30 Years Since Maggie Got In

[Chinahand]

Oh heck, another over long Chinahand ramble!

 

Its 30 years since Maggie was first elected - BBC Clicky.

 

I found this piece in the FT by Saatchi a thought provoking defence of the Lady.

 

Maggie's legacy has been a topic of quite a few threads recently.

 

P.K. and Gladys have raised her "attack" on the working class communities as exhibits for the prosecution.

 

I believe things are far more complicated than that and Saatchi echoes some of my views:

 

... she said: “Caring that works costs cash.”

 

The Good Samaritan showed that first you need the money in order to do the good works. She said: “A bigger cake means a bigger slice for everyone.” But first you had to create the wealth to make the cake bigger.

 

... She said that lower tax was good: for moral reasons – it meant more freedom and choice for individuals – and for economic reasons, because paradoxically lower tax rates meant higher tax revenues and more wealth creation.

 

Economics was always her priority: “National solvency is not so much an objective as conditio sine qua non for the attainment of any objectives.”

 

... she believed that individuals could not be free if they were poor, because, as J. K. Galbraith said: “The greatest restriction on the liberty of the citizen is a complete absence of money.”

 

Like Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson and all the great champions of liberal democracy, she recognised that a paternalist government, based on the benevolence of a ruler who treats his subjects as dependent children, is the greatest conceivable despotism and destroys all freedom.

 

She saw that human dignity in fact resides in independence, individuality, self-determination.

 

But today ... a “static scoring” consensus has emerged about public sector finance, in which a £1 cut in tax means a £1 cut in nurses and teachers – because belief in the wealth-creating effect of lower taxation has faded.

 

... She would despise the vision that is opening up before us – in which the state controls your mortgage, your bank account and your life insurance; where the state routinely passes your papers from one government department to another, your phone bills to the health department, your health records to Revenue & Customs, your tax records to the benefits department; your car journeys tracked by state sensors; your bus and Tube journeys caught on state cameras; your foreign trips notified to the authorities; every click on your computer available for inspection; your identity card always ready for presentation; one in three on the state’s payroll; two in three receive a state payment; cities where half the jobs are with the state, and where the state has views on how you fill your rubbish bin.

 

The cliche is that Maggie didn't care about the damage she was doing - I believe the nuance is that her care had to be second order - by the end of the 1970s the UK was effectively bankrupt - without society generating enough wealth there would be no way to care; and the idea that state support is always caring is debateable especially when it creates dependency.

 

I personally often debate my values - I very much agree that there is great human dignity in independence, individuality and self-determination and one of the ways our society has gone wrong is in creating an underclass predicated on benefit dependency and an entitlement culture.

 

P.K. raised the question - should we have just kept subisidizing the dead end industries unable to reform or compete, rather then shutting them down and destroying the communities based around them, putting thousands onto the dole?

 

My reply is that it costs multiples times more to subsidize a failed business than have someone on the dole, and if they are on the dole they have the ability to find purpose elsewhere. Getting on your bike is a cruel philosophy, but I believe dependency is crueler.

 

The UK emerged from Maggie's rule far stronger than when it entered it. I've raised in multiple threads the fact that manufacturing output was higher when Maggie and Major left office than when they started - in real terms etc. Other areas of the economy did even better - I do not discount the pain large communities suffered though the change Maggie enforced, but I also feel NuLabour is also creating pain by supporting and subsidizing an underclass which seems to think it is entitled never to work, never to seek work, and always have its benefits and child support paid; and where this is supported by a state which takes up an ever larger proportion of employment with better terms and conditions, all paid for out of an ever growing tax burden on the working private citizen and private sector.

 

When it comes to the miners strike my views are reasonably clear - Scargill knew he didn't have enough support to win a strike ballot, but he knew he could enforce his strike call on the mining communities. By doing that he abused those communities, he took advantage of their cohesion for his political ends. The attacks on the "scabs," the secondary picketing etc wasn't based on a free choice to strike or work, but on him undemocratically manipulating a community to his will by exploiting its solidarity against "scab" working.

