than admit the truth. Only the ultimate maverick, Alan Clarke, was finally prepared to tell the truth in court.
(By comparison - whatever you think of Labour sleaze, no Labour minister or MP has yet been jailed.)
A further example - the Westminster gerrymandering, encouraged by Margaret Thatcher's powerful belief that the end justified the means (strange that a non-conformist upbringing should lead to such a Jesuitical stance). I don't blame Margaret Thatcher for Shirley Porter's criminality and viciousness. I do blame her for bringing about a culture in which people thought that kind of behaviour was justifiable if it worked.
And finally, her lionising of General Pinochet, when he was quite rightly and properly being pursued on a charge of murder. And we have discovered since how corrupt Pinochet was. Again, I don't blame her for Pinochet. I do blame her for having no problem in not just consorting with him but regarding him as a close friend. And, once again the crucial point, she was so self righteous about it. The presenting to him of a plate celebrating the victory over the Armada says it all. Pinochet (dictator, murderer, corrupt embezzler) is our ally. Spain (democracy, engaging Pinochet by the rule of law) is our enemy.
"Greed is good" was part of a larger movement than Thatcherism. But Thatcher enthusiastically endorsed it by her actions, even though the self righteous tone of her rhetoric would not allow her to say it outright. She encouraged other people to "do unto others" by the example of her own instinctive aggression and by the permission she gave to them to break any rule if it was in the way. Allied to a rhetoric of individual responsibility - look after yourself because nobody else is going to - the result was, in my opinion, lethal for morality.
The overall result of that was the production of a tone of behaviour, not among everybody, but among significant numbers of some classes. There are still many people in this country today who have taken their tone from Margaret Thatcher - what she did herself, and what she encouraged others to do. If somebody else is in the way of what you want, then every means is justified to get them out of the way. According to some commentators, we have a generation of young men who are so self centred that they have become criminally minded. That generation, if it exists, which I'm not sure about, was brought up under Thatcherism, and the taint of her morality shows. I don't believe it is limited to a few young spivs though. It shows in boardroom behaviour where CEOs seem to genuinely believe that having a pay package an average of 70 times staff earnings is justifiable. And it is fuelled by the Thatcherite belief that there is no such thing as society, which implies that there is no reason to be responsible to anyone else. She completed that phrase by saying you have individuals and you have families - another good example of her hypocrisy when you look at the number of her ministers who flouted family values, and the amount of support that families didn't get when they were suffering through her restructuring of the economy.
There are many people who are not infected of course, many who inoculated themselves against Thatcher at the earliest possible moment. But that attitude that says that any law, any morality can be broken because I have a higher morality - me, is still too evident in the actions of too many people.
Simon Jenkins, in Thatcher and Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts, argues that she carried out two revolutions - an economic one, which benefitted the country enormously, and a centralisation of power, which didn't.
(He then argues that the second revolution needs to be undone by a concerted decentralisation of power to regions, cities, boroughs, parishes, etc. Given that this has consistently been a central plank of Liberal Democrat policy since before he cut his political teeth, it's interesting that he seems to dislike the LibDems so much.)
Thinking about that crystallised some thoughts which have been on their way for some time. In my view, Margaret Thatcher did carry out two revolutions, but one was not the one Jenkins thinks it is. The first revolution is the economic and industrial one, on which most people are pretty much agreed nowadays - it needed doing, and because Thatcher did it so far and so fast, we now have a much stronger economy than we might have had. (And incidentally one that is so far out of kilter with most of our colleagues in the European Union that it is at the root of most of our squabbles with them, along with an outdated English view of the meaning of nationhood.)
One of the characteristics of a revolution is that it starts and it stops. In other words the whole process is subsumed under that heading. I think the economic revolution under Thatcher was more or less that. Very little had happened prior to her in the way of noticing that the world economy had changed and the industrial hegemony of developed countries was on the way out. Very little had happened to take on board the fact of the information revolution with its implication that services, and the movement and manipulation of information, would be a priceless asset in years to come. Arguably Thatcher only went part of the way on that one, because the big revolution in IT, particularly the web and mobile technology, was still to come. But she transformed Britain's economic landscape from predominantly an industrial one to a much more mixed economy with a large, probably dominant, service sector. That movement, and the deregulation that accompanied it, largely finished when Thatcher left office. Any movements since can be better described as tinkering rather than revolutionary, and in some senses there has been a reversal, with more rather than less regulatory burden on business, as well as a (slightly) higher burden of tax. Interestingly there is not a big argument about tax today. There are lots of little ones, which people keep trying to turn into big ones, but all the main players seem to be more or less agreed as to the general level of taxation.
