Forget silences, flowers and front pages. They’ll last a minute, a week, a news cycle.
The policies, the ideas, the acts – many will live longer. Mining communities won’t return, while large-scale renationalisation (except of our brave financiers) seems a distant prospect. The current government goes further in its assault on the poor than Thatcher ever dared.
Yet practical Thatcherism, embedded as it is at every level of Britain’s political class, may not be indelible. It is just possible to imagine a day when monetarism’s grip is weakened, when politics once more places people at its heart, when compassion is expressed not through a nation of occasional charity runners but by an electorate which not only supports, but demands, government protection for the most vulnerable.
Such lurches in the political paradigm can happen rapidly, sometimes triggered by external events, their seeds often sown in thoughtful speeches and articles which bypass much of the media.
What may not ever change, though, is the mindset embodied by so many of those reacting not to Thatcher’s death, but to the response of others.
Social media, in many ways as Thatcherite a concept as it’s possible to imagine, is full of the censorious, the disapproving, the sanctimonious. These, truly, are the children of Thatcher.
Few national leaders since Cromwell were as obsessed with judging the actions of people beyond their own narrow field of experience. Few encouraged pettiness, small-mindedness and incuriosity with quite the same zeal.
Confronted by a reaction to an event different to one’s own, today”s socially acceptable response is not to enquire but to judge.
Events are never multi-factoral – so an outbreak of rioting is simply criminality, facile statements about no country ever spending its way out of recession are accepted as fact, the hiving-off of health and education for profit is described uncritically as ‘reform’,
Our collective inability and unwillingness to ask why, to step outside our own comfort zone and read at least one contrary view to our own, is as direct a product of post-1979 politics as anything enacted at Westminster.
It’s worth reflecting on Thatcher’s own background, and how different it was to those of most of her predecessors. A grocer’s daughter who studied at Oxford thanks to a scholarship, she studied chemistry, in marked contrast to MacMillan (Latin and Greek), Home (modern history) or her great rival Heath (philosophy, politics and economics).
These experiences in her early years, far more than her gender, coloured Thatcher’s political and social philosophy. Neither the cold realities of pounds, shillings and pence, nor the casino online certainties of the science lab, lend themselves to abstract thought and investigation.
In government, these glaring weaknesses – monomania, immovability, deliberate and fundamental cold-heartedness – were sold as strengths, and accepted as such by the 33 per cent of the electorate a would-be prime minister needs to persuade.
The post-war consensus, the idea that others might have a point, that a problem might be tackled from more than a single angle, was dismantled as surely as the pitheads and winding-wheels. The moderation which formed a central tenet of traditional Conservatism was replaced by spite and a form of stateist intrusion in people’s lives supposedly anathema to a party founded on principles of non-intervention and laissez-faire.
And so, today, we use the freedom supposedly afforded us by social media to limit the expression of others, policing one another and scorning dissent. We view the former miner, the ex-shipbuilder and the Hillsborough survivor alike as people with an agenda not a viewpoint, a grudge not a grievance, an axe to grind rather than a story to tell.
We talk at those we disagree with rather than listening. And when we talk it is to denounce and not persuade, abuse and not win over.
This week we lost a former prime minister. Like many, I’d long since divorced the physical reality of an 87-year-old apparently only vaguely aware she had ever been a politician from the woman happy to cut millions adrift from a society she didn’t believe in, so there was little either to celebrate or to mourn, other than ourselves – and what she made us.
Marvellous article. Well said.
When you have Tories spouting ideological rubbish about austerity being necessary so as not to increase the deficit and, thus, national debt, a viewpoint debunked by that well-known Marxian socialist, George Soros, in a recent article on eurobonds, one has to despair. Not only are they stupid and ignorant, they’re impervious, in their castle of prejudice, to any alteration of their stupidity and unknowledge.
I think her death has drawn up a lot of the bad feeling that lingers just beneath the surface because A) first and foremost, a generation of working people suffered through the adverse effects of her stances and B) her legacy and misgivings are so relevant today socially and economically. I’m a ’90s kid and even I was swearing at the telly watching Newsnight and the initial shite Francis Maude was spouting to start proceedings off. Thatcherism won out* and apparently was proven the right way to go** – but give a guess who’ll probably be on Question Time next week or whenever bemoaning, without a glimmer of self-awareness, the economic situation him and his party inherited from New Labour/Thatcherism and the industry-marginalised, bank-centric economy which ultimately proved folly to disastrous effect in 2008.
