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by Tom Mills
Making Thatcher’s Britain, edited by Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
As the Thatcherites smashed their way through Britain’s post-war, corporatist structures, academics and left-wing intellectuals tried to come to terms with what exactly Thatcherism was and how such a regressive political movement was able to maintain popular support, or at least remain electorally viable. Political magazines and journals were filled with apparently antagonistic accounts of Thatcherism.[1] Over time, though, with both the departure of its namesake from the political scene and the institutionalisation of her considerable victories, Thatcherism went from a radical political movement to an entrenched political common sense. Scholarly interest then declined, to the point that five years ago the political scientist Colin Hay could note that Thatcherism had ‘all but disappeared from the lexicon of British political analysis’.[2]
Why then this new collection on Thatcherism? The reason is rather mundane. Three decades have now passed since Thatcher came to power, meaning that new archival material has become available to scholars under the ‘thirty year rule’. There is also, however, a good political rationale for revisiting this period (though not one that necessarily motivates the contributors to this collection). Those who were mindful to look at the actual evidence already knew that the lofty claims made about the record of Thatcherism were little more than triumphalist bluster.[3] But now, in the aftermath of a spectacular financial crash and the midst of a seemingly never ending economic crisis, few can doubt that Thatcherism has been discredited. It seems like a good time, then, to look again at the political disaster that was Thatcherism, if only to ask: how did we get here?
Given that more than three decades separate the rise of Thatcherism and its final undoing in 2007/8, it is not surprising that, with the exception of Andrew Gamble, all of the contributors to Making Thatcher’s Britain are historians rather than political scientists. Their task, according to the editors, is to ‘build on and extend the nascent historical interest in the Thatcher era’, drawing on newly available documents, and to ‘broaden the traditional emphasis on statecraft and political economy’.
The book is divided into three sections. The second examines the impact of Thatcherism on different segments of British society, whilst the third examines Thatcherism in international context. The first, which is the most engaging, focuses on the emergence of Thatcherism in the mid- to late 1970s, detailing the intellectual influences that shaped it during this period, and the political context in which it developed.
Although Thatcherism would over time reveal itself to be, at its core, a neoliberal project, in this early phase it encompassed a much wider range of reactionary forces. Thatcher’s speeches spoke not only of economic decline, but also of the loss of traditional morality and threats to ‘Christian values’.[4] The moralistic tone of Thatcherite rhetoric in this period no doubt to some extent reflected Thatcher’s own political and cultural inclinations, but it was also part of a conscious attempt to profit from the broader reactionary politics of the New Right. Perhaps because of this attempt to build a broad coalition, Thatcherite rhetoric remained rather ambiguous. In his chapter, Robert Saunders argues that Thatcherism existed at that stage primarily as ‘a negative body of ideas’ and a ‘highly effective oppositional creed’.[5] The committed vagueness of Thatcher’s politics during the 1970s comes across strongly in his account. Saunders notes that despite her subsequent reputation as an ideologue, Thatcher in fact refused to characterise her political commitments as anything other than an expression of fundamental values or basic common sense, whilst she tended to express economic doctrines (not to mention interests) in cultural or moral, rather than technical, terms.[6] Anti-socialism featured prominently in her public statements, but what exactly she meant by ‘socialism’ was never defined.
