After the Second World War the UK was on its knees, penniless and exhausted. The old politics were discredited, and the old economics, after depression and six years of war, equally discredited. The consensus was that a gentle and moderate form of socialism should be tried by the Labour Party in 1945. The Conservative party in due course came back to power as a "One Nation" governing party, supporting Labour's "socialized" medicine, universal education and the welfare state. The unions and management were consulted on all major economic policy matters. This consensus was effective for a while, and the concept of actually working together and playing down sectional interest quickly became ingrained into the psyche of many. (Note: It was certainly engrained into me personally).
However, the One Nation system suffered the fate of most human systems: it was exploited, especially by the big unions, for selfish purposes, was conservative (with a small "c") in so far as it held back labor mobility and innovation, and offered limited incentives for people to actually work. By the end of the 70s the system, characterised by high taxes, inflation and "stop-go" policies, was causing resentment and frustration as the UK fell behind Germany, Japan, the US of course, and even France.
The great contribution made by Margaret Thatcher was to break the negative power of the unions, who, like their medieval baronial counterparts, held the country to ransom. Their principal activity seemed to be saying "no". Thatcher confronted them and defeated them roundly. Not since the Suez crisis was the country so deeply divided. Every day the news was dominated by the striking miners, the shock-troops of the union movement. Sympathy for them waned as they became more recalcitrant and violent. Thatcher is admired for her toughness and nerve, and it was in retrospect necessary to hang tough. I remember, however, praying that she compromise, did a deal.
All this, I thought, is very un-British, this bloody-mindedness on both sides. I hoped she might prevail, but in doing so restore the original idea of consensus to a sensible balance between competing interests, reforming the system to encourage industry and entrepreneurship. However, she chose not to. An ideologue, she demanded the total surrender of the workers and a thoroughgoing revolution that would make the captains of industry the undisputed masters. I remember thinking, "We will pay dearly for this, and her party will as well." I was right, as it happens.
The second thing I remember vividly is the takeover of The Times (of London), The Sun and the News of the World by Murdoch. Murdoch secretly built a new factory in the East End of London and without notice or consultation moved some chosen printers and journalists into it in a midnight coup, firing the rest. Thus Thatcher obtained a substantially loyalist media. Coup indeed! This was a huge change in the balance of political power. Blair, continuing many of Thatcher's policies, is beholden to the foreign (alien) News Corporation, without whose support he might have departed before this.
Thus, The Times, known as "The Thunderer", the most powerful newspaper in the world for nearly one hundred and fifty years and relied upon for unbiased news, was reduced to being a mouthpiece of a foreign mogul, who made no secret of his disdain for Britain and who had no patience with any liberal "One Nation" concept. The trend since then has been for British journalism to become amateur, full of personal opinion masked as news, and sensational.
Thatcher loathed the Civil Service (which was staid and bureaucratic, of course, but which operated by and large on behalf of all the citizens). She was the first to sideline experienced civil servants and import her own "advisors". She began the process, expanded by Blair, of reducing the power of Parliament and turning the office of Prime Minister into an occasionally-elected presidency . I remember being infuriated by this attack upon the constitution and dismayed that a cowed Press did so little to oppose it. Even more was I upset by the emergence of a sleazy, corrupt coterie of nouveau riches men who clustered around Thatcher, were appointed to a host of new quangos (quasi-government organizations), benefited personally from the privatization process and were "ennobled" or knighted for undermining a system which was arguably the least corrupt in the world.
The above comments are on political power, the constitution and the approach to government . As a businessman at the time I was committed to manufacturing and to trying to protect the jobs of the people who had worked for the company for years. For technical reasons I was not averse to a bit of inflation. The government's stringent monetarist policies and high interest rates had the effect of putting several of our most important suppliers out of business. With those suppliers went technical skills that were important to us. Worse, it put customers out of business, leaving us with substantial bad debts. These threatened to upend us and led to a spate of redundancies (Note: a proportion of distressing chain of events was caused not by Thatcher but by a technological revolutiion (computers), but then we were fighting both technology and our own government). The tight monetary policy encouraged customers take more and more credit until we had to wait an average of 122 days to receive money owed to us. This was part of the great clean-out of poorly managed businesses, and, done in a more gentle, measured way, was probably necessary.
