Margaret Thatcher and the cult of personality

[RH]

Margaret Thatcher and the cult of personality

Robert Henderson

Two Cults

Margaret Thatcher was the subject of a cult of personality. This was
not the result of calculated propaganda, but simply the creation of
her extraordinary personality. Because the cult of personality
developed not in a totalitarian state but a country where public
opposition was possible, there were two cults of personality attached
to her in a relationship which mimicked the matter/antimatter duality.
These were the Thatcherite religious believers fulfilling the role of
matter and the Thatcher-hating Left acting as the antimatter.

Both the matter and the antimatter Thatcher cults were potent. The
religious believers bowed down before the great god MARKET (and
Thatcher was his prophet) and, when things went wrong, did what all
religious believers do until they lose their faith, denied reality by
simply pretending something had not happened or by giving a calamity
some absurd spin to ”prove” the god had not failed.

For the Thatcher-hating Left she was the personification of the Devil
and consequently credited with all manner of evil but, as is the way
with personifications of the Devil, never portrayed as anything but
powerful, a being possessed of a political juju (doubtless ensconced
in her handbag) which could wreak any degree of havoc with all that
the Left held dear is if she so chose. Like all those who believe in
evil spirits the Thatcher-hating Left ascribed every act of ill
fortune to her.

The attitude of both bands of cult followers was essentially
superstitious, attributing powers to the woman which she did not, and
often could not, have. The religious Thatcherites imagined she
could speak the spells which would miraculously convert Britain from
a country making silly old fashioned things such as steel, ships and
cars and mining coal to a country stuffed to the gunnels with
entrepreneurs creating new non-unionised service industries; the Left
saw her as a witch practising black magic to contaminate and
transmogrify the world they knew.

Because the Thatcherite religious believers and her leftist haters
could not and still cannot see past the woman’s gigantic political
personality, they made and continue to make the same mistake, namely,
seeing the two cult figures as the reality while ignoring her actual
policies and their outcomes.

The reality of Thatcher

The reality of Thatcher is that objectively she achieved little if any
of her wishes. It is a bitter irony for the woman (and Thatcherites
generally) that her policies were of a nature which undermined the
ends she espoused. Perhaps the prime example is her avowed wish to
see a strong and wealthy Britain whilst creating through her
commitment to laissez faire economics the very circumstances that
would weaken the country. Under her economic regimen and its lingering
aftermath ever since Britain has become ever less self-sufficient in
strategically important economic activity such as the production of
food and energy and vast swathes of British business were either
bought up by foreigners or ceased to operate from Britain because of
offshoring and the absence of government action to protect our own
economy. She simply did not understand that you could not have
laissez faire in both the domestic and international economic sphere
and have a strong nation state. Had she known any economic history
she would have realised that, but even without such knowledge common
prudence should have told her that a country which is dependent on
others for necessary goods and services is a weak country. Moreover,
one of her claimed tutelary heroes Adam Smith readily understood there
are things which are either strategically important such as armaments
or social goods which are never going to be supplied universally by
private enterprise such as roads. Thatcher never gave any indication
of realising that Smith was not the unrelenting free marketer of her
imagination.

