Margaret Thatcher
I review the Iron Lady ahead of the 2024 General Election. Have a guess on how many stars out of ten?
“For (£)3 million you could give everyone in Scotland a shovel, and we could dig a hole so deep we could hand her over to Satan personally.”
- Frankie Boyle on Margaret Thatcher’s state Funeral
I was taking the (un-privatised) train home last Friday when I was accosted by an ageing man who I can only describe as a late-stage Elvis impersonator. His pock-marked face and bulbous, alky nose sat pugnaciously beneath a wilting, shoe polish-black quiff. His eyes were piss holes in the melting snow of his face. The train carriage wasn’t too busy, but as I listened to my audiobook in peace, I could feel the weight of his stare as he perched across from me on a half-occupied row. I knew he was dying to comment on my navy blue version of the t-shirt above. When it came time for his stop, which was thankfully one before mines, he decided to inform me that “this fuckin country wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in if she was still in charge. That shite on your shirt is downright offensive. You should be ashamed.”
I never said anything; I just smiled at him as he backed off the train, raging into the sunlit evening. I watched him humph his heavy carcass out of the station and had several retorts cued for him should he have wanted to linger and debate the finer points of neoliberalism. Instead, I am a story lost to some Facebook rant in which he and a select coterie of others from the handout generation will likely, and unironically, call people of my age and younger snowflakes. As he thundered back to his council-built safe space, I wondered if it ever occurred to him that we were living in Thatcher’s Britain.
“Crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
- Antonio Gramsci
In this Sneer Review, I address several points that Thatcher's admirers, such as the gentleman on the train and those of his ilk, may not have fully considered. If you don’t want to read further, that’s perfectly fine; she gets no stars out of ten, FYI.
Thatcherism for Dummies
So why was the lady “not for turning”? Just what was her personalised ism all about? For that, we must go back to before Boy George, the Nintendo Entertainment System, and a war with Argentina—yip, the seventies.
I have never lived through three-day weeks, a Winter of Discontent, rubbish piling in the streets, or the tens of millions of lost working hours due to 1970s strike action. Whilst today there are many strikes, trade unions were able to bring the UK to its knees back then when nowadays all that happens is I’m sat on an overcrowded train or slightly late for an appointment. This change in the power of unions was due to Thatcher, part of her one solution remedy to all the multifarious and nuanced ills of that decade: neoliberalism.
“Neoliberal democracy. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless.
- Noam Chomsky
To understand Thatcherism, it is important to know what Neoliberalism is. A product of The Mont Pelerin Society, a thinktank founded in post-war 1940s Switzerland, Neoliberalism began life as a disparate set of ideas from those looking to retain post-war profits in private hands. The group was home to figures such as Friedrich Hayek, Frank Knight and Ludwig von Mises. These economists, funded by the largess of the wealthy, sought to abolish the Keynesian consensus of economics, oppose socialism and generally create an intellectual bulwark to justify the greed of the 19th-century laissez-faire economics. Thatcherism was born from Friedrich Hayek’s book, The Constitution of Liberty, which, according to historian John Ranelagh, Thatcher slammed onto a table at a Conservative Party conference, stating, “This is what we believe”. The Iron Lady did this in response to her colleagues suggesting a more moderate course.
The main thrust of this new direction was to let the market decide. This turn to an esoteric quantity such as the market is probably one of the cleverest bait-and-switch manoeuvres in the history of politics. By taking a poorly defined term onto which we can all project an image of something fair and as old as time, what she, and by extension, Hayek, were actually saying was don’t worry. We will take responsibility for nothing while allowing the rich to make all the decisions and, ergo, profit.
The key to Thatcherism was not just to invoke the market but to unleash it. That meant dismantling barriers to profit, such as collective bargaining, regulations, taxation, public ownership and social care.
“Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women.”
- Margaret Thatcher
In this system, society was not a vibrant, interwoven fabric of complex ideas, needs and relations but a transactional soup of atomised customers whose interactions were commercial, product-driven and profit-motivated. Once this became orthodoxy, all barriers to profit were illegitimate and fit for dismantling. This change in mindset was one of the greatest feats of social engineering ever achieved.
Thatcherism was opportunist, myopic, and fuelled by resentment. It took the form of its progenitors, who sought to reinforce a rigid 19th-century class system mediated by wealth. The gains of the post-war world were to be stripped back, and the instability that had given the world robber barons and the Great Depression was to be restored. The wealth generated would come from bargain basement sales of nationalised utilities and cutting vital services to the bone. Market-driven policies were enforced in areas where privatisation was unpalatable or unworkable, leading to institutions like the NHS employing an internal market. The assertion was that competition would breed success. Efficiency was the byword, with no one daring to say what they meant was profit. Again, the genius came down to the understanding that everything was about the individual, so no blame could be attached to a governing structure for a lack of success. It was down to you, only you, even if your community had been gutted by industry leaving, your public services eroded in the name of efficiency, and your society smashed in favour of letting the market decide. The onus was solely with the individual, the lone ship on a swelling sea. The logic was that the weather and waves had nothing to do with the vessel's fortune, and you were deluded or, worse, a Socialist if you dared to question the prevailing winds themselves.
