Thatcher and Thatcherism

Eric J. Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780815354802
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429892752
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

This revised, expanded and updated fourth edition of Thatcher and Thatcherism examines the origins and impact of 'Thatcherism' both as a cultural construct and an economic creed from the 1970s to the formation of a coalition government in 2010. New to this edition is an extended exploration of Thatcher's impact outside of the UK, as well as an examination of the assessments published following her death in 2013, providing students with a greater understanding of the legacy of Thatcherism within the modern political landscape.

Focusing on the career of Margaret Thatcher, Eric J. Evans questions both the originality and the ideological coherence of what came to be called 'Thatcherism' and considers to what extent it met, or failed to meet, its main objectives.

Key topics discussed within the book include:

• Privatisation policies and the attack on trade union power and influence;
• How Thatcher changed and controlled the late twentieth-century Conservative Party;
• The legacy of the Falklands War;
• Thatcher's relations with Europe – East and West;
• Thatcher's approach to the professional ethic;
• The influence of Thatcherism on succeeding governments: Major and 'New Labour';
• Neo-liberalism and its influence on, and under, Thatcher.

With comprehensive suggestions for further reading and explanation of the economic, social and historical context of Britain in the late 1970s and 1980s, Thatcher and Thatcherism is an invaluable guide to the complexities and paradoxes of Britain from the late 1970s to the second decade of the twenty-first century.

1 The 1970s

Explanations and origins

Introduction

Margaret Thatcher’s political career was extraordinary. She was Britain’s first woman prime minister. The eleven and a half years (May 1979 to November 1990) she spent in No. 10 Downing Street were comfortably longer than anyone else in the twentieth century. She was also prime minister for a longer continuous period than anyone for more than a century and a half – in fact since Lord Liverpool’s fifteen-year tenure was prematurely halted by a stroke in 1827. She won three successive general elections, the last two with landslide majorities. No other party leader in the twentieth century won more than two successively and then with smaller majorities overall. Although it is still too early to be sure, the claims of Thatcher’s supporters that she changed the course of British history cannot be lightly dismissed as heroine-worship or as grandiose posturing. At the very least, she cast a long – opponents would say baleful – shadow across both political parties into the twenty-first century. Controversial and partisan as she was, she also changed the mindset of the nation.

Change as moral crusade was the leitmotif of her career. As early as 1977, when asked by the right-wing journalist Patrick Cosgrave, then one of her special advisers, what she had changed, she replied, simply, ‘Everything’.¹ When she was preparing her first Queen’s Speech in 1979, a speech that many of her detractors say she would like to have delivered in person, it was uppermost in her thinking: ‘If the opportunity to set a radical new course is not taken’, she wrote in her Memoirs, ‘it will almost certainly never recur . . . I was determined to send out a clear signal of change’.²

Certainly, she shook the country up. Certainly, too, she exercised the most profound effect on the structure and social composition of the Conservative Party, which she led for nearly sixteen years, from February 1975 to November 1990. Her influence on the Labour Party was scarcely less substantial. ‘New Labour’ can be seen as the logical response to Thatcherite hegemony in the 1980s. Thatcher also profoundly altered the nature and orientation of the governmental machine. She required a fundamental reappraisal of the role and loyalties of a civil service that, like most professional structures, she was determined to turn upside down.

Once she had found her feet, she addressed both the nation and international political leaders in hectoring tones. Straightforward, simplified, and frequently moralistic, messages were conveyed with insistent, repetitive clarity. Thatcher transformed, by ignoring, the nuanced subtleties of international diplomacy. She became more readily recognised worldwide than any figure in British public life, except perhaps the most prominent members of the royal family. Her leadership, policies and personality alike excited stronger passions, for and against, than have those of any other twentieth-century prime minister, with the possible exception of Lloyd George.

Ideas and origins: what was ‘Thatcherism’?

Thatcher was the only twentieth-century prime minister to become eponymous. The use of the term ‘Thatcherism’ might be taken to imply a more or less coherent body of thought or ideology, much as well-established terms such as ‘liberalism’, ‘Marxism’ or, indeed, ‘Conservatism’ do. Thatcherism is markedly different from any of these. It offers no new insights and, although profoundly ideological on one level, it is better seen as a series of non-negotiable precepts than as a consistent body of thought.

