The Anatomy of Thatcherism

Shirley Robin Letwin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351294461
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Process
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Anatomy of Thatcherism explains how, for the first time in British history, a prime minister's name has become an 'Ism'—a symbol of a profound social change. Letwin argues that Thatcherism promoted a moral agenda rather than an economic doctrine or a political theory in order to achieve a fundamental realignment in British politics. She introduces a new term—"the vigorous virtues"—to describe what Thatcherites have aimed to cultivate in Individual Britons and In the country as a whole.

Her definition of Thatcherism is supported by a detailed analysis of the principal Thatcherite policies and the grounds on which they were advocated and opposed, Inside and outside the Conservative Party. Without departing from a lucid and lively style or resorting to technical jargon. Dr. Letwin explains such innovations as schools opting out, budget holding by GPs, and the creation of the first ever competitive spot market in electricity. Just how did the Thatcherite administrations shape the reform of the unions? How is the Thatcherite attitude to the family connected with Thatcherite policies on schools? Why does mon-etarism appear—wrongly—to be at the heart of Thatcherism?

The Anatomy of Thatcherism is a bold and searching book about how Britain changed between 1979 and 1992. It challenges many truisms about British politics, and Is indispensable reading both for those who believe in the future relevance of Thatcherism and for those who want to demolish it. And it will be of particular interest to those con-cerned with the history of British politics, as It shows how Thatcherism both arose out of, and confronted, trends that had per-meated Conservatism for the entire twentieth century.

I

Identifying Thatcherism

1

A Bundle of Attributes

Although the term ‘Thatcherism’ had been introduced by her opponents to suggest that Mrs Thatcher had imposed by force of will a dogma rejected by most people in Britain, the term was taken up and used even more persistendy by her supporters. After her resignation it became, if anything, still more difficult to discuss politics in Britain without talking about Thatcherism. Academics no less than journalists and politicians, however much they disliked coining ‘isms’, came to speak of Thatcherism and Thatcherites because they had no other name for what they regarded as an important, and readily discernible, new feature of British politics.

Those who talk about Thatcherism appear to have in mind a clear definition. But that is hardly the impression that one gets from the dozens of books, essays, and incidental discussions devoted to explaining Thatcherism that have poured from the presses since 1979. In all these commentaries and studies, there is no agreement whatever about what is meant by Thatcherism. That, perhaps, is less remarkable than that, generally, the commentators cannot escape either being incoherent or fastening incoherence on Thatcherism, and often they do both.

It is, of course, possible that what happened after 1979 had no distinctive pattern and that Thatcherism is a meaningless label. That indeed is what some have suggested.¹ They believe that although the Thatcher Governments had altered and achieved much, there was nothing new about the aims pursued; they had been ‘twinkles in Tory eyes for decades’.² Or else Thatcherism is said to signify merely that old ideas had recaptured political power ‘after a century of retreat’.³ Others assert that Thatcherism was of a piece with what was going on everywhere else: all governments ‘were becoming more conservative’ and were ‘cutting public borrowing, deregulating the private sector, reducing income taxes, and pursuing financial prudence before every other goal*. Parties of ‘the welfare left’ were everywhere ‘losing their traditional political base’. Even the Labour Government that had preceded Mrs Thatcher’s first administration had been following the same course. In short, the notion that the Thatcher governments were ‘engaged on a project that was unique’ should be dismissed as a fantasy. Thatcherism, according to such commentators, was just the ‘British response to a global phenomenon’.⁴

The significance of Thatcherism is dismissed in still another way by those who describe it as a mere ‘ragbag of ideas’. Margaret Thatcher, they say, ‘made much of her big ideas, the need for radical change and the possibility of a new world’. But in fact she had no clear notion, either in public or in private, of what she really meant to do. She offered nothing more than ‘a uniquely seductive package of nostrums and prejudices’. There were plenty of plans, but no ‘Big Plan’. She loved to talk of her ‘philosophy’ and hobnob with Conservative dons, but what she garnered from them was a hodgepodge from which she drew whatever came to hand.⁵

Nevertheless, as we do speak of Thatcherism and everyone seems to assume, even in the course of denying it, that the term has some meaning, there is good reason for persisting in the search for that meaning. Moreover, the jumble of conflicting explanations is not quite a Tower of Babel. Certain attributes reappear regularly and they can be arranged under four headings: i) an enterprise shaped by economic concerns; 2) a drive for power; 3) a moral crusade; 4) an intrinsically self-contradictory undertaking.

