The Point

Last updated: 27 June 2022.

Margaret Thatcher

The Point's Gary Fraser looks at the woman who divided a nation in life and death.

Margaret Thatcher who died yesterday was the woman who transformed Britain. The longest serving British Prime Minister of the twentieth century she is also a candidate for the most influential. We often talk about the constraints that context places on individuals but Thatcher was one of those individuals who was always likely to transform whatever context she found herself in.

The official narrative on Thatcher might well be that she was ‘divisive’ a term that even the sycophantic British media is using less than 24 hours after her passing. Thatcher was ‘divisive’ because she was despised and admired in equal measures and she was ‘divisive’ because she makes Britons think of that most divisive of concepts, namely that of class. She was admired by a minority, albeit possibly a larger minority than some of us may wish to acknowledge, of people who benefited from her policies. She was also admired by a ruling class drunk on the spurious myth that Margaret Thatcher had somehow managed to restore Britain’s sense of place in the world. Quite what this means I’m not sure but a lot of people say it. Of course the Falklands War was a ‘success’, but this was to borrow a phrase, a grubby little war, which could have been avoided, but was used by the opportunistically savvy Thatcher to bolster her then declining popularity at home. Then there is contrived notion doing the rounds that Britain was a place of doom and gloom in the 1970s. Much of this narrative is a media construct. For many British people, the 1970s was a time when they had a steady job which gave them a sense of social worth. Moreover, it was a time of relative social cohesion marked by good public services supported by an interventionist state. Compared to today, 1970s Britain can sound like a socialist paradise such is the extent of the journey that Mrs Thatcher took this country on – although we should not forget that it was the fag end of Jim Callaghan’s Labour government which first accepted neo-liberal economics.

Thatcher is of course despised by many. In ex-mining communities the hatred is easily understood. Thatcher not only decimated an industry, she decimated entire communities. The results of her assault on the miners and Britain’s manufacturing industry in general, are still be felt to this day – generations have been lost to the dole, or to low paid, existentially degrading jobs in the services sector. Communities and families have been torn apart from the inside as lives were lost to a sense of hopelessness which all too easily finds expression in drug addiction. Follow the thread carefully and such devastation can be traced to Thatcher and her ilk. No wonder that on the night of her passing there were those celebrating the demise of what some have called Britain’s most ‘evil’ Prime Minister.

Of course such statements should be uttered with caution. I’m aware of what psychologists and historians who have studied psychology call historical myopia. This is the phenomenon in which the closer an era is to our vantage point in the present, the more details we can make out and therefore the more emotion we feel. Moreover, and this is an uncomfortable thought, if Mrs Thatcher was evil, or even morally wicked, which I believed to be the case, she did have the support of many people including sections of the working class who benefited from her policies. Thatcher enabled working class people to buy their homes, often at discount rate, and then sell them at a profit in order to mount a climb up the greasy ladder of meritocracy. Of course the ‘home owning democracy’ narrative is also part myth. Home ownership has turned many people into slaves to their assets and moulded them into dutiful employees. But nonetheless some working class people, especially those belonging to the generation who actually lived through what we now call ‘Thatcherism’, benefited.

Perhaps when assessing her legacy Thatcher’s greatest success and what makes her stand out from her peers, is her impact on the opposition. Margaret Thatcher utterly destroyed the Labour Party and helped turn the party of labour into the party of capital. Thatcher’s true protégée was not the hapless John Major, or any of the other Tory stooges that became Conservative leader in the years of Tory party decline following her demise in 1990; her protégée was Tony Blair, who was the best Thatcherite since Thatcher. Yet ‘Blairism’ started long before Blair. It began way back in the 1980s when the Labour Party slowly started to buy into Thatcher’s narrative. Margaret Thatcher also brought the British Trades Union movement to its knees. Today it is a shadow of its former self and 13 years after a Labour Government, the most draconian anti-trades union laws remain on the statute book.

Thatcher will be remembered as a conviction politician. I have heard the most militant of socialist warrior’s compliment her by saying that at least she stood up for her class, which of course carries the implication that Labour didn’t, an observation both true and sad in equal measures. In the end her greatest strength, namely the ability to court unpopularity in the advent of a cause she believed in, also turned out to be, as so often is the case, her undoing. Many things contributed to her downfall. I could have written about the Poll Tax, in which she committed the grave tactical error of uniting a majority against her, or Europe in which her avowedly anti-EU stance looked incredulous to many Tories at a time when the EU was moving in a neo-liberal direction. Histories tragedy however is that Margaret Thatcher’s political downfall was not caused by the people whose lives she destroyed. In the end she was brought down by a cabal of Tories who had simply had enough of her.

Yesterday an 87 year old woman suffering from dementia died from a stroke. It is never advisable to celebrate death and even if you have that inclination it is probably best to avoid it, at least in public anyway. Instead we should work towards the death of what Margaret Thatcher represented. But a touch of honesty on my part here; even as I write this noble sentiment, a part of me is unsure it will happen. There once was a time when socialists genuinely believed that socialism would occur in their lifetime. Today, most socialists, if they are honest, would acknowledge that their own deaths are likely to occur before socialism happens, something which has qualitatively changed the psychology of being on the left. The mountain that we must climb in order to build a society based on equality, fairness and justice, looks a steeper climb after Margaret Thatcher. It pains me to say it, but I’m sure she would consider that one of her greatest achievements.

Margaret Thatcher, 1925-2013

Other articles by Gary Fraser in The Point can be found here