Thatcher’s failures in making policy to achieve her ends were
legion. She destroyed much of British heavy industry in the belief
that those made unemployed would rapidly be re-employed in private
sector jobs. The new jobs did not materialise and she was reduced to
presiding over massive and long lasting unemployment which she funded
with North Sea oil and gas tax revenue and the receipts from
privatisation whilst fiddling the unemployment figures shamelessly.
She sold off state owned services (which belonged to the community
as a whole not to the government) in the belief that service would
be improved. It was not. Instead vital services such as the railways
and the provision of energy and water became ever more expensive
whilst providing poorer service and less employment. She introduced so-
called private business methods into the NHS and higher education in
the belief that they would become more efficient. The result was
massive increases in bureaucracy and an ever climbing cost of both
the NHS and higher education and a substitution of the pursuit of
money for the public service ethos because money was attached to
individual patients and students. She introduced the Community Charge
or “Poll Tax” in the belief that it would be fairer than the old
domestic rates. The result was widespread unfairness because it took
no account of an individual’s means which provoked the nearest thing
to a national movement dedicated to the non-payment of taxes known in
modern times. She raged against EU interference in British affairs
but signed up Britain to the Single European Act (SEA) in the belief
that it would create a genuine single market within the EEC. It did
not create such a market and merely presented the EEC with an open
goal for ever more audacious sovereignty grabs. A supposed opponent
of further mass immigration, her signing of the SEA also opened the
door to free movement within the EU, a situation worsened by her
strategy of dramatically widening the EEC. She signed Britain up to
the She embraced “Care in the Community” for the mentally ill or
disabled on the grounds that it was more humane than keeping such
people in long-stay institutions. The result was thousands of people
left to largely fend for themselves in the outside world who were
quite incapable of doing so. She sold off great swathes of social
housing (which belonged to the community as a whole not to government)
to tenants in the belief that this would result in a “property owning
democracy” whilst more or less ending the building of new social
housing. The eventual result was the growing housing emergency we
have today. She instigated the disastrous “light touch” regulation of
the financial services industry by abolishing credit controls and
failing to meaningfully regulate the industry meaningfully after “Big
Bang” which effectively de-regulated the London Stock Exchange to
bring in a brave new world of free trading (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
finance/financialcrisis/8850654/Was-the-Big-Bang-good-for-the-City-of-
London-and-Britain.html) with the dire results with which we are now
living.

Even in the few areas where she was ultimately successful such as the
Falkland’s War she was at best negligent in ignoring warnings from the
Foreign Office of a growing threat to the Falklands and even during
the time after the expeditionary force had been dispatched she agreed
to a US organised plan which would have not offered the Islanders
either self determination of or any meaningful security (http://
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/margaret-thatcher/10008116/Margaret-Thatcher-how-she-took-on-the-men-and-won.html).

There were also acts of omission and collusion with policies with
which she supposedly fundamentally disagreed. Most importantly,
Thatcher failed utterly to carry her strong views against further mass
immigration into her period in office. Not only that but, as already
mentioned, she made things much worse on that front by signing up to
the Single European Act. She agreed to the institutionalisation of
political correctness in public life, especially in the Civil Service,
schools and universities. In addition, she allowed the “progressive”
educational establishment to destroy a first rate school examination
system by swopping the certificate of Secondary Education (CSE) and
O(rdinary) Levels for the dangerous absurdity of the General
Certificate of Education (GCSE) which was supposedly an exam for all
16 year olds but was in reality two exams masquerading as one.
Despite the fact that Tory support rested heavily on the countryside
she allowed the de-regulation of rural bus services to occur which
reduced them so severely that to live in countryside meant owning and
driving a vehicle or at least having access to someone who did. To
make matter worse, this was done in tandem with a wilful neglect of
the then nationalised railways.

The protests after her death were unsurprising

Just based on her economic disasters the uproar surrounding her death
is unsurprising. In the space of a few years she raised the
unemployment pay claimant count from 1.4 million when she took office
in 1979 to 3.2 million by 1986 (http://www.economicshelp.org/
macroeconomics/unemployment/measuring_unemployment.html) That bald
figure is startling enough but the reality is tens times worse. She
must have known her policies would result in mass unemployment, at
least in the short term, when she removed the financial support of
taxpayers from nationalised industries or sold them off in the belief
that private business would be able to do the job more efficiently
with much smaller workforces. Further, as these industries were
concentrated in areas where they were by far the dominant employer she
should have realised that structural unemployment would be created
in many parts of the country. To imagine, as she did, that new jobs
would rapidly sprout in the areas showed a shocking lack of
understanding of economic history which has no example of such a thing
happening on the scale required in 1980s Britain.

