Martin Durkin’s excellent documentary last night perfectly
outlined my thoughts on the dangerous subject that is Margaret Thatcher. You
can see it here on the Channel 4 catch-up site.
...
Many years ago when I received my first poll tax bill I of
course did not like it at all. It was only in retrospect that I realised that
there it was in black and white: this is how much your council, your police,
your fire service … are charging to provide their services and here’s the bill.
The knee-jerk reaction to this was to protest because of course it was all the
fault of the evil Tories. I didn’t go to any protests because, unlike most of
those throwing chunks of paving slab at council offices, I had a job to do. It
was a stark reality check. The Poll Tax never went away and was just made more unfair
by being rebranded Council Tax and then aimed at a target that couldn’t duck
it: the home owner. No subsequent Labour government removed it. In reality it
was as unfair as any tax to fund state-run organisations because you have no
choice; all taxes are demanded with menaces. Which brings me to the 1970s.
A lot has already been written about how things were back
then: just about everything state-run and inefficient, unions demanding
ridiculous wage rises and striking at the drop of a hat, 33% and 83% income tax
rates, rubbish piling up in the streets, endless blackouts, dead bodies going
unburied and stacking up to the extent that one city even considered burial at
sea, trains running a damned sight more erratically than they do now. However,
one small thing can illustrate it better for people now: you didn’t even own
your own telephone. We had the British disease; we were Cuba without the
sunshine. Britain, prior to 1979, was under the dead hand of the state. And the
British were sick of it, which is why Thatcher got in, three times, with majorities
that today’s parties can only dream about.
So, Margaret Thatcher started closing down our industries
and putting people out of work. She destroyed our country yada yada. Well, no,
what she did was stop us having to subsidize moribund, unionized, inefficient, pretend industries that simply could
not compete in the real world. We were living in the illusory world of twenty
people building a crap car while hurtling towards us was the reality of one
person and a series of robots building a good one. And yes, that did hurt and did put people out of work.
However, that was because previous governments had been doing just what many governments
are doing now with the financial crisis: kicking the can down the road. Reality
was going to bite; it was just a question of when.
Margaret Thatcher destroyed our coal mining industry … except
it was the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson (managing to restrain himself from kicking that can) who closed three times as many
pits as her, but that was okay, because Wilson was Labour, and a man. Never let
it be forgotten that the coal miner’s strike was firstly illegal because
Scargill couldn’t get enough miners to vote for it, and was secondly an attack
by Scargill, and other left-wing apparatchiks, on the Thatcher government. It
was about who ruled the country: an elected government that won three landslide
victories, or the unions. That man used the miners as cannon fodder and, when
it was over, it wasn’t him on benefits, oh no, he just toddled back to his 1.5
million mansion.
Anyway … the interesting thing that Durkin documentary
highlighted was that Margaret Thatcher fought the establishment, both Labour
and Tory, on behalf of the working class. The Tory ‘wets’ didn’t want the
working class to have social mobility because, well, shudder, they didn’t want
the plebs having the wealth to move in the same rarefied strata as them.
Equally, Labour didn’t want social mobility because shit, if the oiks toss away
their flat caps, buy white vans or mobile phones and start making money, where’s
the sense of grievance and the client-base that gets Labour elected? The very
idea of these people buying their own homes or buying shares in companies was
anathema. In fact the unions told their members not to buy shares, and were
ignored. Both parties had and still have their total snobs. You can see this
attitude reflected in the term ‘yuppies’ and in Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney
character – this is the awful sort of thing that happens when oiks and plebs
dare to rise above their station. Shudder.
In the end, of course, the dead hand of the state came back
with Blair, Brown and the EU while, damn it, I would prefer to see people
working in industries rather than as clients of the state – meaning either uselessly employed by it or on benefits – but how do you get round that? How do we get full
employment in an increasingly mechanised world? A world which, in their way,
the Luddites were right to fear? That’s a post for another time perhaps.
