Thatcher redux

“Reject the miracles Games of the impossible’
Cling to the words... Impossible, impossible...”
From The Last Words by Bachchoo

If I was a cartoonist I’d portray the relatively new British Prime Minister, David Cameron, not as has been suggested as Winston Churchill with a cigar and a lisp, but as another Prime Minister of recent memory. The complaint from his own party that the Cameron magic circle has not defined its Big Idea, has been hoodwinked. The Big Idea is as discernible as a 3-D film is to those who put on the viewing specs. Without the specs the film stays a blur.
Mr

Cameron has chosen his model but he and his camp have not proclaimed their allegiances and plans. More than that, they have calculatedly thrown up a political smoke screen of “fairness” and tough compassion to appear to be the opposite of the political inspiration and trajectory they have chosen to follow. The devil travels untrammelled and unquestioned in an angel’s mask.
They have even managed, I believe, to keep their design from their partners in coalition (who have been sold the tickets to the 3-D movie, but haven’t been given the specs), because framing this Big Idea as a programme would almost certainly crack the coalition and would alienate the British electorate. Mum’s the word — in more senses than one, the second sense being the Mother Goddess of the Cameron project: ladles and jellyspoons, none other than the redoubtable Baroness Margaret Thatcher. (Alarums within?)
Mrs Thatcher began as Prime Minister by defeating Edward Heath for the leadership of the Tory Party and winning an election on a platform which at the time seemed not to have a big idea either. Heath was avowedly the political representative of international capital and gambled on Britain’s entry into the European Union as its instrument. It was a narrower vision than Mrs Thatcher’s even though she, out of sharp political acumen, seemed to be the representative of the British lower middle classes — the mobilisation of the suburbs, small business mentality which didn’t see itself as part of the machinery of globally mobile capital, the global movement of labour and markets.
She spoke against immigration and won the hearts and votes of those who felt that British culture had been “swamped” by aliens and freebooters from the ex-colonies. In fact, despite the rhetoric, on her watch immigration into Britain actually increased.
When she came to power it was fashionable amongst my friends and colleagues to characterise Mrs Thatcher as a “fascist”, a loose and inexact term of abuse. Mrs Thatcher was, in fact, the figurehead of Britain’s lower middle-class “revolution”. In using that word, I don’t mean that this lower middle class established some “dictatorship of the boxwallas”, but several of their prejudices, preoccupations and insights triumphed.
As a class they were economically close to the wage-earners, and the pen-pushers amongst them were, as managers and supervisors, familiar with the practices of trade unionists, those that the Labour Party had nurtured or pampered. They knew and resented the fact that the unions had got away with winning privileges and perpetrating practices which were far from transparent. It was no coincidence that Mrs Thatcher and her Party’s capitalist allies — Rupert Murdoch in particular — first took on the printing trades unions.
“The Print” had forced concessions from newspapers over the years and were perceived as holding their employers to ransom. The myth of print work was that five or so people were employed to do the job of one and that while most of the night shift slept and the day shift skived, a selected rota of operatives would keep the presses rolling — and everyone would get paid. There was some truth to the myth and Mrs Thatcher and the press barons who supported her launched an eminently fair-sounding crusade against them. She could rely on the public being against a good day’s wage for a very relaxed and dodgy day’s or night’s work.
The mood against such practices gave the Thatcher government the momentum to declare their war on all organised labour and on the concessions that they had won. Her government passed legislation to restrict and stymie the power of the unions. When she took on the National Union of Miners, appointing Ian McGregor, an American, to rationalise the work and output of the nationally-owned mining industry, the political programme became clear.
Despite the disguise of being the voice of lower middle-class Britain, the mission of her government was to nullify the power of organised labour so that she could shut down British coal mines — why mine coal in Britain if Poland, even Soviet Poland, could sell it to our power plants cheaper? Why make cloth in the mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire if one could import the same from Hong Kong at a lower price? That millions would be thrown out of work and, as the miners were fond of saying, “communities destroyed”, was the problem of the those millions and those communities.
The Thatcher project was, much more than that of poor Edward Heath and his honest-brokerage of European Union membership with all its rules and restrictions, the instrument of internationalising the market in raw materials, consumer goods and the movement of capital.
And capital did move — but only bankers’ capital because Britain offered the best conditions for speculative usury. Twenty years later those chickens have come home to roost, carrying their sub-prime debts with them.
Mr Thatcher succeeded. British mining, steel, textiles, shipbuilding, even car manufacture and other light and heavy industry collapsed. Other countries would provide and Britain would buy cheaper.
The policy, the most anti-British in history, came wrapped in the Union Jack. The Argentinian military junta assisted the Thatcher project by claiming the last colony, the Falkland Islands, forgotten pieces of dirt in the South Atlantic. The country, nostalgic for its colonising victories in India and Africa and in a pantomime of the Churchillian spirit of “down with the Hun”, celebrated their easy victory.
To complement the destruction of an organised wage-earning class and give capital its opportunities, the Thatcher administration decided to sell the family silver. It would denationalise, “privatise”, every industry and utility which it feasibly could. The railways of Britain, the suppliers of gas, electricity and water were sold to the highest bidder, in most cases firms which were capitalised by international banks and often owned entirely by non-British interests.
A new Britain certainly emerged — of a population selling American hamburgers to each other.