Entangled Alliances

Suddenly she’s everywhere.  Docu-dramas on the Beeb (and what could be more thrilling than Portillo on Thatcher?); a New Statesman special issue; op-eds from the Guardian to the Telegraph; portrait hangings at No. 10.  Yep, apparently we have Thatcher Fever.  What accounts for the sudden revivalism of a legacy which has been spurned for two decades?  I don’t buy the argument that this is a matter of simple anniversaries.  Sure, it’s almost 30 years since Sunny Jim miscalculated the election date, but I don’t recall a similar fiesta in 1999.  

photo credit: Steve Punter

Nor, it would now seem, does the mere mention of “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie” elict the Pavlovian response “Out Out Out!”  The BBC’s sympathetic portrayal, and Gordon’s acceptance of the idea of not only a Downing Street portrait, but even a state funeral, seem to imply that after Harry Enfield’s Tory Boy, an election campaign based around Thatcher’s hair on Hague’s head and spontaneous celebration when she quit, it’s finally OK to be a bit soft on the Iron Lady.  Just when did it go out of fashion to hate Tories?

How has this happened?  Well, as Martin Kettle points out in his Guardian column, part of the explanation is that, unlike in 1999, we’re now on the precipice of a Conservative comeback.  David Cameron is poised to become the next Prime Minister, so, the media seem to be presuming, we’re all a bit nostalgic for the last era of Conservative hegemony, if not (as in the case of my generation) curious about what it was actually like.

There’s some danger in all this.  As Kettle points out, we may be on the verge of a Cameron premiership, but this does not mean that we’ve necessarily turned right:

 

Our era is not like that. This is not a conservative moment. If anything it is the reverse. The failures of 2009 are those of the banks and the absurdly over-rewarded bankers, not of the public services and their low-paid union members as in 1979. The failure of governance in 2009 is the failure of inadequate regulation – not of too much, as was the case in 1979. It is financial ungovernability that has brought the economy to its knees today, not union power. By rational standards this is a left of centre moment.

In the United States, that is exactly what is happening. Barack Obama’s speech to Congress this week, with its key insistence that America faces a day of reckoning, expresses all this with great potency. Britain is more problematically placed to take the same advantage because the country is governed by Labour ministers from a different era who had no alternative but to take Thatcher seriously and no realistic course other than to accommodate their party to her destruction of the pre-1979 order.

 

The Maggie-fest suffers another serious flaw.  It is about political power-plays, not about policy.  It is about personality, not about the people.  And, in turning the fall of Lady Thatcher into a Greek tragedy, as the BBC adaptation seems wont to do, and beatifying her even before her death, we risk casting aside in the collective consciousness many of the terrible consequences of her reign.  Let us never forget what 18 years of Conservative government did to Britain.  Let us never forget that society was torn apart, communities destroyed, inner-cities systematically sacrificed for new Beemers for city bankers and a war waged with the smiling face of jingoism and the unceasing background motivation of electoral politics.  And let’s not forget, in maligning those damned cowards who forced her out, that she went for three very clear reasons: an increasing tendency for autocracy; her ceaseless opposition to Europe which her peers saw as dangerous to the national and international interest; and the imposition of the Poll Tax, the most regressive tax in modern political history.

Yes, she’s defined our modern politics, in emulation and opposition.  Yes, her economic model transformed the country and the Labour Party.  Fine, we can have an honest debate about her legacy (but why we’re having it right now bewilders me), but let’s not allow the damage she did to become a mere footnote in history.  Britain today is a far better place than it was in 1997, after seven years of half-hearted Thatcherism which entrenched the damage of her eleven year premiership.  It’s been a hard fought battle to insist that there is, after all, a society.  In this new winter of discontent, we cannot allow Thatcher to become the standard-bearer for a new Conservative era.  We must fight, as Obama is doing under more favourable circumstances, to preserve what is fundamentally a social democratic moment.  I’ll leave you with Oona King, who gives a personal and emotional account of Margaret Thatcher’s influence on her own career, concluding, as all on the Left should, that whatever her achievements, she can never been forgiven.

And because I can’t resist, after you’ve flicked through the New Statesman’s “Where Were You When You Heard” article, why not savour in the dulcet tones of Michael Burke (and the incredibly authoritative titles of 1990s BBC News!):