The populist reactionary style that the Thatcherites developed during the ‘crisis’ of the 1970s had an antecedent in the politics of the maverick right-wing politician Enoch Powell, who features prominently in the book. Powell is today best remembered for his racist demagoguery, and post-imperial racism was indeed central to his politics. But it was also part of a broader populist vision which set the people against the (welfare) state and against liberal political culture. This was a powerful mobilising rhetoric, which had a clear influence on Thatcherism. Powell was also an early convert to monetarism. Indeed in 1970, two years after his notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Milton Friedman wrote of Powell in the most glowing of terms:
I have met with, talked with, and participated in meetings with Enoch Powell on a number of occasions. He has a better and deeper understanding of economic principles, and a clearer conception of the relation between economic and personal freedom, than any other major political figure I have ever met. And even this is to put it too mildly.[7]
Despite these similarities with Thatcherism, though, there were also notable points of departure, which Camilla Schofield illustrates in her chapter on Powell and Thatcherism. Powell, Schofield notes, placed far greater emphasis on race and nation, bringing him much closer ideologically to fascism (indeed he remains an inspiration to the far-right). He was also hostile towards the United States and argued directly against Thatcher that one cannot ‘fight for our values’, adding that he would fight for his nation, even if it had a communist government.[8] Thatcher, on the other hand, whilst certainly a nationalist, was also a committed Atlanticist. Andrew Gamble notes that Denis Healey used the term ‘poodle’ to attack Thatcher over her subservient relationship with the US long before it was used against Blair. Above all, though she would not have expressed her commitments in these terms, Thatcher was a defender of the international capitalist order. Interestingly Powell was also critical of the economism of the Thatcherites: his commitment to monetarism was apparently rooted not in the economic rationalism that characterised much of the ‘neoliberal thought collective’, but rather in a pessimistic Burkean opposition to political progress.[9]
Monetarism and inflation were, of course, key political issues at the time of Thatcher’s ascendency, and Jim Tomlinson gives an interesting and nuanced account of the relationship between monetarist theory and Thatcherite policy. Inflation, he notes, has always been an important issue for the Conservatives as it devalues the savings of their middle class voters and causes the pound to depreciate, which in turn impacts negatively on British imperialism and the City of London. Strategically, then, inflation presented an irresistible opportunity to bind together the interests of the Conservatives’ key political constituency with their electoral base, and in the interwar years the Tories developed a populist anti-Labour political strategy on this basis. Inflation also offered an opportunity to mobilise sections of the population against rising equality and against trade unions, since rising prices were generally attributed to rising wages, which in turn could be blamed on the bargaining power of the unions.
In the 1970s, right-wing anxiety about inflation reached absurd levels of hysteria, as inflation came to be seen as an existential threat to capitalist civilisation. Friedrich Hayek claimed that inflation was part of a deliberate socialist strategy pursued by the Labour Party to advance the cause of socialism, whilst the editor of The Times, William Rees-Mogg (a convert to neoliberalism) gave his support to the Pinochet coup in Chile on the basis that dictatorship was a reasonable price to pay for effective counter-inflationary policy.[10]
Before Thatcher, the Conservatives had often been split over the specifics of counter-inflationary policy, with certain factions emphasising the need for monetary constraint and others for wage restraint. The latter in practice meant an incomes policy and therefore some kind of partnership with the unions. This was unacceptable to the radical right, which was almost defined by its visceral hatred of organised workers. The former option, however, also carried with it certain disadvantages, if monetarist doctrine was taken seriously. For monetary theory suggested that unions were not in fact responsible for inflation. Milton Friedman even ‘ridiculed the idea that controlling government borrowing was the best way to reduce monetary growth.’ Despite these disadvantages, monetarism did provide an intellectual rationale for dropping the commitment to full employment and even blaming the trade unions for unemployment. The Thatcherites' solution to this dilemma was to adopt those aspects of monetarism that suited them. They leaned on it to justify their position on unemployment, whilst still implying contra monetarism that unions and government spending caused inflation, the latter claim proving ‘too tempting politically to be set aside for any niceties of doctrine’.[11]
Monetarism was part of what has been called the neoliberal ‘thought collective’—a much broader intellectual movement which profoundly influenced Thatcherite politicians. In this collection, only Ben Jackson deals in any detail with neoliberalism specifically. Jackson’s chapter focuses on the activities and influence of the Institute of Economic Affairs. He challenges the notion, propagated by the British neoliberals themselves, that they were ‘maverick outsiders’ marginalised from the political establishment. On the contrary, Jackson points out that, though admittedly a minority within the academy, neoliberals received significant support from business, the media and influential politicians. Furthermore, in a period in which most institutions were struggling financially, the Institute of Economic Affairs experienced no such difficulties, receiving financial support from such donors as British American Tobacco, BP, IBM, John Lewis, Marks & Spencer, Proctor & Gamble, ICI, Shell, Tate and Lyle, Unilever, Barclays, Lloyds, Midland, NatWest, Lazard Brothers, British Assets Trust, Cayzer Irvine and Prudential.[12]
