Margaret Thatcher
Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, otherwise known as Maggie Thatcher or That Bloody Woman died this morning at the Ritz Hotel after a stroke.
She’d been going potty for years, a fact rather cruelly exploited by Abi Morgan, the screenwriter of The Iron Lady, a generally sympathetic and more or less accurate biopic released a couple of years ago. Meryl Streep was brilliant in the title role (did anyone expect anything less?) and the script imbued Margaret with a number of humanising qualities absent in real life, such as grace and a sense of humour.
I suppose the humourless quality of her personality is one of the many reasons I could never abide Margaret Hilda Thatcher; zero sense of humour it seems to me the one defining trait of all true fanatics. And a fanatic she was, or at least became, famously working till midnight, and then up again at 4am manic and driven, ready to greet another action-packed day of red boxes and meetings. None the less it probably did need a fanatic to break the will of those other fanatics; wannabe revolutionaries such as Arthur Scargill, Ted Knight and the other ‘brothers.’ It was always brothers, never the sisters of British trade union movement, whose leaders ruthlessly exploited a unique set of circumstances in post war Britain; lousy industrial relations, lousy managers, a ruling class that was losing it’s nerve, high demand, high employment and high inflation. The brothers had a good scam going, but like so many others who have a good scam, they always want that little hell-of-a-lot-more.
Thatcher took them on, collectively and individually, and I’ll never forget their faces as they trooped out of Downing Street after the one and only official meeting between the British Government and the TUC in the first week she took power. The meetings called Economic something or others were a legacy of Jim Callaghan’s pink socialism. That last gathering was over in under 15 minutes and never repeated. Some fools are already saying that Thatcher was a friend of freedom, and it’s true one of the many reforms she introduced and that New Labour was careful not to repeal was her insistence that trade union democracy was democratic; previously major strike decisions had been taken on a show of hands with all the opportunities for intimidation and miscounts that that implies. But true democracy was always optional for the priggish Margaret; hence the genuinely warm and friendly relations with turds like General Augusto Pinochet, President Suharto and the unqualified support of apartheid South Africa.
If the breaking of the unions was a necessary and long overdue evil, then I’m much less impressed by unnecessary evil of the Falklands War, often billed as Thatcher’s triumph. True it was started by a breathtakingly stupid move by a particularly stupid military dictatorship (has there been a clever one, since Julius Ceaser?). But what really grates is that the war was at least partially provoked by stupid and unimaginative spending cuts to the Royal Navy. The conflict was completely avoidable. Thatcher’s much despised predecessor Jim Callaghan (who as Chief Petty Officer Callaghan had served in the Royal Navy with distinction in World War 2), got wind of a possible invasion of the Falklands in the mid 1970s. He immediately dispatched several frigates and destroyers to the islands and discreetly made sure the move was known to Argentina. With the prospect of any landing craft having to fight their way through a naval battle before landing a single soldier, the invasion of the Falklands was quietly shelved. No lives lost, no ships sunk, no invasions and counter invasions, the kind of cold ruthless competence Thatcher herself was supposed to embody.
Once the triumphs over the brothers and Argentina are dealt with, the rest of the Thatcher legacy becomes more nuanced, less spectacular and more opaque. We’re still dealing with the effects of her economic policy. Pissed away on benefits was the once in a century North Sea Oil money, which could have been used for almost anything else more productively. She (I suspect half unwittingly) deregulated the banks, sold off the council houses, and (again half unwittingly) told manufacturing industry, mostly based in the ‘red’ North of England to go fuck itself. As a student living in Preston and then Manchester during the height of Thatcherism (1981 to 1986) and then as a junior employee in the booming South of England from 1986 to 1989, I think I can speak with some authority on the effects of her economic policies. Reading, Berkshire was booming, booming to the extent that the population had completely overrun the town’s services and the roads were a congested nightmare. Europe's largest housing estate, Lower Early was on the Easten flank. Designed by building companies, it had not a single shop or church, just road after curved road of tiny Barret style houses.
I hated my years in Reading, and have always turned down job offers in Thames Valley ever since. By contrast towns like Preston never recovered from the loss of manufacturing industry in the Great Recession of early 1980s. Legacies like long term unemployment, ‘ghost towns’ and depression in the North all date from that time, and it’s horrifying to think they are still very much with us. Manchester, by it’s sheer size and cultural assets, did manage to reinvent itself during the Blair boom of the naughties, but before that there were still the best part of two lost decades when the city lost its wealth and almost lost its confidence.
