Valdai Club

History is full of ironies, but the contrast between what Mrs Thatcher set out to achieve and her actual achievement is a particularly ripe example.

Among other things, she was a devoted admirer of Victorian values and nostalgist for “traditional” British society who helped finish of these values and traditions in Britain. She was an opponent of big central government who greatly expanded the power of the British state, especially at the expense of local government. She was a leader of the Conservative Party whose most catastrophically successful heir and imitator was a Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair. And she was an ardent British nationalist who contributed enormously to what looks like the impending break-up of the United Kingdom.

Part of the reason for all this was a tension in Thatcher which lies at the heart of modern “conservatism” in the West: that she was both a cultural conservative and a 19th century radical liberal economic reformer whose economic reforms inevitably helped to shatter the conservative society she wished to uphold and restore.

To understand the radicalism of Mrs Thatcher’s programme and support for it by a sufficient proportion of the British electorate (though never anything like a majority – under Britain’s “first past the post” system, even 35 percent of the vote is enough to give a decisive majority in parliament) it is necessary to understand the depth of the malaise into which Britain had fallen by the time she came to power in 1979. I was a teenager then and still vividly remember the sense of inexorable decline and frustration that gripped the country.

This was the product of a mixture of economic and cultural factors. The decline of British industry in the face of Far Eastern competition and the obsolescence of existing equipment and practices ran head on into a trades’ union movement which was, internally anarchical, immensely powerful, and completely unequipped the think about the needs of modern economic development. The result was an unending series of strikes as the unions competed with each other to block restructuring and extract the highest possible – or rather impossible wages for their members.

By 1979 the Miners’ Union had brought down one government and crippled a second, and strikes in public services were having a severe effect on the lives of the population. The pressure on the unions to fight in defence of their workers was made much worse in the 1970s by the combination of inflation and recession brought on by the oil shocks created by Middle Eastern oil producers in order to punish the West for supporting Israel.

To these “objective factors” was added another, “subjective one”, which continues to this day: the mood of decline and impotence created by the rapid loss of an empire which had lasted in one way or another for some 250 years. If in one way the existence of an English-speaking superpower protector in the USA partially compensated Britain for this loss, in other ways it only made Britain’s loss of status the more bitter (compared to France, which could at least hope for some sort of role as leader of the Francophone world).

Hence, mass support for the ferocious campaign by Thatcher to break the Miners’ Union, as part of a campaign radically to reduce the powers of the trades unions in general. Today – as in the USA – the only area where the unions retain any power is in the public sector.

Coupled with this was a radical reduction in state subsidies and protection for British industry, and the privatisation of state-owned firms which greatly speeded up the devastation of the old industrial zones of northern England and Scotland. In keeping with Thatcher’s ideological hostility to state planning (to be fair, due in part to the repeated incompetence of the British state in this regard) no attempt was made by Thatcher’s government to develop new industries in these regions to replace the ones that were being lost. One result was to encourage the development of impoverished ghettoes in areas inhabited by the former Muslim immigrant industrial workforces in Yorkshire and Lancashire – which became incubators for Islamist extremism.

Because of their devastating impact on Scotland’s industry, Thatcher’s policies effectively destroyed the Conservative Party in Scotland. Once Tony Blair followed in Thatcher’s footsteps and through his policies crippled the Labour Party in Scotland, the way was opened for the rise of the Scottish National Party and its agenda of Scottish independence.

Despite the fact that the Labour party had wedded itself to hopelessly unrealistic socialist policies, as a result of the suffering caused by these policies, Thatcher would probably have been defeated electorally in 1984 had it not been for a wholly fortuitous gift – the Argentine invasion of the Falklands in 1982 and its defeat (in which Thatcher showed iron determination). This set off a new wave of military patriotism in England which – if understandable at the time – later under Blair helped lead Britain into disaster in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

By the later 1980s, Thatcher’s deregulation of Britain’s financial industry based in the City of London – the so-called “Big Bang” had created a financial services boom which lasted 20 years and created enough jobs and prosperity in London and south eastern England to compensate in part for the devastation elsewhere. This created a social constituency for Thatcherism which outlived her government and later largely moved to Tony Blair and New Labour.

Together with the policies of Ronald Reagan in the USA, this apparent success – coupled with the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the USSR – set off a near-messianic wave of faith in free-market capitalism (among its beneficiaries) which gave rise to the Washington Consensus and the horrors of Western-enforced “shock therapy” in Russia and elsewhere in the 1990s. Not until the financial crash and recession of 2008 did the terrible consequences of financial deregulation become apparent. And even then, the financial sector remains so profitable for its members that no truly radical moves to discipline it can be taken. London meanwhile continues to grow (albeit accompanied by pockets of the deep poverty) while most of the rest of England stagnates or declines. Social inequality has rocketed to levels not seen since the 1920s.

As a result, London has become a magnet for immigrants which now has (according to the last census) a population most of which was not born in Britain. Thatcher would not necessarily have minded this in itself, for she was personally very well-disposed to hard working entrepreneurial immigrants. But much of her old southern English middle class base is now fleeing in dismay to the UK Independence Party, in part because pressure on housing, schools and public services created by immigration mean that many of the middle classes do not think that they are benefiting from economic growth in their own city, let alone their country.

Meanwhile, the culture of the City of London which has developed since the Big Bang, with its unrestrained greed, its contempt for law, prudence and thrift, and its deep sense of entitlement vis-a-vis the state and British population (when it comes to saving bankers from their own crimes and errors) is in many ways the antithesis of the small-town Victorian virtues which Mrs Thatcher’s ancestors held and in which she believed so passionately.

Oddly enough – since Mrs Thatcher is supposed to have created a new, classless Conservative Party, this party today is led by a row of aristocratic (or pseudo-aristocratic) Old Etonians: David Cameron, George Osborne, Boris Johnson, Zac Goldsmith. Very much the line up under Harold Macmillan in the early 1960s, more than half a century ago. Their programme however is characterised by a free market ruthlessness not seen since the 1930s, coupled in the case of Johnson with an individualist populism that brings him closer to Donald Trump (hair and all) than to traditional Tory values. And this too can be seen as a result of the cultural revolution that Thatcher helped create. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice – “if you seek her monument, look around”. A large part of it is not however the monument that she thought she was building.