Margaret Thatcher - Stateswoman

The release of Baroness Thatcher's death certificate describing her occupation as 'Stateswoman' was something that could be disclosed without fear of contradiction from any quarter. Even her enemies would concede that she strode the world stage with the foremost of that breed. Statesmanship is not something that can be acquired by an individual; it must be bestowed by a caucus of informed opinion.

Blair's tragi-comic cavortings in his attempts to reach that status keep us all entertained, but besides real statesmen he is a pygmy. And Brown seems sensibly to have avoided the ridicule that such a bid on his own behalf would earn. Both will be there tomorrow, still in Margaret's shadow as just ex-Prime Ministers, not as elders and Statesmen. One has only to imagine, in the event of the sudden death of either, the snorts of derision that would be caused if either's death certificate made that absurd claim. But for Thatcher, the term is no more than the simple truth.  

Thatcher Library

A Thatcher Library, in the form of those US (ex) Presidential libraries, will no doubt be a good thing. American Presidential libraries are actually public libraries, administered at taxpayers' expense by the National Archive and Records Administration (NARA) under the Presidential Records Act. We don't have such provision in the UK, so Margaret's would have to be privately funded. And perhaps this is more suitable, under the circumstances. Part archive, part museum I would expect permanent exhibitions on both the Berlin Wall and the Falklands. And just as the Reagan Library sells copies of the famous RR Stetson at $209.95, the Thatcher Library could vend tasteful copies by Mulberry of those handbags at a similar price point. Or the 'Thatcher Steampunk tank Pashmina and goggles' perhaps. 

Of course no Thatcher venture would be complete without some hideous embarrassment caused by her wayward son, so we'd have to expect a concession stand run by Sir Mark offering gay men's underwear with 'Thatcher' embroidered on the waistband and no doubt these will prove popular also with the gangsta types who wear their jeans half way down their bottoms.

Thatcher and Sid

The pub juke box was belting out Boy George for the third disk in a row; eyes were fixed on the mechanism as the arm lifted the 45 single, jerkily returned it to it's slot in the fan-array of black plastic ... and then returned back to the same place to lift it out again. There was a soft groan from the bar. The London after work pub crowd was complacent; it had been three years since the IRA's last major mainland bombing and Londoners, who recover quickly anyway, had almost forgotten the threat. This was a workers' pub, which is to say well-frequented by students and the unemployed with a leavening of actual tradesmen - mostly painters, for some reason - having an after-work pint. 

" 'Ere maigh, izzat your Standa'?" Came a voice in my ear. I nodded and passed it across. "See 'ow me shares have done today" the voice explained. It didn't need to explain further. Thatcher's Gas privatisation in December 1986 had made shareholders for the first time of hundreds of thousands of small investors. Though some had taken to buying the FT on the basis of a £250 shareholding, thereby wiping out their dividend, most relied, in London at least, on discarded Standards to keep track of the share price. 

Many preferential small shareholders cashed in immediately, walking away with a fat profit, but no matter; share ownership, once something arcane and foreign to most people, had become commonplace, something of which your neighbour had experience. Those who recall the impact that it had didn't find at all extraordinary Vince Cable's suggestion that the government's bank shares be sold off preferentially to small investors; most folk can find £500, particularly if this represents a real discount on the share market price. Unlike the feeble-minded Osborne, Thatcher could see the scale of social impact such a move would make.    

1979 was a turning point

Comments below have quite rightly pointed out that we didn't go from 0 to 70 in 1979, that there had been precursors, such as the retrograde police reforms of 1964, and the monstrous local government reorganisation of 1974, and the great social changes of the 60s and early 70s that reverbrated amongst a newly Godless society. However, I hold that the late 70s - and 1979 seems right on the button - marked the beginning of a period of change of quite a different order.

The baby boomers, the dominant population cohort of our lifetimes, born during the '50s, reached young adulthood in the late 70s. In their testosterone fuelled 20s and 30s, they were the beneficiaries of Thatcherite opportunities, and they grabbed the 80s with both hands. They were also the beneficiaries of 60s liberalism, and though the contraceptive pill was as available as aspirin by the 70s, it was the boomers who pushed bastardy through the gates from 1979 - leaving us with a massive problem now from the underclass that they bred (see below).



And it was Thatcher's war on local government - on the independence of her own Conservative councils as well as the rainbow coalitions of the nuclear-free Left - that did more than anything to establish the corrosive Central State and establish the poisonous metropolitan political class. She stopped listening to Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon and stopped reading Hayek. It was the start of 'big government', to the dismay of her former advisors;

Alas, you need government, but big government is subject to such flaws, incorrigible flaws. Big government is irresponsible government because they can’t know all the circumstances of the nation, the society, the families that they are administering. Big government leads to all kinds of deals, backstage deals about policies, and all the time they are governed not by the public interest, but by the self-interest of the politicians to maintain their power. You need politicians, but the more you can contain politicians to the central tasks they have to do, the less you tempt them into this vote-grabbing, this corruption and deceit which is inseparable from modern, mass, undiscriminating democratic politics.