In short I was so scarred by the government and culture of Thatcher’s Britain that I ended up leaving the country just as soon as I could, and didn’t return until the dawn of New Labour in 1996.
So you might ask, how did Thatcher do it? How despite such flaws and horrors did she manage to win three general elections? In short, she was unbelievably lucky. 1979 and thanks to the brothers and their Winter of Discontent, anyone sane and breathing could have been elected Prime Minister. 1982, Thatcher is the most unpopular Prime Minister in polling history, running the most unpopular government in polling history. What happens? Argentina invades the Falklands and thanks to the outstanding efforts and professionalism of the British armed forces Thatcher wins a war and fights a “khaki election” against a split opposition the following year. 1987 the Labour Party is at its most extreme and unlikable, whilst the Social Democratic Alliance formed of moderate Labour Party heavyweights steals most of the moderate Labour Party vote. Thatcher is elected on around 30% of the votes as usual. 1992, and Thatcher has already gone power crazy and has been out of office for the best part of two years. That last fact is an important one – never underestimate the ruthless desire to win of the modern Conservative party – the most successful political party in Western Democracies for the last 50 years.
I’ll finish with two things you didn’t know about Margaret Thatcher – she was an alcoholic who hit the bottle hard when chucked out in November 1990, and she privately despised Ronald Reagan as a twit with “nothing between his ears” – an opinion I share.
I only saw Margaret Thatcher once. It had been a long rather lovely day at Wimbledon, and I’d watched a compelling semi-final on Court No 1 between Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal. The Spaniard had won after poor Novak couldn’t continue from his blisters caused by an epic match the previous day (the tournament was blighted by bad weather for most of the fortnight). Wondering back past the outside of Centre Court, a crowd had gathered outside. Hoping for a sight of Roger Federer, we joined the crowd.
No such luck – out of the double doors comes a frail, somewhat bird-like little woman with famous but thinning hair and crazed eyes. It’s Margaret Thatcher and the crowd politely applauds.
She’d been going potty for years, a fact rather cruelly exploited by Abi Morgan, the screenwriter of The Iron Lady, a generally sympathetic and more or less accurate biopic released a couple of years ago. Meryl Streep was brilliant in the title role (did anyone expect anything less?) and the script imbued Margaret with a number of humanising qualities absent in real life, such as grace and a sense of humour.
I suppose the humourless quality of her personality is one of the many reasons I could never abide Margaret Hilda Thatcher; zero sense of humour it seems to me the one defining trait of all true fanatics. And a fanatic she was, or at least became, famously working till midnight, and then up again at 4am manic and driven, ready to greet another action-packed day of red boxes and meetings. None the less it probably did need a fanatic to break the will of those other fanatics; wannabe revolutionaries such as Arthur Scargill, Ted Knight and the other ‘brothers.’ It was always brothers, never the sisters of British trade union movement, whose leaders ruthlessly exploited a unique set of circumstances in post war Britain; lousy industrial relations, lousy managers, a ruling class that was losing it’s nerve, high demand, high employment and high inflation. The brothers had a good scam going, but like so many others who have a good scam, they always want that little hell-of-a-lot-more.
Thatcher took them on, collectively and individually, and I’ll never forget their faces as they trooped out of Downing Street after the one and only official meeting between the British Government and the TUC in the first week she took power. The meetings called Economic something or others were a legacy of Jim Callaghan’s pink socialism. That last gathering was over in under 15 minutes and never repeated. Some fools are already saying that Thatcher was a friend of freedom, and it’s true one of the many reforms she introduced and that New Labour was careful not to repeal was her insistence that trade union democracy was democratic; previously major strike decisions had been taken on a show of hands with all the opportunities for intimidation and miscounts that that implies. But true democracy was always optional for the priggish Margaret; hence the genuinely warm and friendly relations with turds like General Augusto Pinochet, President Suharto and the unqualified support of apartheid South Africa.