So it all Went Well, Right?
In those early days of Thatcherism, the very architects of it, these disciples of Neoliberalism, knew it would make most people worse off. Cue the co-opting of metaphors:
“A rising tide lifts all boats.”
- John F. Kennedy
One year after her 1979 election, Thatcher’s popularity was low. Her promise of revolutionising the economy was unmet, and many key economic indicators showed that perhaps the lady should have been for turning. In 1980, UK inflation peaked above 20%, unemployment doubled within eighteen months, and GDP sharply declined. In the same year, UK industrial output sank to its lowest level in the post-war period. The rising tide seemed to sink most of the ships moored in the UK marina. Salvation came in the shape of Argentines shambling onto the shores of Las Islas Malvinas. Their ill-advised land grab produced a popularity lifeline that Thatcher was too canny to ignore.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Thatcher’s decision to bitch-slap Argentina out of the Falklands was about the only thing she did that I agree with - and I am hardly what one would call pro-British in sentiment. The subsequent war was more akin to a six-foot tall man holding a child at arm’s length whilst they booted the kid in the face, and all for the cost of one of two flailing punches grazing his fully grown knee. The victory in the Falklands ensured Thatcher’s address post the 1983 election would remain 10 Downing Street.
Her popularity, however, was not coming from economic performance:
The cost of reducing inflation was increased unemployment and a bloating of GDP due to the selling off of state assets and the UK’s mineral wealth. Indeed, Thatcher’s popularity was less about tangible progress and more about The Feels. Conservatism flourishes when facts are subordinate to emotion.
The Feels Market
Let's go back to the pound shop Elvis on the train. What animated that snowflake so? Having spent my childhood living under the reign of Maggie the Milk Snatcher, I remember her pantomime bombast, tuned to the most jingoistic of frequencies. She understood Disraeli’s contention that Britishness was simply a distillation of Crown, Church and Flag and used this much as he had a century before to win over the electorate.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Her tenure, her very ism, was a triumph of hyperbole over substance. She fired the starting pistol on the largest transfer of wealth from bottom to top in history, declaring this a necessary change and inevitable progress.
“If our country was a dirty window, then Thatcher threw a boulder through it, telling us that she was cleaning it.”
From July 4th: Indifference Day
The tip of the social engineering battering ram was selling off council houses. This allowed Thatcherism to manifest as more the words on the telly; it smashed your front door and gave your parents no option but to look at it and feel the presence of her reform in your house. This form of privatisation was more tangible than the logo changing on an electricity bill but was all part of the same sale of publically funded goods to private hands.
This transfer of wealth and shedding of state assets would take years to metastasise into the full-blown housing crisis of today. By selling off social housing and not replacing the stock, artificial scarcity was produced, benefitting private landlords, who could drive up the rent as the prices of houses climbed ever higher whilst our children’s likelihood of home ownership sank ever lower.
Thatcherism was entirely woven from the finest sophistry. According to its own internal mythology, the invocation of free markets and several strokes of a pen enabled natural monopolies to evaporate and for functioning economic policy to be rendered obsolete. With the benefit of almost forty years of history, only the most zealous and sycophantic can still cling to the free market fable. This bonfire of regulation & public ownership has proven just how unsuccessful free market policy has been.
In England, where water is a privatised utility, the infrastructure crumbles, waste leaks into freshwater sources, and record debts and dividends are extracted from the husks of once publically owned institutions - institutions that carried zero debt before being sold off.
Memories of decrepit British Rail trains, like the chaos of the 1970s, were easily exploitable problems for the (not so) New Right. Rather than pointing to the chronic underfunding persistent in so much of UK history or even at the decisions of previous Conservative governments (such as the Beeching Report), Thatcher instead invoked the spectre of socialism, the Freddie Kruger of Hayek’s dreams. Her society-less amalgam of atomised individuals was to coalesce around the anode of public ownership and corrode it. She would help by further defunding a chronically underfunded service, thus running into the ground and fit to be snapped up by a voracious private sector. The same recipe is currently being used on the NHS; such a well-loved institution requires more time in the oven, however.