What is certain is the fact that she had no doubt about the
destructive possibilities of laissez faire economics, viz:

“Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ is not above sudden, disturbing,
movements. Since its inception, capitalism has known slumps and
recessions, bubble and froth; no one has yet dis-invented the business
cycle, and probably no one will; and what Schumpeter famously called
the ‘gales of creative destruction’ still roar mightily from time to
time. To lament these things is ultimately to lament the bracing blast
of freedom itself.” — Margaret Thatcher, Statecraft P. 462

A politician of conviction?

The idea that merely having convictions is praiseworthy is a rum one.
Hitler, Stalin and Mao had convictions. But even if the quality of a
person’s convictions is ignored, this is one of the most mystifying of
myths attached to Thatcher. The reality was she frequently changed
her position on the most important issues she faced or adopted methods
which went against her avowed policies when she had created a mess,
most notably with the massive rise in unemployment resulting from her
slash and burn approach to the British economy which greatly
increased the benefits bill for many years and left people unemployed
for years, in many cases for decades.

The most significant publicly admitted changes of policy were on
immigration, the Europe and global warming. Before the 1979 election
she had spoken of the need to control immigration because the country
was in danger of being “swamped”:

‘If we went on as we are then by the end of the century there would be
four million people of the new Commonwealth or Pakistan here. Now,
that is an awful lot and I think it means that people are really
rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with
a different culture.’

She went on to say, ‘The British character has done so much for
democracy, for law and done so much throughout the world that if there
is any fear that it might be swamped people are going to react and be
rather hostile to those coming in.’

’If you want good race relations, you have got to allay peoples’
fears on numbers. […] We do have to hold out the clear prospect of an
end to immigration…’ (http://www.runnymedetrust.org/histories/race-
equality/59/margaret-thatcher-claims-britons-fear-being-swamped.html)

Once in office she did nothing despite still feeling strongly about
the subject in private (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/
margaret-thatcher/6906503/Margaret-Thatcher-complained-about-Asian-
immigration-to-Britain.html).

On Europe she went through the following metamorphosis:

- 1975 she campaigned and voted for Britain to remain within
the European Economic Community (EEC – the EU was only formed by the
Maastricht Treaty in 1993).

- By 1980 she was convinced that the EEC was not acting in
Britain interests.

- By 1986 she signed the Single European Act giving the EEC
immense powers to interfere with Britain’s sovereignty.

- In the 1980s she adopted the policy of enlarging the EEC
which meant that a vast new swathe of workers from poor countries
would be allowed free movement within the EEC. The effects of this
also allowed the federalists to press for things such as Qualified
Majority Voting on the grounds that the EEC/EU had become too unwieldy
to operate under the original rules and generally press forward with
the creation of a United States of Europe.

- In 1990 she took the UK into the Exchange Rate Mechanism
(ERM) despite being opposed to a single currency to which the ERM was
a stepping stone with the pound effectively shadowing the Deutschmark.

The idea that Thatcher only realised what the EEC was after taking
office in 1979 is simple nonsense. Thatcher’s speech to the
Conservative Group for Europe at the start of the Wilson referendum on
the EEC clearly shows her viewing the EEC as far more than a simple
free trading area, viz:

That vision of Europe took a leap into reality on the 1st of January
1972 when, [ Edward Heath] Mr. Chairman, due to your endeavours,
enthusiasm and dedication Britain joined the European Community.

* The Community gives us peace and security in a free society, a
peace and security denied to the past two generations.

* The Community gives us access to secure sources of food supplies.
This is vital to us, a country which has to import half of what we
need.

* The Community does more trade and gives more aid than any group in
the world.

* The Community gives us the opportunity to represent the Commonwealth
in Europe. The Commonwealth want us to stay in and has said so. The
Community wants us.

Conservatives must give a clear lead and play a vigorous part in the
campaign to keep Britain in Europe to honour the treaties which you,
sir, signed in Britain’s name.

