Thirty Years After Her Victory, Thatcherism Is Bankrupt

The celebrations of the thirtieth anniversary of Margaret Thatcher's ascent to power have had a surreal quality. The moist panegyrics from David Cameron and Boris Johnson - followed by an army of cheering commentators, and a distant, shameful echo from Gordon Brown - have been filled with statements that are the opposite of the truth. Yet there they stand, unchallenged, as the road-map for our future.

The defences of Margaret Thatcher invariably have three prongs. She made it possible for ordinary British people to "get ahead", and "aspire" once more. She expanded freedom. And her strip-down-the-state economic model saved Britain - and spread prosperity across the world. Each of these is simply asserted, as if these claims can't be measured objectively. Just shut up and rejoice!

But your ability to "get ahead" - to rise up the social ladder - isn't simply a matter of hunches; it can be tested scientifically. And every study has found one thing: social mobility collapsed under Margaret Thatcher. As a massive recent London School of Economics study showed once again, in the 1980s and 1990s we became a country where if you were born rich, you stayed rich, and if you were born poor, you stayed poor.

This shouldn't have been a surprise. Every country that adopts a low-tax, low-investment model sees the same. The evidence shows only countries that tax the wealthy and use the cash to lift up the rest - like Sweden - consistently achieve the dream of allowing anyone with talent to make it.

So thanks to her policies, a whole generation of poor and lower middle class children remained stuck, unable to achieve their potential. Look at the new generation of rising Tory candidates and MPs and you see this failure of social mobility writ large. They are overwhelmingly the children of the wealthy, educated at the most expensive schools. Everybody else is stuck, unable to get up and out.

While you are entitled to your own opinions, you are not entitled to your own facts. To claim Thatcher boosted aspiration is false - unless you mean merely the aspiration of the rich to become super-rich.

How about Thatcher's support for freedom? This is a leader who called Nelson Mandela a "terrorist" and vandalised all attempts to place sanctions on Apartheid South Africa, while her husband cheerfully referred to black Africans as "coons." This is a leader who called the self-described "fascist" General August Pinochet "a great man", after he toppled an elected leader in a violent coup and rounded up thousands of dissidents to torture to death.

This is a leader who upheld a system of Protestant supremacism in Northern Ireland, while the police force there conspired with criminal gangs to murder Catholics. This is a leader who at the height of the AIDS crisis criminalized any mention of homosexuality in our schools. Freedom?

What about the idea that her economic model "saved" us? Thatcher wanted to build a "night watchman state", where the government stopped anyone invading the country or your home, but otherwise stood inert and passive. She saw regulation as "red tape", and boasted of building a "bonfire" of it. And what happened? Her apostles took this to its logical conclusion, building a "shadow" banking system free of all government interference. If she had been right, it would now be the self-regulating engine of the global economy, pulling us all to a better world.

It didn't quite turn out that way. As John Campbell, her best biographer, has written, the tragedy of Margaret Thatcher is that she sincerely believed rolling back the state would create a generation like her father, a moral, self-reliant grocer. Instead, it created a wave of businessmen like her son, a parasitic amoral crook.

Yet David Cameron's election song could be the old Honeybus hit "I Can't Let Maggie Go." He cheered the ugliest of Thatcher's policies while they were happening: he even accepted a free holiday jaunt to Apartheid South Africa paid for by one of the most depraved corporations backing the whites-only regime. Today, he says she will be his inspiration in power, as his claims to moderation burn away under the pressure of recession.

But oddly, the party that has found it hardest to get out of Thatcher's shadow is Labour. They drank so deeply of Thatcherism after the collective trauma of 1992 that they have become tarred with its worst failings.

As Labour now collapses into a mess of fratricidal sound-bites, it would do well to pause and remember a slap-in-the-face fact. Contrary to the ahistorical waffle pumped out over the past week, Margaret Thatcher never won over a majority of the British people. At every single election where she was leader, 56 percent of the British people voted for parties committed to higher taxes and higher public spending. She won because the centre-left majority was divided and at war with itself - and because of our lousy electoral system.

Over the past year, there have been small hints of what a de-Thatcherized Labour Party could look like - and it's a world away from both Toryism and the old, hellish Scargillite closed shops. It is simple Scandinavian-style social democracy that marries thriving markets to an interventionist state. It would tax the rich more, both to reduce inequality and to pay for public services. Despite the out-of-touch press shrieking, some 68 percent of us supported the new 50 percent top rate of tax on the richest 1 percent of Brits.