My absolute favourite thing about this week though has been some of the rhetoric used: ‘pragmatic’ to say she cared about winning elections at any cost, ‘strong’ = bloody minded, ‘divisive/controversial figure’ as a substitute for cunt, etc.
*Anyone running a country where there’s such unrest that police are sent to beat back protesting civilians who they’re paid to serve and protect, consistently and on a wide number of issues, is doing a pretty shitty job I’d say. Simplistic, but I think it’s fair to say harmony is a decent barometer for whether you’re looking after the nation’s best interests or not. ‘Take these hugely detrimental changes to your livelihoods on the chin or we’ll have to cosh you over the head with batons’ sounds a lot closer to fascist than conservatist practice on the face of it, and it certainly isn’t a way of proving your ideas and policies right. It’s doing the opposite if anything.
**Proof of the fatal flaw of Thatcherism is in the European pudding. Germany (who put a lot of stock in the manufacturing of actual, tangible goods and the jobs that necessitate their production, as opposed to the bits of paper that represent their worth) has a few Old Etonians sweating, which would amuse me if any potential missteps were made accountable to anyone but the public and its job prospects. People as pawns: this is the “Big Society”. Lather, rinse repeat.
I always thought the post-WWII, post- Atlee consensus was that of things being good and not rocking the boat too much. This was up until the 60’s and Wilson’s claiming it was ’13 wasted years’ etc. and then everything started building towards the loggerheads between unions and the government? Could be a misinterpretation by me, however. It’s also pretty much just semantics but just curious.
Great article. We now live in a dictatorship. We keep being told that you have the freedom fought for in two world wars, but say or do anything outside of their agenda and your castigated. Politicians have forgotten that we, the voters ,have put them in the position they are now in, making them our employees, and as such should listen and react to what the public want ,not what they want. Hence dictatorship.
Fantastic reason, Steve.
Thatcher was a great leader, but so to was Hitler and what the Right appear incapable of realising in their current glorification of her is that just because someone wins successive elections does not mean they are a good person. thatcher gave a legitimacy to selfishness in this country, she ripped compassion out of Britain’s soul and for that reason I feel not a speck of sadness at her passing.
You just know Thatcher’s eulogisers are a load of hypocrites, if Dodgy Dave held her in such high regard, why did he not call for a national day of mourning?
Harold Wilson more elections than her and he saved a generation (of which I’m one ) from dying” in some crazy Asian war” to paraphrase the Boss.
Well done to Glenda Jackson for pointing out that Thatcher’s own Cabinet got rid of her because they wanted to win the 1992 election. The plotters were politically astute because she was electoral poison when she was chucked out crying tears of self pity in 1990. Here are two quick examples of Merseyside’s opinion of Thatcher in the 1980s. After the 1984 League Cup final replay at Maine Road, a fan got on to a crowded bus and, in an effort to find common ground between Red and Blue, shouted “Maggie! Maggie! Maggie!” The whole bus – including the driver no doubt – replied with an enthusiastic “Out! Out! Out!” A year or so later a mate of a mate asked me my political allegiance: “Are you a Labour supporter or Militant?” By the 1980s the Tories were beyond the pale in Liverpool and because of Thatcher I suspect they always will be.
Does anyone really believe that these ‘heads of states’ are the real decision makers? They are just puppets who do as they are told. The real slags are people who’s names we don’t know who have been running the show for a very long time.
The royals get a final veto on plenty of laws-those ‘ex’ german lizards , amongst others, are a little more like the real thing, the maggies of this world are there for show.
“Marxian socialist, George Soros”
You mean the George Soros who single handedly destroyed the British Pound and forced us out of the ERM?
The George Soros who funds anarchist web sites such as moveon.org?
The Georege Soros who fund both cultural and class warfare on the successful?
You’d be better off selling your soul to Satan.
“Marxian socialist” is irony! :-) The point is, if such a corporate raider (regardless of your view on him – and I certainly don’t endorse his CV!) is writing articles stating that austerity is nonsense, it’s a little harder for the Tory ideologues to decry than an article from a liberal or social democratic author, is it not?