It is, you may have heard, Margaret Thatcher’s 86th Birthday today. By way of a
congratulatory toast to the Iron Lady, here’s a thought-filled article that T.E. Utley wrote about her politics, for The Spectator, some 25 years ago:
Don’t call it Thatcherism, T.E. Utley, The Spectator, 19 August 1986
There is no such thing as Thatcherism. The illusion that there is is in part a deliberate creation of Mrs Thatcher’s enemies. They have proceeded on the age-old maxim that there is nothing (certainly not private scandal) more likely to injure the reputation of a British politician than the suggest that he has an inflexible devotion to principle. This maxim is only partly true, but is an unshakeably established belief, a fact which helps to make it truer than it otherwise would be.
The illusion is in part also the creation of a coterie of admiring friends by whom Mrs Thatcher has been surrounded. Some of them, for cultural and sometimes ethnic reasons, have little sympathy with the English political tradition, which they regard as a fraud perpetrated on the people by an oppressive and incompetent political establishment. What the country needed, they argued, was someone who would sweep away all this rubbish about compromise and consensus and lead the country in a radical reconstruction of its habits and institutions. They easily identified Mrs Thatcher as their man.
The illusion, however, could never have achieved its present proportions without some assistance from its victim. Mrs Thatcher is not by temperament averse to the Messianic role. She also as a wish to be, and to be regarded as, something of an intellectual, and she has a passionate devotion to intellectual honesty. When she got into politics, she became an avid student of the writings of what is broadly and rather vaguely called the ‘New Right’. In the press of public business, she still finds time to discuss at length such profound questions as why Britain ‘lacks a free enterprise culture’, and how this deficiency can be repaired.
At another level, however, she is an exceptionally astute politician and an accomplished party tactician. It is inconceivable that her devotion to doctrine would ever persuade her to do anything which was plainly politically suicidal.
Now, in all this, you may say, there is little that is new. Many of her predecessors have had a taste for philosophy, and only a philistine would suggest that this taste has had no influence on their political conduct. All of them, like Mrs Thatcher herself however, have been practical politicians with a sense of the status of principles as guidelines, not absolute and literal moral imperatives.
This is so, but somehow in the case of others the reflective and practical ingredients in their natures have blended more easily. It sometimes looks as though she lives a completely compartmentalised life. When talking to her friends or addressing a party conference, she is the philosopher queen, although the impression, as far as her public oratory goes, springs rather from the manner of its delivery than from its actual content; listen hard enough and you will always hear the qualifying clauses, often uttered rapidly and with an almost palpable physical revulsion. Then something happens in the real world — the need to bring the Rhodesian crisis to an end, the need to avoid a miners’ strike before the government is ready to cope with it, the need to placate a divided Cabinet over trade union reform — and Mrs Thatcher yields to necessity, often swiftly.
Who can doubt, for instance, that Mrs Thatcher is convinced that the welfare state needs radical reform, that she would like to introduce educational vouchers, student loans, possibly even to make the relatively rich contribute something directly towards their medical care? But most of these projects have been quietly dropped, or put into indefinite cold storage in obedience to supposed political necessity.
Consider, then, the ‘ideology’ of which Thatcherism is supposed to consist. Its chief plan is the advocacy of a free and competitive economy, but that simply represents one more or less permanent ingredient in modern Conservative philosophy. It was on that principle that Churchill fought the 1945 election, having just read Hayek’s Road to Serfdom; to judge from what is now said, one might suppose that Mrs Thatcher had ‘discovered’ the great Dr Hayek. What brought the Tories to 13 years of political supremacy in 1951 was the slogan ‘Set the people free’. ‘Under Labour there has been too much government interference in the day-to-day workings of industry … there has been too much government’; ‘We will reduce and reform taxation, giving first priority to reducing income tax’; ‘Our aim is to identify and remove obstacles that prevent effective competition and restrict initiative.’ All those quotations are from Mr Heath’s election manifesto in 1970.
