So Maggie Thatcher has died. And people are acting somewhat surprised that there is so much polarity in the reaction to her death – well, this is hardly a surprise given just how divisive she was in life. Or perhaps more accurately, how divisive she was in power. It is true that the anti-Thatcher reaction to her death is kind of tasteless – dancing on her grave is not exactly the best of behaviour.
But it is also kind of understandable. The first reactions to Thatcher’s death were from the pro-Thatcher brigade who loudly trumpeted just how good Thatcher was for Britain. The anti-Thatcher mob understandably reacted negatively to all of the positive things that were said about Thatcher in the first few hours.
What might come as a surprise to people who weren’t around in Britain during Thatcher’s reign (1979-1990) is that whilst Thatcher may well have been the most popular British Prime Minister of the modern era, she was also by far the most hated Prime Minister of the modern era. Because if you have to sum up Thatcher’s career in just one short phrase, it would have to be that she was probably the most divisive Prime Minister Britain has ever had.
If she were still around, she would quite happily admit to not being interested in consensus and to having the ambition of thrusting her beliefs and policies down everyone’s throat. She believed that she was right and that everyone else who disagreed with her was wrong. There are those who would say this is the essential ingredient to “leadership”, but it is actually only half of what makes a great leader; and it’s the dangerous half at that.
Listening to the opposition – and the louder they are, the harder you should listen – isn’t caving in to their demands, but simply listening. They might have something interesting to say.
For example, take Thatcher’s Poll Tax. Thatcher’s intention was that everyone should have to pay something towards the cost of local government in a way that illustrate just how expensive different councils were, and wanted to do so by everyone paying the same (students and the unemployed would only pay 20%). The opposition to the Poll Tax wasn’t based because of this policy, but the way that it was implemented. It could have been possible to implement Thatcher’s policy in a way that would not have caused the level of opposition that we saw :-
Those opposed to the Poll Tax were more opposed to the regressive nature of the tax, than the idea of a simplified means of paying for local government that would make it clearer how much local government was costing. As an example, a local income tax clearly marked in your payslip (“Local council: £37.95 – 1.5% compared with the national average of 1.2%) would quite possibly been much more widely accepted. Of course the Poll Tax was incredibly popular with the rich (as they would pay much less), but unfortunately for Thatcher, there really aren’t that many of them.
To set the context of Thatcher’s government, we have to remember that Britain in the 1970s was in poor shape with an industrial base reliant on old heavy industry, a former empire that was no longer buying British goods by default, paying much higher prices for oil, and of course an unnaturally militant bunch of unions :-
Of course the unions were to blame for everything bad that happened in the 1970s – OPEC rising oil prices, the hot weather in 1976, the civil war in Lebanon, Pinochet’s cout d’etat in Chile. That’s not to say that they couldn’t do with a little cutting down to size, but they probably sounded more radical than they actually were. Having been a member of a union, I can tell you that those who climb up the union hierarchy are those who are interested in the work involved whereas the majority of the members are less politically motivated; the 1970s union leaders may well have had a portrait of Uncle Joe that they regularly worshipped to, but the members didn’t.
There’s truth in the idea that the big heavy industry of the 1970s needed to become more efficient and less labour intensive; there’s also a grain of truth in the union’s claims that a great of rationalisation was more about making money for the company owners than gains in efficiency.
Thatcher’s union reforms – criminalising closed shop agreements, insisting on secret ballots, and preventing secondary strikes – all sound quite reasonable from the perspective of distance, but at the time it was clear that Thatcher was at war with the unions, which to many union members felt like the ruling classes were at war with them. And there was a belief that the long-running and exceptionally bitter Miner’s Strike of 1984 was little more than Thatcher’s revenge for the miners strike of 1974 which humiliated Heath :-
Apart from her attacks on the unions, she seemingly went about favouring the rich over the workers in other ways too. Her “big idea” in economic management was to switch priorities away from employment to reducing inflation. This was arguably a sensible change in priority, but then she also went ahead and raised VAT from 15% to 17.5% in pursuit of her obsession with switching to indirect taxes, which in turn immediately raised inflation. This of course made it necessary to pursue monetary policies much more harshly to try and control inflation, which had a much greater effect on unemployment than would otherwise be the case.
This in turn caused welfare spending to surge making it necessary to much more harshly cut public spending in other areas.
Which of course was compatible with her “no such thing as society” – not the speech itself which was a rant about people feeling entitled to assistance (a theme which is repeating itself), but the whole tone of her policies. Thatcher may not have been a disciple of that poisonous Nihilist Ayn Rand, but the only way to tell the difference was that you could find Thatcher in a church. Thatcher was all in favour of the “self-made man” which all too often turned out to be a loud-mouthed business-sociopath of the kind that inspired Harry Enfield’s loadsamoney character.
There’s a lot of truth in the at first rather bizarre claim that Thatcher was behind the current banking crisis – her deregulation of the banking industry kick started the whole big gambling side of banking and encouraged a whole generation of bankers to gamble bigger and bigger. Those that learned the wrong things in the 1980s were the ones at the top of the banking industry during the 1990s and 2000s when the mistakes that led to the collapse of banking were prevalent.
In terms of housing, her policies were rather bizarre. Her policy of selling off council houses at knock down prices was (for her) a way of bribing the electorate into voting for her. The effect on the people who bought their own council houses was positive, but Thatcher’s insistence that councils be prohibited from using the proceeds to build more social housing is rather extraordinary. Not only would it stop further generations from buying their own council houses, but it was almost guaranteed to result in a housing-bubble with house prices escalating out of control.
It’s probable that Glenda Jackson said it a whole lot better than me :-