We must do this, even though we dislike referenda. We must support
the [ Harold Wilson] Prime Minister in this, even though we fight the
Government on other issues.

We must play our full part in ensuring that Conservative supporters
say “Yes to Europe”. (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/
102675).

In any case, the Treaty of Rome left no room to believe it was merely
a free trade organisation. No one could read that and be in any
doubt that the intention was to create a United State of Europe.
Thatcher, the supposed obsessive who was a stickler mastering a
subject, should have read it before the referendum.

As for global warming, she started the ball rolling whilst in office
and then reversed her position in her autobiography published in 2003.
Here she is speaking to the UN general assembly, in November 1989:

“What we are now doing to the world … is new in the experience of the
Earth. It is mankind and his activities that are changing the
environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways. The result
is that change in future is likely to be more fundamental and more
widespread than anything we have known hitherto. Change to the sea
around us, change to the atmosphere above, leading in turn to change
in the world’s climate, which could alter the way we live in the most
fundamental way of all.

“The environmental challenge that confronts the whole world demands an
equivalent response from the whole world. Every country will be
affected and no one can opt out. Those countries who are
industrialised must contribute more to help those who are
not.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2013/apr/09/margaret-
thatcher-green-hero)

By the time she had published her political work Statecraft in 2003
she was thinking along these lines:

“The doomsters’ favorite subject today is climate change. This has a
number of attractions for them. First, the science is extremely
obscure so they cannot easily be proved wrong. Second, we all have
ideas about the weather: traditionally, the English on first
acquaintance talk of little else.

“Third, since clearly no plan to alter climate could be considered on
anything but a global scale, it provides a marvelous excuse for
worldwide, supra-national socialism. All this suggests a degree of
calculation. Yet perhaps that is to miss half the point. Rather, as it
was said of Hamlet that there was method in his madness, so one feels
that in the case of some of the gloomier alarmists there is a large
amount of madness in their method.” (http://www.masterresource.org/
2013/04/thatcher-alarmist-to-skeptic/).

There were other issues where her public position was at odds with her
actions, for example, the troubles in Northern Ireland and the rule of
law. Thatcher claimed that there would never be a surrender to IRA
terrorism. Yet after she narrowly escaped death in the Brighton Grand
Hotel bombing in 1984 (12 October) the Anglo-Irish agreement was
signed little over a year later in November 1985 giving the Republic
of Ireland government a say in what happened in Northern Ireland and
committing the British Government to accepting the principle of a
united Ireland if a majority were in favour. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/
onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/15/newsid_2539000/2539849.stm).
There was no obvious reason for such a change of heart beyond the fear
generated in Thatcher by the bombing of the Grand Hotel.

As for the rule of law, far from respecting it as she claimed, she
laid the basis for the ever increasing authoritarianism of the British
state by permitting the police to act unlawfully during the miners’
strike by stopping miners and their supporters from travelling across
the country and turning a blind eye to any police excesses as they
clashed with the miners and their supporters.

A politician of conviction? Only if you define someone as such who
runs from one position to another while vigorously embracing each
successive position regardless of its contradiction of a previous
advocated policy or set of ideas.

Nor was she someone who would take responsibility for her actions.
When she found her policies were a disaster she either claimed she had
been badly advised or cheated (for example, the Single Market, global
warming) or attempted to ignore the mess she had created (for
example, enduring mass employment and ) by misrepresenting it, or in
the case of unemployment, using North Sea oil tax revenues, the
privatisation receipts and blatant manipulation of the unemployment
statistics to paper over the unemployment cracks.

Why did Thatcher get things so horribly wrong?

Why did Thatcher get things so horribly wrong? Her behaviour
strongly suggested that she was seriously lacking psychological and
sociological insight. This meant she constantly made horrendous
mistakes such as trusting the EU over the single market and imagining
in truly infantile fashion that millions of jobs shed from heavy
industry and coal mining would be rapidly replaced by “modern” jobs in
the service and light industry sectors. Her record in choosing people
to support or employ was also dismal.