Any interpretation of Thatcherism which sees it as essentially an economic enterprise attaches to it one or more of three different characteristics: a project to make the rich richer; a clearly focused programme to increase economic efficiency; a determined effort to put into practice an economic dogma.

Seeing Thatcherism as a drive to make the rich richer has the virtue of being simple and coherent. Those who take this view describe the essence of Thatcherism and indeed of all Conservatism as ‘greed’.⁶ Thatcherites, they say, are supremely selfish to the exclusion of all other concerns. They are inspired by a bleak and harsh vision of a world in which lonely buyers and sellers try to do one another down in an impersonal, heartless marketplace. Amassing more money is the fount of virtue and fighting to acquire wealth is the only activity that Thatcherites value. For the poor at whose expense fortunes are accumulated they feel no pity. Besides, the idolization of wealth and the ascendancy of finance over industry has profoundly debased British culture. ‘The conspicuous consumption shamelessly favoured by the parvenúes who made their fortunes in the City’ produced ‘the bourgeois triumphalism’⁸ that distinguished Thatcherite Britain. As ‘yuppies’ had been encouraged ‘to shed all inhibitions about enjoying the spoils of the class war’, ‘vulgarism rules O.K.’⁹ and Britain has ceased to be ‘a nation of decency’.¹⁰

Who the fortunate beneficiaries of the Thatcherite bonanza are intended to be remains obscure. Some hold that it is ‘commercial interests’ or the City, and that manufacturing industries are the main victims. Other candidates are the ‘big corporations’, ‘country landowners’, ‘industrial polluters’, and ‘transport interests’. But conclusive evidence for believing that Thatcherism is out to make the rich richer, they all say, is provided by the Thatcherite devotion to reducing taxes. For that, it is assumed, benefits only the rich. And all other policies are explained as means for making it easier to reduce taxes. The aim of privatization could not have been to promote economic efficiency because, according to this view, there is no ‘incontrovertible evidence’ that privatized industries run better than nationalized ones. The real reason for privatization is the sordid desire for cash which dominates all Thatcherite thinking. It not only enriched the City institutions that organized the sales and the executives who now run the privatized companies, but chiefly, by bringing in funds to the exchequer, privatization made it possible to reduce taxes and so to feed Thatcherites’ greed.

A more favourable view of Thatcherism as an economic project is taken by those who describe it as a drive for economic efficiency, motivated by the desire to rescue capitalism. This view rests on the neo-Marxist argument that, as the old mass-producing industries have ceased to be viable, the rising importance of new kinds of industry has rendered obsolete the old social democratic policies which were aimed at supporting manufacturing workers. Thatcherism responded to that change by recognizing that in order to ‘relaunch Britain as a successful capitalist economy’,¹¹ the ‘shibboleths of social democracy’ had to be abandoned. That is why Thatcher Governments undertook to wage war on the unions. They found monetarist policies better suited to ‘the logic of the growing financial and commercial integration of the world economy’.¹² By widening share ownership, they tried to nurture the values and attitudes needed to maintain capitalism in the new circumstances.

Even those who do not follow the neo-Marxist line agree that the drive for economic efficiency made reducing the role of government one of ‘the prime objectives of the Thatcher Government, repeated from a thousand platforms and rehearsed in scores of policy documents’, along with endless eulogies of business, profits, the balance sheet and the bottom line.¹³ Thatcherism is accordingly considered synonymous with ‘market liberalism’ of which ‘the axiomatic principle’ is that ‘state intervention in what markets did to the economy should be held to a minimum.’¹⁴

Whereas the preceding interpretation of Thatcherism as an economic enterprise gives it a highly pragmatic character, a third version treats Thatcherism as a dogmatic economic doctrine. Some who trace the ancestry of the doctrine to Adam Smith conclude that Thatcherism is wedded to ‘nostrums devised for an older simpler world of unspoiled markets, a golden age that probably never was’, which makes it incapable of solving the problems of the late twentieth century.¹⁵ Others, who emphasize the influence of the American economist Milton Friedman, equate Thatcherism with monetarism and regard strict control of the money supply as the defining objective of Thatcherism. Some charge that the adherence to monetarism prevented Thatcherites from responding flexibly to practical problems, while others argue that the abandonment of monetarism, which had produced the economic miracles of the early eighties, gave rise to the difficulties of the late eighties. Although some of those who equate Thatcherism with an economic doctrine are its most stalwart admirers, others conclude that Thatcherism thus introduced right-wing ideological politics into Britain.

