Goodbye, Thatcher, Hello Burnham
Alternatives to Economic Liberalism
The new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has told his adoring followers that he means to bring an end to the revolution begun by Margaret Thatcher over forty years ago.
The contention is clear. In the 1970s, Britain, and other European countries, had exhausted the ideas of John Maynard Keynes - namely that governments could borrow money, pay for welfare, and when the bills mounted up, simply borrow more. The governments of Britain which based their economic ideas on Keynes were well-intentioned - perhaps none more so that the Labour administrations of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan. But by the time Mrs Thatcher defeated the Labour Party in 1979, the United Kingdom was more or less bankrupt, inflation was destroying people’s wages, the unions had enormous power to ‘hold the government to ransom’, as the phrase went.
It has been well-noted - especially by Lara Spirit, the young political correspondent of The Sunday Times, who is the most brilliant analyst and essayist, writing in England today - that if you say the word ‘Thatcher’ to back-bench Labour MPs they actually HISS. This is understandable enough. Thatcher meant what she said. Unlike the ‘wets’, ie moderate-minded Keynesian conservatives - she brought in anti-union legislation, she waged war, literally, on the most powerful union, the National Union of Mineworkers, and in the short term, it looked as if her crusading zeal for the economic liberalism of the United States was going to yield wonderful results for your ‘ordinary voter’.
On the day of Mrs Thatcher’s funeral, April 17, 2013, I went down to watch the coffin being brought by car from the Palace of Westminster to a gun-carriage outside St Clement Dane’s Church.
The whole of the Strand, from Trafalgar Square, was lined with people. Outside St Clement Dane’s, when the coffin became visible, the crowd, much moved, some weeping, burst into cheers and clapped. The majority of this crowd were Eastern Europeans. They regarded Thatcher as the Western leader who had led the charge against tyranny of the Soviet Union… led the charge and won. She was the Iron Lady. When I had seen this spectacle - and it was moving - I beetled down to the river, and ran , since the crowds were too thick to allow me to shuffle up Fleet Street. Near El Vino, I could see the gun carriage making its slow wobbly journey towards Ludgate Circus. A policeman near me pointed out a protester. There was just one from where we could see, and he said, ‘That’s a very brave young person’. A solitary young woman was turning her back as the coffin went past. (Protesters had been asked not to cry out, but simply to turn their backs).
All the others stood in deeply respectful silence. This crowd, unlike the crowd by St Clement Danes, were British. They had bought shares in privatised industries, when there was a chance to do so. They had been the occupants of council flats, and had exercised the right to buy . They were part of the ‘property-owning democracy’ which was the central pillar of Thatcher’s programme. And on she went, the Iron Lady, towards St Paul’s Cathedral, and I, nostalgic for the old days in the Fleet of Shame, (for we had all moved out by then, and my paper, the Standrad was in Kensington of all unlikely places for a paper) went and ordered a very large glass of plonk at El Vino. About an hour later, the cynical , thirsty, right-wing journalists came in, having attended the service in St Paul’s, all making jokes about her death - suggesting that the Barclay brothers had tired of her running up expenses in the Ritz and had her bumped off. (She died in the Ritz). But these bad-taste jokes were the jarring notes. The crowds in the streets had been saying goodbye to someone they regarded as a heroine.
I turned on the TV news expecting to see at least some coverage of the funeral by the BBC, even though she had hated the Corporation and they had hated her. There was no suggestion, not by so much as a syllable, that her funeral had brought out a crowd which one would normally only see for a Royal funeral. It has never to my knowledge been mentioned by the BBC that this vast public spectacle took place in London. It has been airbrushed out of the story.
Mrs Thatcher had many qualities which set her apart from her successors as conservative Prime Ministers. Unlike any of them, she was keenly ideological. She was extremely brave, both physically (witness her sangfroid after being nearly blown sky high by the Brighton bomb) and morally. She was prodigiously hard-working. She had vision. But - and hence the hatred of the Left - she was profoundly wrong.