Thatcher forgot Burkean remedies and neglected the little platoons. As Blond has it;

Conservatives who believe in value, culture and truth should therefore think twice before calling themselves liberal. Liberalism can only be a virtue when linked to a politics of the common good, a problem which the best liberals—Mill, Adam Smith and Gladstone—recognised but could never resolve. A vision of the good life cannot come from liberal principles. Unlimited liberalism produces atomised relativism and state absolutism. Insofar as both the Tories and Labour have been contaminated by liberalism, the true left-right legacy of the postwar period is, unsurprisingly, a centralised authoritarian state and a fragmented and disassociative society.

I know there are those who bristle at the slightest criticism of the Blessed St Margaret, and she is in truth a giant amongst politicians, a Statesman of international dimension and the most important political figure in Britain since Churchill, but even our idols have feet of clay, and Thatcher's was her part in the establishment of the Leviathan that is now strangling the nation.

So I'll stick with 1979.

Unravelling Thatcher

The stand-off in Erith and Thamesmead between the 279 constituency Labour Party members and the powerful grandees of the central party over their attempt to instruct the locals to accept the 22 year-old Honourable Georgina Gould (for such we must call her, as the daughter of a life peer) as their candidate for the next election is a distant ripple from the Thatcher era.

The year 1979 was indeed a watershed in British politics. Thatcher began a process of ruthless centralisation that lost the Conservative Party over a million members and robbed local government of everything they had fought for since the mid nineteenth century. The disempowering of local party associations and control by central office has made the parachuting-in of apparatchik blow-ins such as Ms Gould by both main parties the norm rather than the exception. Thatcher's centralism also provided the perfect platform for the growth of Labour's Leviathan State; had local government retained the powers it had before 1979, the effects of Brown's mismanagement of the public sector would now be much reduced.

Whether the good of her economic and labour reforms outweighs the bad of her central Statism remains to be seen; and don't forget that needs-based letting and the duty-to-house which has created ghettoes of squalor, crime, idleness, ignorance and illness in our large council estates was a Thatcher creation. Against all the advice and urging of Conservative councils at the time.

As Thatcherphile readers now retreat with a box of tissues in dismay to watch à la Richard Timney their endless replays of the 1979 election, unravelling the effects of Thatcher's and later Brown's neutering of local government is quietly being undertaken both inside and outside Parliament.

The Communities and Local Government select committee have since July last year been looking at the relationship between central and local government. Now at oral evidence stage, Hazel Blears' recent transcript proves the truth of previous expert evidence; that Brown's government is deeply committed to ruthless central control whilst mendaciously throwing meaningless sops to localists within their own party. As the LSE's Prof. George Jones said in diplomatic language to the committee:

It depends on what view you have of the proper role of central government and its relationship with local government. What has been happening for the last 30 or so years is that increasingly the central government has seen local authorities as their executive agents, no different from other parts of the central government departments. They are there to carry out the wishes of central government departments in particular services. They are very service oriented whereas local government must be valued as providing opportunities for local people to govern themselves, to shape the development of their own local communities and not just to be executive agents of central government. This is the choice that has to be made: do you want to go in the centralist direction or the localist direction? The government has been fudging, in its rhetoric, by speaking out for decentralisation to local government and to communities and people, but the reality, despite the reduction in certain targets and indicators, is that it is still dominated by the desire to control what local authorities are doing.

These arguments are no mere ideological nit-picking; the future of core services such as health and education are utterly dependent on the outcome of this debate. The excesses of Labour's Leviathan State have failed to secure meaningful service improvements and the whole country knows it. The State must be shrunk, and the nation realises this also. The failure of central Statism is manifest. Only a root and branch devolution of control to the lowest level at which services can be designed and managed has a hope of squaring this circle.

Well worth reading

If anyone in the Conservative party should feel the need of a refresher lesson in the principles upon which the UK should base its relationship with the rest of Europe, the Telegraph usefully reprints the full text of Mrs Thatcher's Bruges speech from 1988.

Did Thatcher make the underclass?

In an interesting response to a post below, John B replied:

But denying that the underclass *originally arose* between 1979-97 is stark raving mad

The concept of the underclass was originally introduced by Charles Murray in the US. He published The emerging British underclass in 1990 in which he identified a nascent British underclass. Writing for Civitas in 2001 he charted the progress of the underclass in the UK. Whilst there is no doubt that an underclass has grown since the 1970s, I think we must be clear in distinguishing between the growth of an underclass and the effects of 'sticky' structural unemployment.