For Jackson, Thatcherism ‘drew ideological sustenance from neo-liberalism, but was not co-extensive with it’. He notes Thatcher’s failure to restructure the NHS and the educational system—which were prioritised by the neoliberal activists even more than the emasculation of the trade unions — and also claims that in contrast with the anti-democratic tendencies of their neoliberal allies, the Thatcherite Conservatives were ‘far more comfortable with majoritarian democracy’.[13] It is questionable though whether either example really sets the Thatcherite politicians apart from the neoliberal intellectuals. Rather both suggest that the distance between them reflected more their different roles within the neoliberal movement than any meaningful points of disagreement. On the question of democracy, Thatcher et al. were thoroughly socialised into the political class and no doubt deeply attached to Parliamentarianism, but this hardly amounts to a commitment to democracy in any meaningful sense. Their commitment, such as it was, came with the job. As Robert Saunders notes in his chapter, democracy was after all one of the ‘common currency of British politics’.[14] As Jackson suggests though, the fact that the Thatcherite politicians viewed electoral politics as a means to neoliberal ends, made them more ambitious than the pamphleteers of the Institute of Economic Affairs. On the questions of the NHS, education and welfare however, the opposite was true and the Thatcherites were constrained rather than galvanized by political imperatives. As Jackson notes, in this case ‘political judgement and the defence of middle-class interests trumped ideology.[15]
The complex relationship between ideology and political practice is central to many of the controversies over Thatcherism and if there is a weakness in the collection it is that a number of the contributors focus too much on the former and not enough on the latter. Jon Lawrence and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, for example, have a chapter on the discourse of class in Thatcherism, in which it is noted that in Thatcher’s rhetoric, ‘“Ordinary working families”, rather than “the workers” or “working class”, occupied centre stage.’[16] Though the chapter is occasionally interesting, it fails to examine in enough detail how class in fact changed under Thatcherism. Indeed there is very little attention to class or economic inequality at all in the book, which is remarkable given the impact that Thatcherism had in this respect.
A focus on ideology at the expense of policy is also a feature of Matthew Grimley’s chapter on the moral and religious aspects of Thatcherism. Grimley notes that Thatcher in fact ‘did little to legislate on morality and the family’ but insists that this does not mean that this ‘was an unimportant part of her ideology.’[17] Fine, but why is it then that one part of her ‘ideology’ prevailed over another and what role did the power of different social groups play in this process? And in any case, why is it that political rhetoric, rather than social reality, has been made the primary object of study? As Richard Vinen notes in his chapter, this is a particular feature of studies of Thatcherism in general which ‘have tended to emphasise what was said rather than what was done.’ Unfortunately Vinen himself then falls into the same trap two pages later when, straying from his area of expertise, he makes the breathtaking claim that: ‘Blair’s foreign policy involved intervention that was designed to make the world a better place, culminating in the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.’[18]
It is in the second and third sections of the book, which deal more closely with questions of policy, that the weakness of an excessively narrow focus on ideology becomes clear. In ‘The Irish question’, Marc Mulholland notes that Thatcher ‘was temperamentally a unionist of the Powell stripe’ sharing ‘his desire for military victory, and even for integration.’ In opposition she appointed Airey Neave as her spokesperson on Northern Ireland, who echoed Powell’s hardline approach. Yet in government the Thatcherites abandoned their earlier commitment to ‘integration’.[19] Similarly Vinen notes that during the 1970s Thatcher was closely associated with a number of authoritarian Cold Warriors, who portrayed every popular movement as a covert socialist plot, but that, ‘Once the Conservative Party was in government, many of the right-wing advisors who had been influential, or at least allowed to imagine they were influential, in opposition were marginalised.’[20]
What the various accounts suggest is that whatever Thatcher and her allies’ broader political ambitions, their primary concern was with instituting a neoliberal restructuring of British society. How was this unpopular restructuring achieved? This is not a question which features highly in this collection, but it could be argued that here too we find another potential problem with the scholarly focus on ideas. For a focus on the ideological power of Thatcherism risks inverting its actual political strategy, which was arguably characterised more by attempts to change attitudes through instituting social change, than attempts to institute social change by changing attitudes. The most obvious example of this is the selling off of council houses at huge discounts (in flagrant violation of the ‘free market’). Thatcher’s commitment to creating a ‘property owning democracy’, according to Jim Tomlinson, was so strong that it even threatened counter-inflationary policy. No doubt it was in some respects a popular policy, but it was also a top-down initiative explicitly designed to realign people’s political orientation.