The problem with Thatcher was that everything had to be changed yesterday, at huge personal costs to many. No, there was not one thing that was done by the Thatcher government that was manifestly in the interests of my company or of me personally, except a reduction in rate of taxation. But there is no point in reducing tax if, by other means, you have made a company less profitable and you yourself more chronically anxious. (Note: the company survives well under new ownership. It has just, after 13 years, gone back into manufacturing. I wish it well!)
Margaret Thatcher did have choices: she might have let the defeated miners down gently, paid them off more liberally and done more to help them find jobs. In selling off the assets of public enterprises, paid for and owned by the taxpayers, she might have spread the proceeds around their formers owners more fairly. She might have chosen, while rightly encouraging enterprise, to develop policies that also promoted caring and community spirit (It was Maggie Thatcher who first had the bright idea of closing down the homes for the mentally sick and turfing the inmates out onto the street to beg). In reducing taxation she might have softened the effect of the more regressive taxes. Instead she tried, and failed, to introduce a flat poll tax that benefited the rich at the expense of the poor. Kings provoked armed rebellion by doing just that in the Middle Ages.
Margaret Thatcher's short-term legacy was electoral disaster for her party, which is likely to be out of power for many more years. Some of her privatizations have worked, British Airways being a prime example. Others have had grim results, bringing everything from death and disablement (e.g the railways) to higher prices and often worse service (e.g British Telecom). Privatizing natural monopolies is bound to be a bridge too far. There was great concern that the dismantling of industry, caused partly by Thatcher's monetary policies, would make the British a nation of hamburger-flippers. But on the positive side the service economy does seem to work, especially if you live in the South-East of England and work in a bank. On the other hand cities like Liverpool, which were once the power-houses of the industrial revolution, are now some of the poorest in the European Union.
The results are mixed. Inflation is under control and the violent ups and downs of the old manufacturing economy have been eliminated. The clean-out of business has re-allocated workers from the old "metal-bashing" and similar industries to new technologies and services. Britain is now the European magnet for economic migrants from all over the world. Despite the harshness of Thatcherite policies Britain is still a gentler environment than the US, valuing its health service, offering workers relatively civilized employment conditions and maintaining the social safety net now disappearing in the US. The threat to Britain nowadays is of bubbles, currently housing and credit bubbles.
On the negative side, Maggie Thatcher helped create the modern atomized society, where all that matters is money and the consuming individual. The dumbing down of education, begun under Thatcher (who did not like teachers or teacher unions or spending tax money on schools), has now reached the point where education is confused with training and many graduates emerge unable to spell. In place of mutual caring there is sex, and in place of pride in country there is alcohol and drugs. In place of respect for others (especially seniors) there is self-absorbtion and ill manners.
Thatcher cannot be blamed for all of this. After all, there is such a lack of original thought in Britain that most things American are copied in England the day after they are invented. The Sixties created many of the problems, but it was Thatcher who said "There is no such thing as community" and, despite a total lack of interest in history, she assisted in the re-creation of the old Roman culture of "bread and circuses" (over-consumption and a passion for "personalities") to take the minds of the masses off the fact that the rich are getter daily richer and the others are feeling emptier and more bereft.
It is unreasonable to lay all the ills of a culture in visible decline at the feet of one person. It is never that simple. But Margaret Thatcher undoubtedly made her world more heartless and more grasping, without putting in place any meaningful philosophy which would draw together sixty million individuals and have them believe in anything more than making a few, quick dubious quid (pounds/ bucks) at the expense of their neighbors.
August 2005