Murray links three factors to define the growth of the underclass; unemployment, violent crime and illegitimate births. He hypothesises that the proximate 'cause' of an underclass is the lack of socialisation resulting from absent fathers. This lack of socialisation is manifested by 'voluntary' unemployment, particularly in the under 30s, and a rise in violent crime.

Britain's 'tin bashing' industries grew largely in north Britain during the Industrial Revolution because coal, limestone, iron ore and labour were available there. By the closing decades of the 20th century, demand had declined, production had shifted abroad and the world was shifting economically. Governments could artificially prolong the life of dying industries by direct or indirect tax subsidies, or artificially maintaining low exchange rates. None of which are in the nation's long-term interests; sooner or later the bullet had to be bitten. The social costs of this adjustment will always be high - workers unemployed, the wealth of dependent communities slashed. How rapidly the structural unemployment so caused adjusts, and to what extent the social costs of transition are eased, are inter-related to some extent. Generous welfare replacement will cause structural unemployment to be 'sticky', and long-term unemployment to grow. Those unfortunate workers unable or unwilling to move to find work, or to re-skill, may become poor. But it doesn't make them part of the underclass.

We have 5m adults of working age out of work at a time when demand deficient unemployment should have been minimal, and when the adjustments of structural unemployment from the 80s, nearly 30 years ago, should have faded. The factors that determine high levels of frictional unemployment are far less prevalent now than they were 10, 20 or 30 years ago. The economic causes of involuntary unemployment are not significant.

The numbers of 'NEETS' - young people not in education, employment or training, and the drop-out rate of the young from employment markets marks a significant increase in voluntary unemployment. At the same time illegitimate births have soared; 27% of white children and a startling 67% of afro-Carribbean kids are growing up without their biological father. At the same time violent crime has become endemic. This is the underclass that Murray defines.

If Murray is right, and bastardy is the proximate cause of the underclass, we need to ask if Thatcher was responsible for the rise in illegitimacy. Well, in a curious way she might have been. "The war between the family and the State is very old" wrote Robert Nisbet "when one is strong the other is generally weak". Thatcher departed from the advice of gurus such as Hayek and Ralph Harris, and the period from 1979 marks the growth of a Leviathan central State, which Nisbet contends is at the expense of the authority of the family. And bastardy has certainly grown rapidly since 1979 (from Murray):



I also think John B has a point about oil revenues; we have used them to ease the social shock of economic structural adjustment, and as a result welfare dependency has increased. But Labour have exacerbated welfare dependency since 1997. And again, not all those who are welfare dependent are members of the underclass. As the Hills Report demonstrated, living in a Council house is a greater determinant of welfare dependency than anything else.

John also comments that

... the suggestion that the Tories, who created welfare-dependent communities, have any desire, intention or plan to end them is simply hilarious.

Ah, well we'll have to wait and see, won't we?

Brown's sad little fantasy world

Sometimes one comes across people whose beliefs are so bizarre - Scientologists, for example - that one really wonders whether they actually believe that small green aliens chose Ohio in 1964 as the place to reveal the secret of the Universe, or they're just pretending to believe it. So with Gordon Brown.

When the Telegraph reports this morning that Brown blames Thatcher for the stalling of Britain's social mobility, one is tempted to reply with a knowing wink "Ah yes, the same Mrs Thatcher that brought share ownership to millions of ordinary people by ensuring everyone could subscribe to the British Gas privatisation; that allowed millions to buy their own council houses and escape the clutch of the State, that deregulated the financial markets to bring barrow boys into the boardrooms, that encouraged an entire generation of small business and enterprise to flourish."

But of course Brown's intellect is not of the first order. Or even second-rate. He was a college lecturer who taught politics - the 70s equivalent of media studies - in an institution of such academic mediocrity that it failed even to qualify as a polytechnic. So he may actually believe this guff.

While the rest of the country knows damn well that it's Labour's Welfarism that has stalled social mobility over the past 11 years, Brown may well be away with his personal fairies. A cabinet minister's April 2008 quote repeated in CCHQ's annual report that "The trouble is, Gordon is basically mental." just confirms what many of us already suspect. And his pronouncement over the weekend that he will retire 'after winning the next election for Labour' ranks with "Busse and Steiner's armies will throw back the Soviet thrust and Berlin will be freed by May" as the triumph of fantasy over reality.

The real problem is that the world's fifth largest economy is stuck with a fantasist, a mentalist, as Prime Minister at a time when the nation faces great challenges; a man whose judgment is profoundly flawed. Whilst allowing him to remain in office gives the Tories an electoral advantage, it puts the country in great peril. A dangerous choice indeed.