It would argue for a Keynesian stimulus directed at transforming Britain into a low carbon economy - the only sane response to a depression and an unravelling climate. And it would put at the forefront of its agenda moves like Harriet Harman's excellent Equality Bill, which will require local authorities to spend most on the poorest areas, and to put greater equality at the heart of all decisions.

The logic of this legislation fits with the egalitarian, European mindset of the silent liberal majority of British people. If we leave it to the market Thatcher-style, it will take eighty years before women are paid the same wages as men for the same work - and we will all be dead. Who wants to defend that? Who wants to say companies shouldn't even have to publish their gender gap, as the Bill demands? A long queue has been forming outside TV studios of Tory MPs saying just that. But a recession is the time when we can least afford to waste talent and promote mediocrities just because they are men. We need the best talents in the best positions now.

Yet all this comes far too little, and far too late in the day. Brown's "Green New Deal" is pitifully small, and his ability to sell any policy is limited by his own lousy communication skills and his refusal to decisively cast off the shroud of Thatcher. Even the 50 percent tax rate was introduced with a nervous, quaking commitment to reverse it once the recession ends. Who will point out that during America's largest boom - the 1950s - it had a 92 percent top rate of tax under a Republican President?

And so the window to a better, more social democratic Britain seems to be creaking shut. Gordon Brown stands frozen as his Blearsy-eyed colleagues hiss and snap all around him, protesting at even the tiniest nudges to the left. Why won't Labour let the Iron Lady rust?

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper. To read more of his articles, click here or here.

Comments

[Indubio]

It would be nice if Hari cited the London School of Economic Report he mentions at the top of this commentary.

[PresidentRobertBooth]

Thatcher was a disgrace and a disaster.

How can privatising a water company increase competition?

All she did was create regional private monopolies.


Unless you lived in Kent, life became harder and her legacy of encouraging "ownership" (translation = rampant consumerism), privatisation and de-regulation is being seen now with this economic meltdown.

[EducatedObserver]

A spiteful and unsophisticated little article from Johann Hari, which sounds far more like a laundry-room spat than analytical journalism.

I understand somone having reservations about Margaret Thatcher - many do - but this piece sounds more like a vendetta.

I can scarcely imagine that Hari is the same person who authored the outstanding "Dark Side of Dubai" report a few months ago.

[RoloTomassi]

There's nothing spiteful about it; Reagan/Thatcher sycophants merely perceive anything negative--­regardless of how accurate--to be spiteful.

Reagan offered up Friedman to Thatcher on a silver platter, and fearing an untimely demise, she ate him raw.

And a RAW DEAL is what we got, on both sides of the pond. The line may zig-zag a bit, but there is no doubt whatsoever that it runs unbroken through both counties' finanacial system, from the era of Reagan/Thatcher to the very core of the mess we find ourselves in today.

[jmpurser]

Thank you. As an American my "view" of Thatcher is based on what I hear in the media and of course none of the facts you presented are to be found. I knew what a disaster Reagan was for America and wondered how similar policies had worked "so well" for England. Now I know. They were the exact same failure across the Atlantic as they were here.

[schatsie]

Powerful, many excellent points...K­eep it up!

[NoMoFearNoMoHate]

Oh! So you Brits knew Reagan!? How quaint!

[papapj]

Reagan and Thatcher were buddies...­.Ronnie even went horseriding with Betty (the queen) and they all championed a recidivist move toward the concentration of wealth alluded to in Johann's post, conning the working class on both sides of the water into believing that they stood up for the ordinary man.

Ronnie shafted airline pilots and Maggie slow cooked the miners over protracted and contentious labour disputes. They then smirked at how cunningly they had polarized public opinion so effectively that anybody protesting them too loudly, too long faced an almost McCarthyite inquest into their bona fides.....­.whilst the Joe Sixpack and Andy Capp cheered them on...or so it was meant to seem...

Patriotism morphed into nationalism on both sides of the water and once discerning, peace loving yuppies (flower children) cut their locks and joined the chorus of rabidly right-wing hate merchants, whose names are too numerous to mention, in both nations.

It's no coincidence that history is looking at both of these unsavory leaders with rose-tinted glasses..i­t's always written by the conquerors­...

[listeningpost]

papapj, one feature of this information age is that the ability and vehicles for writing history is spread around just about everywhere as you and Johann eloquently demonstrate.
Just how this affects the public mind, we are in the process of finding out.