Lord Bruce-Gardyne, in his admirable book Mrs Thatcher’s First Administration, has suggested that the real difference between Mrs Thatcher and the rest (particularly Mr Heath) is the fact that whereas they regard sound finance and free competition as means to an end, she regards them as moral absolutes to be applied whether they appear to work or not. For the reasons I have given above, I do not think this to be a wholly accurate description of her political behaviour; but the essential point, for the purposes of this article, is that there is absolutely nothing new about the doctrinal front that she presents on these matters. In 20th Century English Conservatism (I say ‘English’ because there are absolutely no authentically Conservative Scotsmen, Irishmen or genuine Welshmen) two schools of thought about the economy have existed side by side — the liberal school, to which Mrs Thatcher belongs, and the ‘corporatist’ school, to which Macmillan and now Heath belong. Sometimes one is in the ascendant, sometimes the other. Neither ever captures complete sway over the party. Neither is taken wholly seriously by any of its apostles who are seriously engaged in practical politics. That is all there is to it.
As for ‘privatisation’, Mr Powell proposed it in his famous ‘Morecambe budget’ speech in 1968. As for ‘property-owning democracy’, I believe it was Anthony Eden who coined the phrase.
There is an even stronger and more profound reason for supposing that Thatcherism does not exist: the Prime Minister likes to regard herself as an exponent of the ‘politics of conviction’, as distinct from the ‘politics of consensus’. Now, this is a silly dichotomy, invented by inferior journalists. Consensus politics is an intrinsic part of the art of government; one has to achieve a consensus with someone and no consensus embraces the whole of the community. But what this monstrous distinction implies is that Mrs Thatcher, unlike other politicians, is in no sense a product of history, that she is starting from scratch, that she is not putting her ear to the ground to hear what is going on in the world and decide she can (however slightly) influence it, but that she is deciding what is the good society and how she can create it. It is hard to imagine anything further from the truth.
Mrs Thatcher was produced by history. Her two major achievements — the control of inflation and the reduction of the trade unions to size — were simply the climax of a series of unsuccessful attempts by Labour and Tory government alike to cope with what were increasingly seen as the two most important evils from which the country was suffering. When Chancellor of the Exchequer (1974-79), Mr Healey boasted that the government to which he belonged was ‘perhaps the first in Britain for many years which has given monetary policy the importance it deserves’. In 1976 Mr Callaghan said to his party conference, ‘Higher inflation followed by higher unemployment: that is the history of the last 20 years.’ As for the trade unions, Mrs Castle had tried and failed to curb them in the late Sixties. Mr Heath tried again and failed in the Seventies. After ‘the winter of discontent’ Mrs Thatcher came to power on a wave of revulsion from trade-union arrogance and oppression which had steadily been growing for ages. Bureaucracy and inflation were equally out. If she had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent her.
The other element in Thatcherism is supposed to be the wish to restore Britain as a great power in the world. By this Mrs Thatcher does not mean primarily a power devoted to the preservation of its own interests. She belongs to that military Whig branch of English Conservatism which took over when Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940. This is to say that her view of foreign policy has a high moral content or, in other words, that she likes to devote herself to large and distant causes — the freedom of Afghanistan rather than the security of Ulster. She is suspicious about the Common Market, but seems prepared to swallow its consequences (e.g. the Single European Act) so long as the blame for them can be attributed to the Foreign Office. I believe that she went into the Falklands with reluctance and regret and that, having done so, carried off with a courage and skill of which no other prime minister, possibly including Churchill, would have been capable. In terms of theory, however, she has contributed nothing to the discussion of Britain’s role in the world.
Margaret Thatcher is a great prime minister, great by virtue of her courage and by virtue of what ideologues would often, misguidedly, describe as her ‘low political cunning’. We desperately need her; the greatest obstacle to our continuing to have her is the belief that she is the inventor of a ‘political philosophy’. She will not get all she wants, as no politician can or should, but she will get more of it than others would. But, please no more talk about Thatcherism.
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