I have a strange relationship with Maggie.
I don’t really remember the Thatcher days for two good reasons. One, I was born in the early eighties and was far too young to have any cognisance of politics and, two, I spent the first few years of my life in Brazil. Nevertheless, it seems she has had something of an impact on my life and not just because she was PM.
However, the charge of Thatcherism – either a high accolade or grave insult, depending on point of view – is one that I hear banded about fairly often; it is always an emotionally loaded term. Certainly, it was usually meant at LSE as an insult; strange, given that most of my contemporaries weren’t politically aware during her tenure.
Funnily enough, I once beat her in an election. Sort of. The LSE Students’ Union elects an Honorary President each year and, one year, the only candidate was Margaret Thatcher (I think her ballot description was ‘Champion of Freedom’). Fortunately, RON (‘Re-open nominations’) is always a candidate, and so I ended up running the opposing campaign. The posters and leaflets I did were simple; all they consisted of was a picture of Thatcher with the slogan ‘Vote for RON or Maggie wins’. RON won. The assorted leftists (as Donal Blaney would doubtless have called us) all had great fun in chanting ‘Maggie-Maggie-Maggie Out-Out-Out’.
Why?
Other than reading history books and looking at dry statistics, my parents have probably given me the summary of Thatcherism that most influences me. They are, perhaps, well-placed to comment, as they were out of the country, watching from afar, and saw one, sharp change from the late seventies and very early eighties to the very late eighties and early nineties rather than a longer, slower change. There is a temptation to think that, pre-Thatcher, we had, in Arend Ljiphart’s words, ‘a kindler, gentler democracy’1. That is, of course, a load of rubbish. The trenchant trades unions undermined that notion and I am, in any case, deeply sceptical of the so-called postwar consensus. What is certain, though, is that the eighties were a period of strife; political, economic and social.
When I ran the RON campaign, Mrs T was promoted as a ‘champion of freedom’; indeed, I think that was her ballot description. Freedom is considered by a lot of people to be the summum bonum; it has achieved totemic status. The problem is that we cannot agree on what freedom is.
While Mrs Thatcher and her advocates purported to conceive of liberty in negative terms, there seems to me to have been an emphasis on the coercive arms of the state – the armed forces and the police – and an awful lot of moralising. Rather negative liberties, it rather seems that Thatcherism was about promoting a particular conception of ‘the good life’, using the state to create it and allowing inaction on the part of the state where existing processes gave acceptable results. It makes the mistake of confusing no action with null action; choosing not to act is not necessarily a return to some default position and, even if it could be shown to be more ‘natural’ (for want of a better word) it would not mean that it was ‘better’.
Norman Tebbit attacked a lot of the opposition to the the Thatcherite project as the result of a ‘second-rate’ decade – the 60s. If Tebbit was right to say that the education of the sixties made the adults of the eighties, it would seem to make sense to say that the adults of today – including any resultant societal problems – are the result of the education of the eighties I emphasise that education is more than what happens in schools.
I suppose, ultimately, I’m asking a question in a rather roundabout way. Having no memory of this apparent, pre-Thatcher Golden Age, to what extent am I one of Thatcher’s children, not so much in terms of economic status but in terms of political outlook?
One last thing; can anyone think of a better way of phrasing the zero/null distinction I made above?
xD.
1 – Lijhpart, Patterns of Democracy. Summary here, buy it here.
PS – I should be blogging more frequently next week. Work, home, stress, you know the drill.
“There is a temptation to think that, pre-Thatcher, we had, in Arend Ljiphart’s words, ‘a kindler, gentler democracy’. That is, of course, a load of rubbish.”
Actually, Dave, it isn’t rubbish at all, it’s largely true. You need to have lived in Britain in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, as I have, to understand the extent to which the Thatcher years entailed a horrible coarsening of our society. It was of course a sharp lurch to the right politically, but it was a lot more than that, and we have ended up with a society in which selfishness and greed dominate, and people do not trust one another.
I was using Ljiphart’s phrase to include a lack of industrial strife; he makes that point in Patterns.
The problem for me is that I’m looking at it all ex post facto and cannot, first-hand, make any judgments at all about what came before. I agree with your last sentence and think that a lot of the social problems we have now are us reaping the rewards of Thatcher’s aggressive individualism.
xD.