A more colourful, and wholly different because irrational, character is assigned to Thatcherism by those who see it as a drive for power. In one version, the emphasis falls on Margaret Thatcher’s personal ambition. She is portrayed as a ‘ruthless crusading leader who knew she was right and had a supreme duty to remain in power’. According to this view, Thatcherism is nothing like an ideology or any other ‘system of ideas’. It is rather driven and shaped by ambition of ‘the small town variety’ than which ‘there is none more ardent’. The ambition is allied to certain instincts which, being ‘narrow in range’ and ‘dogmatically voiced’, created the illusion of a doctrine. But it was not because she was a ‘conviction politician’ or an ‘ideologue engaged on some lifelong crusade’ that Mrs Thatcher set out ‘to kill socialism’. She was really moved by the ‘natural antagonism’ of the lower middle class to the working classes and their allies, the upper middle class intelligentsia.¹⁶

In other words, here Thatcherism is the creed of an extremely ambitious small-town girl, a workaholic with lower-middle-class prejudices, who found an outlet for her formidable energies in the war on socialism.¹⁷ Her gift for appealing to the people over the heads of her colleagues and her charisma gave her pursuit of power an aura of respectability. The weapons for her assault were ready to hand in the stockpile assembled by her recent predecessors - Healey’s monetarism, Wilson’s and Heath’s anti-traditionalism, Callaghan’s attack on the decline of educational standards, Eden’s property-owning democracy. When Mrs Thatcher threw this arsenal into a well-articulated campaign to ‘kill socialism’ and to eradicate all its appurtenances, she created Thatcherism.

A grander version of the ‘dash for power’ view of Thatcherism equates it with a drive to enhance the glory of Britain. Thatcherism is described as a Gaullist project, out to demonstrate that Britain no longer suffered from ‘a crisis of governability and legitimacy’. Strengthening the power of the state was part of a grand mission to restore Britain’s standing among the great nations.¹⁸ Critics of Thatcherism-as-Gaullism add that, under the pretence of protecting itself against its enemies, the state curtailed the freedom of the press and television to an extent not known before in Britain. And others attribute Mrs Thatcher’s Gaullism to her provincialism, her disdain for foreigners, and describe it as ‘Litde Englandism’.

In another disparaging variation on the power theme, Thatcherism is seen as a project for enhancing the might of the central government by destroying the autonomy of local authorities and of all powerful interest groups. The Thatcherite assault on the financial independence of local authorities is said to have culminated in the poll tax, which ensured that more of local spending ‘would henceforth be determined from Whitehall’. The sale of council houses and flats to tenants, the reforms allowing schools to run themselves on money provided by the government, the ‘smashing’ of the trade unions were all dictated by the Thatcherite programme for ‘seizing control over more and more’. Rivals to the central state were systematically ‘emasculated or dismanded’ because the idea of genuine independence, even of competing sources of wisdom and advice, became increasingly uncongenial to a government which was hardly ever obliged to make concessions to opponents. We are therefore assured that whatever else Thatcherism might be, ‘it was not an exercise in reducing the power of the central state.’¹⁹

Both power and money are dismissed as Thatcherite objectives by those who regard Thatcherism as a moral crusade. The object of the crusade, according to one version, is to restore old-fashioned discipline in Britain. Here, too, Mrs Thatcher’s upbringing is emphasized. She is supposed to have been taught at her father’s knee to elevate the ‘economics of sound housekeeping above the merely political to the moral level’, and to regard spending no more than you earn as a matter of moral rectitude. Indeed ‘the appeal to righteousness’, this thesis runs, ‘went far beyond economic management and can account for Mrs Thatcher’s determined insistence, in the early years, on fiscal rigour’.²⁰ Her antipathy to inflation rested on her naive belief that ‘if the value of money was allowed to decline, so would other values.’²¹ And more broadly, Thatcherism aimed to restore traditional values such as respect for authority, hierarchy, discipline and order, that is to say, ‘the military virtues’.²² It establishes Thatcherism as the implacable enemy of the permissive society.