Most modern commentators share the present writer’s view that Thatcherism does not represent a coherent ideology. One argued that it ‘combined in a new synthesis two British political traditions: neo-liberalism in economic matters and authoritarian conservatism in social policy’.³ In terms of economic thought, Thatcherism was more ‘neo-liberal’ than anything else since it held that prosperity depended on liberating businessmen and other ‘wealth creators’ from state controls and constraints. It believed in free trade and low taxation. Though the role of government is minimised, the state should staunchly defend individual property rights. In both its deference to the disciplines of the market and rejection of paternalism, especially by the state, it owed much of its inspiration to the US and especially to the so-called ‘Chicago School’, in which the economist Friedrich Hayek was prominent.⁴ Hayek’s views on the necessity of governments maintaining control over the money supply as a means of keeping inflation in check had influenced a number of right-wing Conservatives from the late 1960s.

Another commentator argues that Thatcherism maintained the traditional Conservative preoccupation with ‘statecraft’. This involved winning general elections and retaining control of high politics. In a sympathetic valedictory piece written the day after Thatcher announced her resignation in November 1990, the Daily Telegraph asserted that ‘Thatcherism . . . is not really an economic doctrine at all. It is a powerful collection of beliefs about the capacities of human beings in political society’.⁵ Shirley Letwin, another Thatcher sympathiser, saw individualism as the key attribute. Her view was that, since people naturally follow what they perceive as their own interests, Thatcher was merely drawing upon basic human motivation, rendering it as a political programme relevant to the circumstances of the late 1970s and 1980s.⁶

Those who see Thatcherism as an ideology fall into two categories. Tory ‘wets’, like Ian Gilmour and James Prior (see pp. 18, 23, 25), accused her of slavish adherence to the economic doctrine of monetarism, whereas traditional Conservatism was rooted in pragmatism, flexibility, compromise and common sense.⁷ Marxists (see Chapter 3), who rarely think other than ideologically anyway, tend to see Thatcherism as a malign campaign to further the interests of the capitalist rich and powerful, consolidating and then extending forms of political and cultural domination over the under-privileged.⁸

Debates about ideology, often politically motivated and intellectually sterile, should not lose sight of Thatcherism’s visceral power. Thatcher’s intellectual horizons may have been overly narrow but she knew what she wanted to achieve. As a woman making her way in an overwhelmingly male political world, she would not be ‘pushed around’. Many of the strategies she used to assert personal influence over both political opponents and members of her own Cabinet were also employed on the international stage. She sought to ensure that Great Britain, after a humiliating period of retreat and declining influence, would no longer be pushed around either. Rooted, angry opposition to much prevailing orthodoxy framed the Thatcher agenda. She believed in: individual rights, particularly in economic matters; private enterprise within a free market; firm, sometimes authoritarian, leadership; low levels of personal taxation; union and vested-interest bashing; simple, unqualified, patriotism.

Professor Peter Clarke has argued that Thatcher was ‘an inconsistent ideologue’.⁹ This was not because she was unintelligent. Far from it. Her inconsistencies were grounded in calculations of political advantage. When necessary – and, until her last year in office, her judgement about when it was necessary was almost invariably shrewd – she would trim, or even concede. Her trade was politics, which demanded more flexibility than ideology. She also knew that very few intellectuals made successful politicians. Nigel Lawson, her chancellor of the exchequer from 1983 to 1989, hit the nail on the head. He accepted that Thatcherism was not a tightly drawn ideology. He referred instead to what he called her ‘particular constellation of policies and values . . . The right definition [of Thatcherism] involves a mixture of free markets, financial discipline, firm control over public expenditure, tax cuts, nationalism, “Victorian values”, privatization and a dash of populism’.¹⁰

Lawson was right to indicate that Thatcherism contained only a ‘dash’ of populism. On the big ‘social’ issues of the 1960s – changing the law on homosexuality and abortion – Thatcher had been a reformer. Her background was lower middle class and her misbegotten and damaging attempt to impose the Community Charge (or poll tax as it was almost invariably termed) reflected her upbringing (see Chapter 5). Her rooted belief was that the existing domestic rating system was unfair. She remembered that her father’s aim, as chairman of Grantham’s Finance and Rating Committee, was to keep the rates low. The burden of providing local services should be more equally shared by charging adults a uniform fixed rate.