 

He thought he had a right to demand hard cash from others beyond any economic sense and idealized a failed economic system and a totalitarian political system as a workers paradise. Scargill was a deadender who would rather be the life-long president of a union with no economic purpose than attempt to reform and diversify the communities he held power over. Maggie seems to bear all the opprobrium for what happened to the Miners - I believe Scargill bears just as much, if not more.

 

This piece from the Wall Street Journal has resonances to all of this.

 

In the US a major issue is how to rectify the wrongs done to African Americans through slavery and segregation. I think there are parallels in the UK over how to right the wrongs of inequality and poverty in the working class.

 

Shelby Steele - a mixed race conservative - discusses activism and how it has trumped conservative ideas of self-reliance and independence. I feel I can go through his article and replace the word black or minority with words like poor or disadvantaged and apply it very much to UK politics - even to the extent of seeing in some form Rog's rants against Liverpool in Mr Steele's comments about "grievance-focused identities".

 

Why the GOP Can't Win With Minorities? I think it began in a very specific cultural circumstance: the dramatic loss of moral authority that America suffered in the 1960s after openly acknowledging its long mistreatment of blacks and other minorities. Societies have moral accountability, and they cannot admit to persecuting a race of people for four centuries without losing considerable moral legitimacy.

 

This was the circumstance that opened a new formula for power in American politics: redemption. If you could at least seem to redeem America of its past sins, you could win enough moral authority to claim real political power.

 

When redemption became a term of power, "redemptive liberalism" was born -- a new activist liberalism that gave itself a "redemptive" profile by focusing on social engineering rather than liberalism's classic focus on individual freedom. In the '60s there was no time to allow individual freedom to render up the social good. Redemptive liberalism would proactively engineer the good. If [it] ... did profound damage, ... it gave liberals the right to say, "At least we did something!" In other words, we are activists against America's old sin of segregation. Activism is moral authority in redemptive liberalism.

 

But conservatism sees moral authority more in a discipline of principles than in activism. It sees ideas of the good like "diversity" as mere pretext for the social engineering that always leads to unintended and oppressive consequences.

 

And here is conservatism's great problem with minorities. In an era when even failed moral activism is redemptive -- and thus a source of moral authority and power -- conservatism stands flat-footed with only discipline to offer. It has only an invisible hand to compete with the activism of the left. So conservatism has no way to show itself redeemed of America's bigoted past, no way like the Great Society to engineer a grand display of its innocence, and no way to show deference to minorities for the oppression they endured. Thus it seems to be in league with that oppression.

 

In the UK conservatism still struggles greatly with the attitude that it is the nasty party, the uncaring party, the party which destroyed communities; this has strong parallels with what Mr Steele is saying.

 

Our society has descriminated, has priviledged some at the expense of others. That is wrong. But I am far from convinced that the left's prescriptions are solving these problems. The huge resources pumped into the state in the last 12 years haven't delivered a better society, haven't reformed services. We've postponed the reckoning by borrowing, and hence the cupboard was bare when the crunch came. NuLabour's social engineering has created a Frankensteinian monster!

 

What in reality was a false boom did actually create huge tax revenues for Brown, the gains we felt from increased house prices etc were illusory, but the taxes we paid over to the government during that time weren't. This pot should have been invested wisely enough to last, but I don't think that's so - they've disapaited just as the stock market and the economy has. That though is the fault of Brown and not the economy - he hasn't invested the UKs Tax money into sustainable social wealth.

 

And so once again we look to be entering an era of austerity and in such times conservative values do come to the fore.

 

Too large a proportion of our society believes it is entitled to either a job for life and a civil service pension, or has the right to be supported by state benefits.