The failures of privatisation were foreseen early on, but the juggernaut of Thatcherism was not to be stopped, and anyone slightly on the fence was bought off with promises of choice or shares from the newly privatised entities such as BT or British Gas. Even in the 1980s, it was evident that Thatcher’s dogmatic alignment with the Friedman Doctrine, in which shareholder profits are the best thing for everyone, was untrue. Today, we live with the consequences of this inevitability where companies have no social responsibility. In return for this moral blank cheque, we have no right to expect highly paid executives or institutional investors to look after their assets. Instead, all we can hope for is that our rivers aren’t filled with too much shit and that the invisible hand of the market will every so often forget to dip our pockets as we increasingly struggle to afford the necessities of life. Hollow words like freedom and choice and the protection of individuality are insufficient to give our children a bright future and a full stomach.
I hope you’re reading this, Elvis.
So, what of our Elvis look-alike on the train? Would he read this and repent? I very much doubt it. If child leukaemia, natural disasters, or silence in response to prayers can’t sway those with religious faith, why should anything I say sway the members of the Cult of Maggie? If communities divided by miners’ strikes and cities (mine and many others) almost condemned due to a lack of proper post-industrial strategy or widespread poverty didn’t move the needle, why should my words?
They shouldn’t.
Thatcher’s legacy wasn’t just constrained to her careless and craven unleashing of the market but a virulent strain of dogmatism that has been a platform for much of the corporatist greed and decline we see today. As I stated, I doubt the Aldi Elvis’ saturated fat-fuelled brain has even registered that we still live in Thatcher’s Britain.
“Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.”
- Margaret Thatcher’s answer to “What is your greatest achievement?”
Thatcher took the funds from North Sea oil and, constrained by her own egotism and dogmatism (the market is the one-size-fits-all solution), transferred this wealth into private, subsidised hands. In the same period, Norway has grown its oil largesse into the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. British industry has never recovered from the death blows Thatcherism dealt it. Whilst we can look back and see that it was structurally weak and not fit for purpose before her three terms in Government, she did not bother to rebuild or remodel but instead hacked and slashed and burned until all that was left was scorched, foreign-owned rubble. Today, the UK relies heavily on non-productive industries such as finance or the low-paying service sector to squeak by. For a woman so obsessed with preventing British decline, she seemed more determined than any leader in the history of these islands to bring it about. Her shock doctrine saw trains, water, and energy broken up and sold off to other national utility companies, completely exposing the lie that public ownership of something meant it was badly run. A badly run organisation is badly run, irrelevant of who owns it.
From Poll Tax to privatisation, financialisation, and beyond, her legacy is one of decline wreathed in lies and underwritten by violence. The fake aroma of intellectualism behind neoliberalism still hangs over Conservativism. This is evident in the complete paucity of Tory thinking post-2008 and the crash. They have never even attempted to move on from the three myths of Thatcherism nor sought to address the structural failings it created. The Iron Lady’s lasting legacy comes not from good policy but from successful PR, and every Conservative leader since has sought to cosplay as a cheap imitation of her, knowing that with each passing year, it becomes harder to justify the greed, theft and corruption inherent to neoliberalism. You know the ideology is a busted flush when a multi-millionaire Prime Minister (nobody voted for) stands on a platform of Stop the Boats whilst adults in full-time employment use food banks.
The Verdict
Zero stars, nil points, total fail. Her popularity with the diehards, such as the ersatz Elvis, won’t wane until these people shuffle off this mortal coil. I could list her mistreatment of Ireland, her centralising zeal, focussed on London, the Miner’s strikes, ad infinitum. There is just so much wrong she managed to cram into a decade. I could spend all year listing her failings and failures, but I won’t. The chances are, if you have read this far, you know pretty much all of this and more. What is undeniable, though, is that all of what I have written about and more can be traced back to one source, and it, to the detriment of us all, was not for turning.
What I shall say, in sum, was better said by a newspaper that broadly supported her, the Financial Times:
A note to an angry man on the train
My t-shirt, cheaply made and undoubtedly one of millions from a Bangladeshi sweatshop or somewhere that exists thanks to neoliberal reforms, has never caused people to use food banks. My t-shirt never destroyed communities by not planning for their post-industrial transition. My t-shirt never brought on a housing crisis, encouraged police brutality against members of their own class or facilitated the demise of British industry. My t-shirt certainly didn’t set the stage for the financial crises we have survived or are cowering before. My t-shirt never enabled the dimwitted arrogance of Osborne’s austerity or left an intellectually bankrupt political movement with nowhere left to go except picking on minorities and immigrants. My t-shirt never enabled swindling pension funds and voracious vulture capitalists to pollute our rivers or make the trains an embarrassment.
All my t-shirt did was boil the piss of one old man on the train. And that makes me very fucking happy.
Great read 💯
Very well written !