A true populist would not have nailed colours to such a mast. Though popular with many small property owners, the poll tax was deeply resented both by those who had not previously paid rates and by those who believed, with Adam Smith, that levels of taxation should be aligned with capacity to pay.¹¹ On the poll tax, Thatcher acted partly as a party politician – she hated how predominantly Labour councils used ratepayers’ money to provide services for citizens who did not themselves pay any rates. She also acted as class warrior. The lower middle classes were ‘her people’ but insufficiently represented at Westminster in the 1970s. They needed a champion.

Thatcher handled most supposedly ‘populist’ causes with kid gloves. Although personally favouring the return of the death penalty for murder, as party leader she was careful not to impose such a policy on her parliamentary party, despite the fact that public opinion was overwhelmingly on her side. Similarly, though by no means unsympathetic to the ‘bang-’em-up brigade’ wanting to see criminals serve long sentences, she fretted about the cost of building the new prisons that would be needed to house them all. On the contentious immigration issue, Thatcher, as opposition leader, gave a television interview in January 1978 in which she spoke of people’s fear of being ‘swamped by people of a different culture’.¹² It caused the predictable stink. Just before the general election of 1979, she used another television interview to ram home her message about the dangers of ‘swamping’ and people’s fear that ‘their whole way of life has been changed’. Those expecting an incoming Conservative government to impose stringent immigration controls, however, would be sorely disappointed. Thatcher was playing politics rather than embracing populism. Her objective was to get across the message that the main parties were not ‘as bad as each other’ on perhaps the most emotive and sensitive issue of the day. It was not to give pledges that, in office, she had no intention of keeping.

Thatcherism, then, embodies a series of interconnected political attitudes rather than a coherent body of thought. Few of these were new. Free-trade beliefs developed out of Adam Smith’s distinctive contribution to the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment. The apogee was reached in the liberalism of William Gladstone, who fought – and lost – a general election in 1874 on the policy of abolishing income tax. Disraeli and Salisbury in the last third of the nineteenth century both exploited patriotism, through the burgeoning British Empire, as an effective vote winner for the Conservatives in the first age of mass politics. Attacks on the grasping, exploiting professions were the small change of eighteenth-century satire, while trade unions were widely tolerated in Victorian society only when their members – mostly a highly skilled minority of the labouring population – used collective activity in the furtherance of capitalist objectives rather than as a challenge to the dominant ideology of the age.

The importance of Thatcherism, therefore, lay not in the novelty of its ideas but in their operation in the late 1970s and 1980s. Two facts stand out. First, Thatcher actually believed in, and drew strength from, a set of precepts that most sophisticated politicians in the 1970s – not least in her own party – found almost unbelievably crude and shallow. Second, she retained throughout her career the unshakeable conviction that the domestic virtues absorbed from a dominating father in a lower middle-class, nonconformist home – hard work, taking personal responsibility, prudence, thrift, plain-dealing and an overriding concern to see that the books balanced – could be transferred into the public sphere as precepts for government. In a television interview broadcast in January 1983, she asserted that her views were ‘born of the conviction which I learned in a small town from a father who had a conviction approach’.¹³

We should not exaggerate the ordinariness of Thatcher’s origins. Her public recollections of her father were conveniently selective. On one point, though, all would agree. Alfred Roberts moved up in the world on the basis of ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Thatcher and Thatcherism
• The Making of the Contemporary World
• Title
• Copyright
• Praise
• Contents
• Preface to the Fourth Edition
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• 1 The 1970S: Explanations and Origins
• 2 Election and Depression, 1979–81
• 3 Thatcher Triumphant, 1982–88
• 4 Thatcherism and the Conservative Party
• 5 The Attack on the Government Ethic
• 6 The Attack on the Professional Ethic
• 7 Thatcher Abroad I: Europe, East and West
• 8 Thatcher Abroad II: Defence and the Americas
• 9 Thatcher Abroad III: the Global Statesman
• 10 The Fall: the Significance of the Westland Affair
• 11 The Thatcher Legacy I: The Major Years 1990–97
• 12 the Thatcher Legacy II: The New Labour Experiment
• 13 Interpretations
• 14 Conclusion
• Guide to Further Reading
• Index