 

People who hold those attitudes are going to be in for a shock as the money simply isn't there anymore. I think there will be real social tensions as a result.

 

The left's social activism/engineering has I believe done great damage - they reply they were at least trying to help.

 

I'm doubtful - Maggie left a country in far better shape than when she started. Blair and Brown will not be able to say that - sure the bust has affected the economy, but we paid taxes right through the boom and now have little to show for it.

 

A broken economy can be fixed, but the consequences of failed social activism take generations to fix. Maggie's social activism created wealth, I admit it did destroy long established communities, but it allowed the country as a whole to be transformed.

 

NuLabour's social engineering - well its not creating much wealth at the moment and I worry it has created a dependency and entitlement culture which will take further generations to fix - while the rest of us work to pay off Labour's debts.

 

What values will be needed over the next few years - I don't see Brown offering the right ones - and to be blunt Cameron has spent so much of his time trying to escape Maggie's legacy I have difficulty understanding exactly what he is offering.

 

Cameron sees himself as the Heir to Blair - but doesn't the UK currently need the focus that Maggie brought to politics? Is there any politician with the vision to sort the UK out? Do we need an Heir to Blair - or should it be back to Maggie?

[P.K.]

Ah yes, Saatchi & Saatchi, the PR duo Maggie hired to run her election campaigns which upped their profile hugely and bought them no end of business.

 

Now let me see. Why on earth would they pen something in Maggies support? Tricky one that....

 

And by the way Mr Chinahand, Maggie transformed a lot of the country - but not for the better. Her appalling government also precipitated the Falklands conflict. On which basis she was re-elected. thanks to..... Saatchi & Saatchi!

 

You also seem to have completely failed to mention the enormous windfall benefits Maggie et al enjoyed via North Sea oil and gas. Funny that.

 

However such diligence should not go unrewarded. Tell you what, I'll forward your piece along with a glowing testimonial to The Daily Mail. You sound like just the sort of person they are always on the lookout for....

 

In the meantime you like research. Why not come back with the number of public schoolboys and millionaires Cameron has on his front bench? Believe me, it's most illuminating.

[Terse]

CELEBRATE?

[Albert Tatlock]

I'm looking forward to the day she finally pops off, and all the evil in the world returns to hell where it belongs.

 

Anyone up for a sweep? - put her me down for a fiver for Sunday 20th June 2010.

[Gladys]

You quote me as putting forward the case for the prosecution, but I carry a candle for neither side of the political spectrum.

 

Britain was in a mess when the Tories came to power in 1979. I remember the day well and the optimism that flowed. But what transpired was a pretty undisguised attack on the working classes. Maggie wanted to have the control over that part of the populace that the unions had had and she did it by a scorched earth policy. The result was a general repugnance of her policies. At a stroke, she closed down industries that could have been 'managed down' or even managed more effectively to be more productive. She also turned off the tap to Northern Ireland, effectively turning her back on that little dilemma, only to have it as a running sore for the next 20 years. Meanwhile, she trounced the Argies and required the death and suffering of soldiers who had never even heard of the Falkland Islands, let alone had the average Daily Mail reader who was up for a good spat. At the same time. she cut the right to British citizenship for a huge swathe of the former Empire. (1982 I thnk.)

 

We could argue the rights and wrongs of any of her policies, (and in idealogical, theoretical terms, her policies were mostly right) but the defining point is that they lacked humanity and that is the point for me.

[Freggyragh]

Excellent post Gladys.

[manshimajin]

What puzzles me is WHO VOTED FOR HER???????? 'fess up....someone - a lot of someones - and more than once too.

 

My suspicion is that this is because of what went before her....

[La_Dolce_Vita]

She also turned off the tap to Northern Ireland, effectively turning her back on that little dilemma, only to have it as a running sore for the next 20 years. Meanwhile, she trounced the Argies and required the death and suffering of soldiers who had never even heard of the Falkland Islands, let alone had the average Daily Mail reader who was up for a good spat. At the same time. she cut the right to British citizenship for a huge swathe of the former Empire. (1982 I thnk.)