So the economic revolution was, and remains, a revolution. What about the centralisation revolution? I'm not so sure about that. It's very complicated because in one way Thatcher decentralised mightily, by selling off state owned industry. She did centralise political power, and taxing power, by bringing powers in to the centre from local government, but I don't see that as being revolutionary. Central government already supported local government to a very significant extent through the rate support grant - I don't have the figures to hand. She put the squeeze on deliberately and for specific purposes - to reduce spending and to reduce the power of Labour strongholds. But she didn't go much beyond that, and, furthermore, the tightening of control was extended by subsequent governments, and indeed went much further than Thatcher had ever envisaged - the whole surveillance revolution was after her time. So I would call the centralisation thing a significant step, perhaps a very significant one, but not a revolution.
But I do think there was a second revolution. It was a more personal one, and one which remains an issue today. I'll summarise it first and then try to describe in more detail what I mean. It was the introduction of a spirit of nastiness into British and particularly English life which still stains it today.
Margaret Thatcher herself was/is a nasty person. She is capable of warmth and charm, but her default mode is nastier than that. She epitomises the manner of early non-conformist capitalism brilliantly summarised by Hugo Young as "aggressive thrift". She was very strong minded indeed, and she was correct to a fault. She was happiest when in a fight with someone. She seemed, according again to Young, to be incapable of reaching a decision without having an argument first. In other words, she had to fight. Arguably the economic revolution carried out under her leadership could have been achieved at much less human cost. But I believe she didn't just count the suffering of the workers as worth it, she actually wanted to make them suffer. I have no doubt that she believed she was doing right - but it's a very old testament, and very flawed view of the nature of the world.
I note that I oscillate between past and present tense when speaking about her. This is itself significant. The person "Margaret Thatcher" is definitely a "was". There is a live person, who "is", whose name is "Lady Thatcher". But, shorn of her power, Lady Thatcher is irrelevant. It was the wielding of power with single minded and utterly focussed will that made Margaret Thatcher the force she was. And she is no longer that force.
Margaret Thatcher was the complete hypocrite. She led a very correct life herself. She never strayed from her marriage, and she never took a bribe. And you can be absolutely sure that she would never have taken one. But she presided over a cabinet that became utterly corrupt under her tutelage. She actively encouraged that corruption by energetically supporting every one of her ministers until it became evident that they could not survive. And she was always so self righteous about it. Most of the evidence came out under Major, when it seemed hardly a month went by without some Tory being found with his hands in someone else's underwear or someone else's wallet. But it was Margaret Thatcher who set the tone. It was Thatcher's government that was enthusiastically selling weaponry to Iraq during the 1980s and it was her proteges who were apparently ready to see innocent business people go to jail rather than admit the truth. Only the ultimate maverick, Alan Clarke, was finally prepared to tell the truth in court.
(By comparison - whatever you think of Labour sleaze, no Labour minister or MP has yet been jailed.)
A further example - the Westminster gerrymandering, encouraged by Margaret Thatcher's powerful belief that the end justified the means (strange that a non-conformist upbringing should lead to such a Jesuitical stance). I don't blame Margaret Thatcher for Shirley Porter's criminality and viciousness. I do blame her for bringing about a culture in which people thought that kind of behaviour was justifiable if it worked.
And finally, her lionising of General Pinochet, when he was quite rightly and properly being pursued on a charge of murder. And we have discovered since how corrupt Pinochet was. Again, I don't blame her for Pinochet. I do blame her for having no problem in not just consorting with him but regarding him as a close friend. And, once again the crucial point, she was so self righteous about it. The presenting to him of a plate celebrating the victory over the Armada says it all. Pinochet (dictator, murderer, corrupt embezzler) is our ally. Spain (democracy, engaging Pinochet by the rule of law) is our enemy.
"Greed is good" was part of a larger movement than Thatcherism. But Thatcher enthusiastically endorsed it by her actions, even though the self righteous tone of her rhetoric would not allow her to say it outright. She encouraged other people to "do unto others" by the example of her own instinctive aggression and by the permission she gave to them to break any rule if it was in the way. Allied to a rhetoric of individual responsibility - look after yourself because nobody else is going to - the result was, in my opinion, lethal for morality.
The overall result of that was the production of a tone of behaviour, not among everybody, but among significant numbers of some classes. There are still many people in this country today who have taken their tone from Margaret Thatcher - what she did herself, and what she encouraged others to do. If somebody else is in the way of what you want, then every means is justified to get them out of the way. According to some commentators, we have a generation of young men who are so self centred that they have become criminally minded. That generation, if it exists, which I'm not sure about, was brought up under Thatcherism, and the taint of her morality shows. I don't believe it is limited to a few young spivs though. It shows in boardroom behaviour where CEOs seem to genuinely believe that having a pay package an average of 70 times staff earnings is justifiable. And it is fuelled by the Thatcherite belief that there is no such thing as society, which implies that there is no reason to be responsible to anyone else. She completed that phrase by saying you have individuals and you have families - another good example of her hypocrisy when you look at the number of her ministers who flouted family values, and the amount of support that families didn't get when they were suffering through her restructuring of the economy.
There are many people who are not infected of course, many who inoculated themselves against Thatcher at the earliest possible moment. But that attitude that says that any law, any morality can be broken because I have a higher morality - me, is still too evident in the actions of too many people.
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