But the very opposite character is bestowed on Thatcherism in another version of the moral crusade thesis. Here its object is to enlarge the freedom of individuals and to uproot traditional ways. In this role, Thatcherism becomes the instrument for enabling the permissive society to survive. Its appeal is to ‘yesterday’s hippies who are now today’s yuppies’ and to the ‘raw, uncouth, socially and psychologically insecure new elites, or rather would-be elites’. That explains why Mrs Thatcher found her natural constituency among the ‘rough, hard, no nonsense new men’, who resented as she did the temporarily defeated but not yet extinguished Establishment - the metropolitan cliques such as the BBC and the ‘toffee- nosed south-eastern establishment’ of Oxford and Cambridge, the Foreign Office and the Athenaeum.²⁴ The ‘new men’ profited from the Thatcherite effort to make the British ‘individualistic rather than collectivism preferring private to state ownership, putting the rights of the members before the interests of the trade union’. In the new Britain, shaped by Thatcherism, people were to be moved by a desire to own their own homes, to possess ‘a stake in things’ and to provide ‘a better chance for their children’. A subtler version of this view emphasizes that Thatcherism aimed to free people from feeling guilty for pursuing wealth, for seeking to better themselves by earning or owning more, and more generally to rid British culture of a disposition to ‘collective guilt’ for past and present evils, regardless of any direct responsibilty for them.²⁵ In short, Thatcherism should be understood as a libertarian project bent on destroying the ‘liberal consensus’.

When the various interpretations of Thatcherism are set out in this fashion, their incompatibility becomes obvious enough. It is all the more striking because the conflict does not always arise from differences of opinion among writers. Quite often, several conflicting interpretations are offered by the same writer. Some commentators, having noticed this difficulty, try to deal with it by characterizing Thatcherism as an inherently self-contradictory project. But there is no agreement on what produced the incoherence.

One suggestion is that Thatcherism could increase the scope for individual capitalist endeavour and reduce state interference in the economy only by using the state’s authority in ever more autocratic ways. In other words, in order to roll back the state, the government had to become highly interventionist and centralizing. This committed Thatcherism to policies that were by turns libertarian and ‘authoritarian’, and gave rise to considerable division and confusion among its followers. According to another diagnosis, Thatcherism suffers from a tension between its Gaullist project of reversing national decline and its ‘neo-liberal view of the world market’ because the former is supposed to require protectionism while the latter is devoted to free trade. A third conflict within Thatcherism is attributed to its being a movement that is ‘both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary’, appealing on the one hand to new aspirations but on the other hand reasserting old values, promising both freedom and order, choice and discipline.²⁶

We cannot, of course, expect an account of the coherence of Thatcherism from the thesis that it is inherendy self-contradictory. But that thesis has the merit not only of recognizing the conflicts among the various interpretations but also of acknowledging, implicidy, that no one of the available interpretations can, by itself, identify Thatcherism.

The shortcomings are more obvious in some interpretations than in others. Although the view that Thatcherism is out to promote greed is especially popular among its more eminent critics, it is the least plausible. For even if we grant that Thatcherism has encouraged greed, is it likely that Mrs Thatcher and her associates sat down and said to themselves, Now, how can we best go about promoting greed? We might as well conclude that because envy had increased under socialism, the object of socialism is to promote envy. There must at least have been some heroic mis-description on the part of Thatcherites which enabled them to suppose that they were doing something which a reasonable person might wish to promote. Moreover, some of the policies for which Thatcherism is criticized by those who equate it with greed are blatandy incompatible with that aim. Why, for instance, should the Thatcher Government have tightened immigration laws if its aim was to make the rich richer?²⁷ It should have done the opposite - eased immigration in order to enlarge the workforce and so drive down wages.

A more serious effort to account for Thatcherism has been made by those who see it as a project to revive capitalism. It is not an implausible view. But it cannot explain why an enterprise of that sort should have been something so special as to be worthy of a name and dignified, by friend and foe alike, as an ‘ism’. The belief that Thatcher governments were concerned with encouraging efficiency and were influenced by certain economic doctrines also cannot be lightly dismissed. But none of the interpretations of Thatcherism as an economic enterprise can offer any insight into why others should have seen it as a crusade to revive ‘the military virtues’, a dash for power, or a patriotic enterprise to restore the glory of Britain.

We are left with not so much an identifiable political oudook as a bundle of attributes, held together only by time and place. Thatcherism appears to have something to do with greed, ambition, hatred of socialism, pat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Part I: Identifying Thatcherism
• Part II: Thatcherism in Practice
• Part III: Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
• Reference Notes
• Index