 

Gladys, what do you mean by turning her back on Northern Ireland? Are you talking about how the British government responded to terrorism?

[Freggyragh]

The only good thing I have to say about Maggot Hatcher is that she paved the way for the only decent leader the UK has had in the last thirty years - John Major.

[Freggyragh]

The only good thing I have to say about Maggot Hatcher is that she paved the way for the only decent leader the UK has had in the last thirty years - John Major.

[Pragmatopian]

I'm looking forward to the day she finally pops off, and all the evil in the world returns to hell where it belongs.

 

I echo your sentiments.

[bluemonday]

You quote me as putting forward the case for the prosecution, but I carry a candle for neither side of the political spectrum.

 

Britain was in a mess when the Tories came to power in 1979. I remember the day well and the optimism that flowed. But what transpired was a pretty undisguised attack on the working classes. Maggie wanted to have the control over that part of the populace that the unions had had and she did it by a scorched earth policy. The result was a general repugnance of her policies. At a stroke, she closed down industries that could have been 'managed down' or even managed more effectively to be more productive. She also turned off the tap to Northern Ireland, effectively turning her back on that little dilemma, only to have it as a running sore for the next 20 years. Meanwhile, she trounced the Argies and required the death and suffering of soldiers who had never even heard of the Falkland Islands, let alone had the average Daily Mail reader who was up for a good spat. At the same time. she cut the right to British citizenship for a huge swathe of the former Empire. (1982 I thnk.)

 

We could argue the rights and wrongs of any of her policies, (and in idealogical, theoretical terms, her policies were mostly right) but the defining point is that they lacked humanity and that is the point for me.

 

Post of the year AFAIC.

[manshimajin]

Meanwhile, she trounced the Argies and required the death and suffering of soldiers who had never even heard of the Falkland Islands, let alone had the average Daily Mail reader who was up for a good spat. At the same time. she cut the right to British citizenship for a huge swathe of the former Empire. (1982 I thnk.)

Understand your points Gladys. IMO though in the longer term Margaret Thatcher will be held as responsible for causing the Falklands War. The UK Government knew that the junta in Argentina were keen on occupying the Malvinas. So what did she do? Reduce defence spending and withdraw virtually all the small military presence the UK had down there. What is more it was not the so-called 'Iron Lady' who trounced the Argentinians - but the British Army, Marines and the RN with a huge amount of help on the side from the USA. And the way the Argentinian Air Force performed it was as Wellington would have said "a damned nice thing". What an utter waste of young lives, both British and Argentinian.

 

IMO she gloried in the results of her own folly and the British people jingoistically supported her.

[asitis]

Meanwhile, she trounced the Argies and required the death and suffering of soldiers who had never even heard of the Falkland Islands, let alone had the average Daily Mail reader who was up for a good spat. At the same time. she cut the right to British citizenship for a huge swathe of the former Empire. (1982 I thnk.)

Understand your points Gladys. IMO though in the longer term Margaret Thatcher will be held as responsible for causing the Falklands War. The UK Government knew that the junta in Argentina were keen on occupying the Malvinas. So what did she do? Reduce defence spending and withdraw virtually all the small military presence the UK had down there. What is more it was not the so-called 'Iron Lady' who trounced the Argentinians - but the British Army, Marines and the RN with a huge amount of help on the side from the USA. And the way the Argentinian Air Force performed it was as Wellington would have said "a damned nice thing". What an utter waste of young lives, both British and Argentinian.

 

IMO she gloried in the results of her own folly and the British people jingoistically supported her.

 

 

Wars have always been a great ratings boost ask Tony Blair !

[Gladys]

Even at the time I remember there were murmurings that Maggie had engineered the conflict to boost her ratings or she would have had to go to a General Election without the popularity vote.