That Thatcher herself was engaged in conscious social engineering is clear enough from her famous comment that, ‘Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.’ A similar, perhaps even more explicit statement of intent was given by the godfather of Thatcherism, Keith Joseph, who called for the New Right to ‘re-create the conditions under which the values we cherish can form the cement of our society… conditions which will again permit the forward march of embourgeoisement.’ [21] The Thatcherite cuts to sociology and Keith Joseph’s attempt to dissolve the Social Sciences Research Council altogether, which are also cited by Lawrence and Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, were the flip side to this strategy, intended to ‘sideline elements which might challenge the new Thatcherite understandings of society’.[22]
What in the end is the legacy of Thatcherism? We can at least take some comfort from the Thatcherites’ failure to change our hearts and souls. For, as the editors note in their introduction, ‘Survey evidence does not support the emergence of more individualistic popular attitudes… the British electorate was not significantly “Thatcherised”’.[23] Perhaps the real lesson, then, is that the right did not need to win hearts. It just needed to win. This goes some way to explaining why even after the ideas of Thatcherism have lost credibility and political currency, the legacy and power of Thatcherism endures, and we remain, for the time being at least, Thatcherised.
Tom Mills is a freelance investigative researcher based in London, a PhD candidate at the University of Bath and a co-editor of the New Left Project.
References
[1] Although as Colin Hay has suggested, the protagonists in the Thatcherism debates often ‘talked past one another and failed to acknowledge the considerable (if implicit) consensus on the subject that has accumulated while they have bickered.’ See Colin Hay, ‘Whatever Happened to Thatcherism?’, Political Studies Review, Volume 5, Issue 2, pp.183, May 2007.
[2] Colin Hay, ‘Whatever Happened to Thatcherism?’, Political Studies Review, Volume 5, Issue 2, p.183, May 2007.
[3] See for example, Ian Gilmour, Dancing with Dogma: Britain under Thatcherism (London: Simon & Schuster, 1992)
[4] Matthew Grimley, ‘Thatcherism, morality and religion’, in Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (eds.), Making Thatcher’s Britain (Oxford University Press, 2012) p.83.
[5] Robert Saunders, ‘“Crisis? What crisis?” Thatcherism and the seventies’, in Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (eds.), Making Thatcher’s Britain (Oxford University Press, 2012) p.40.
[6] Ibid. p.29.
[7] Letter from Milton Friedman to William F. Buckley, 2 December 1970. Cited in Ben Jackson, ‘The think-tank archipelago: Thatcherism and neo-liberalism’, in Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (eds.), Making Thatcher’s Britain (Oxford University Press, 2012) p.58.
[8] Camilla Schofield, ‘A nation or no nation? Enoch Powell and Thatcherism’, in Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (eds.), Making Thatcher’s Britain (Oxford University Press, 2012) p.110
[9] Ibid. pp.103-5.
[10] Jim Tomlinson, ‘Thatcher, monetarism and the politics of inflation’, in Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (eds.), Making Thatcher’s Britain (Oxford University Press, 2012) p.65.
[11] Ibid. p.74.
[12] Ben Jackson, ‘The think-tank archipelago: Thatcherism and neo-liberalism’, in Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (eds.), Making Thatcher’s Britain (Oxford University Press, 2012) p.47.
[13] Ibid. p.60.
[14] Robert Saunders, ‘“Crisis? What crisis?” Thatcherism and the seventies’, in Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (eds.), Making Thatcher’s Britain (Oxford University Press, 2012)p.30.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Jon Lawrence and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, ‘Thatcher and the decline of class politics’, in Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (eds.), Making Thatcher’s Britain (Oxford University Press, 2012) p.134.
[17] Matthew Grimley, ‘Thatcherism, morality and religion’, in Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (eds.), Making Thatcher’s Britain (Oxford University Press, 2012) p.79.
[18] Richard Vinen, ‘Thatcherism and the wider world’, in Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (eds.), Making Thatcher’s Britain (Oxford University Press, 2012) pp.214, 216.
[19] Marc Mulholland, “Just another country?” The Irish question in the Thatcher years’, in Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (eds.), Making Thatcher’s Britain (Oxford University Press, 2012) pp.185-6.
[20] Richard Vinen, ‘Thatcherism and the wider world’, in Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (eds.), Making Thatcher’s Britain (Oxford University Press, 2012) p.207.
[21] Jon Lawrence and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, ‘Thatcher and the decline of class politics’, in Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (eds.), Making Thatcher’s Britain (Oxford University Press, 2012) p.140.
[22] Ibid. p.146.
[23] Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders, ‘Introduction: Varieties of Thatcherism’, in Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders (eds.), Making Thatcher’s Britain (Oxford University Press, 2012) p.16.
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