If the breaking of the unions was a necessary and long overdue evil, then I’m much less impressed by unnecessary evil of the Falklands War, often billed as Thatcher’s triumph. True it was started by a breathtakingly stupid move by a particularly stupid military dictatorship (has there been a clever one, since Julius Ceaser?). But what really grates is that the war was at least partially provoked by stupid and unimaginative spending cuts to the Royal Navy. The conflict was completely avoidable. Thatcher’s much despised predecessor Jim Callaghan (who as Chief Petty Officer Callaghan had served in the Royal Navy with distinction in World War 2), got wind of a possible invasion of the Falklands in the mid 1970s. He immediately dispatched several frigates and destroyers to the islands and discreetly made sure the move was known to Argentina. With the prospect of any landing craft having to fight their way through a naval battle before landing a single soldier, the invasion of the Falklands was quietly shelved. No lives lost, no ships sunk, no invasions and counter invasions, the kind of cold ruthless competence Thatcher herself was supposed to embody.
Once the triumphs over the brothers and Argentina are dealt with, the rest of the Thatcher legacy becomes more nuanced, less spectacular and more opaque. We’re still dealing with the effects of her economic policy. Pissed away on benefits was the once in a century North Sea Oil money, which could have been used for almost anything else more productively. She (I suspect half unwittingly) deregulated the banks, sold off the council houses, and (again half unwittingly) told manufacturing industry, mostly based in the ‘red’ North of England to go fuck itself. As a student living in Preston and then Manchester during the height of Thatcherism (1981 to 1986) and then as a junior employee in the booming South of England from 1986 to 1989, I think I can speak with some authority on the effects of her economic policies. Reading, Berkshire was booming, booming to the extent that the population had completely overrun the town’s services and the roads were a congested nightmare. Europe's largest housing estate, Lower Early was on the Easten flank. Designed by building companies, it had not a single shop or church, just road after curved road of tiny Barret style houses.
I hated my years in Reading, and have always turned down job offers in Thames Valley ever since. By contrast towns like Preston never recovered from the loss of manufacturing industry in the Great Recession of early 1980s. Legacies like long term unemployment, ‘ghost towns’ and depression in the North all date from that time, and it’s horrifying to think they are still very much with us. Manchester, by it’s sheer size and cultural assets, did manage to reinvent itself during the Blair boom of the naughties, but before that there were still the best part of two lost decades when the city lost its wealth and almost lost its confidence.
In short I was so scarred by the government and culture of Thatcher’s Britain that I ended up leaving the country just as soon as I could, and didn’t return until the dawn of New Labour in 1996.
So you might ask, how did Thatcher do it? How despite such flaws and horrors did she manage to win three general elections? In short, she was unbelievably lucky. 1979 and thanks to the brothers and their Winter of Discontent, anyone sane and breathing could have been elected Prime Minister. 1982, Thatcher is the most unpopular Prime Minister in polling history, running the most unpopular government in polling history. What happens? Argentina invades the Falklands and thanks to the outstanding efforts and professionalism of the British armed forces Thatcher wins a war and fights a “khaki election” against a split opposition the following year. 1987 the Labour Party is at its most extreme and unlikable, whilst the Social Democratic Alliance formed of moderate Labour Party heavyweights steals most of the moderate Labour Party vote. Thatcher is elected on around 30% of the votes as usual. 1992, and Thatcher has already gone power crazy and has been out of office for the best part of two years. That last fact is an important one – never underestimate the ruthless desire to win of the modern Conservative party – the most successful political party in Western Democracies for the last 50 years.
I’ll finish with two things you didn’t know about Margaret Thatcher – she was an alcoholic who hit the bottle hard when chucked out in November 1990, and she privately despised Ronald Reagan as a twit with “nothing between his ears” – an opinion I share.
I only saw Margaret Thatcher once. It had been a long rather lovely day at Wimbledon, and I’d watched a compelling semi-final on Court No 1 between Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal. The Spaniard had won after poor Novak couldn’t continue from his blisters caused by an epic match the previous day (the tournament was blighted by bad weather for most of the fortnight). Wondering back past the outside of Centre Court, a crowd had gathered outside. Hoping for a sight of Roger Federer, we joined the crowd.
No such luck – out of the double doors comes a frail, somewhat bird-like little woman with famous but thinning hair and crazed eyes. It’s Margaret Thatcher and the crowd politely applauds.
Labels: UK Politics
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