Far from being a free thinker her cast of mind made her the ready
captive of an ideology:

“…as Leader of the Opposition MT once cut short a presentation by a
leftish member of the Conservative Research Department by fetching out
a copy of The Constitution of Liberty from her bag and slamming it
down on the table, declaring “this is what we believe”. (http://
www.margaretthatcher.org/archive/Hayek.asp).

It is dangerous to trust anyone who is susceptible to ideological
capture for the simple reason that all ideologies, whether sacred or
profane, are inadequate descriptions of and guides to reality. This
means that ideologues constantly have to try to fit reality within the
ideology rather than having reality driving their choices. Those
which include economics are particularly dangerous because their reach
is so vast.

Ideologies are the prime example of Richard Dawkins’ memes, mental
viruses which capture the individual and direct their thought and
behaviour. Those who are captured by them by them give up their
mental autonomy. That speaks either of a character trait such as that
of requiring a source of authority for choices or a weakness of
intellect which seeks ideological algorithms developed by others to
answer political questions because the person’s capacity to answer
the questions by rational pragmatic examination based on their own
knowledge and intelligence is inadequate.

How good was Thatcher’s intellect? She is frequently represented by
her adherents as ferociously intelligent. This view will not stand
up to examination. She read chemistry at Oxford but only achieved a
second class honours degree (http://womenshistory.about.com/od/
thatchermargaret/a/Margaret-Thatcher.htm). Oxford at the time did not
divide the second class degree into upper and lower second classes
and had a fourth class honours division instead. The old Oxford
second is generally taken to be the rough equivalent of an upper
second. That raises questions over her intellect. Chemistry at
degree level in the 1940s had not become heavily mathematized as it
now is. Diligence would get a student a long way. This quality
Thatcher reputedly had in spades. If she did, the fact that she only
took a second suggests that she was not very intellectually gifted.
That is particularly the case when it is remembered that she went up
to Oxford during wartime when competition for places was severely
reduced because so many of the potential male students went into the
forces rather than to university. A beta plus mind at best.

What people probably mistook for intelligence was her avid seeking and
retention of data. But it is one thing to learn facts or arguments
parrot fashion, quite another to mould them into a coherent
intellectual whole. Based on her frequent renunciation of previous
positions, it is reasonable to assume that she simply did not have the
intellectual wherewithal to put the data she took on board to any
useful purpose. She certainly never gave no indication that she ever
saw the bigger picture.

There were also the question of her how fitted she was by experience
to fill the role she played, that of the hardcore economic libertarian
forever seeking ways of making people take responsibility for their
lives both socially and in their work. When I look at the present
Tory front bench I have a similar feeling to that which I experience
when thinking of the Nazi leadership. The Nazis had a rather
noticeable lack of Aryan types amongst them: the present Tory front
bench is remarkably short on people who have been entrepreneurs or
indeed of people who have any great experience of work outside the
narrow confines of politics.

Margaret Thatcher was a forerunner in this respect. She graduated
from Oxford in 1947. For the next four years she worked for various
private companies as a research chemist. At the age of 26 she married
a millionaire. He funded Thatcher’s career change from chemist to
barrister. She took the bar exams in 1953 and practised (specialising
in taxation) until 1961, the last two years of the period occurring
after she was elected to the Commons in 1959. After that it was all
politics.

Thatcher’s experience of the real world of work is at best four years
as a research chemist and eight years as a barrister. However, being
married to a millionaire at the age of 26 rather dulls the idea of her
living a normal working life. The truth is she made her way not as a
self-made woman but by the traditional route for female advancement
of marrying a rich man.

There was no need for Thatcherism

The really angering thing about Thatcher’s time in No 10 is that she
could have done what she was elected to do, tame the unions, without
engaging in the deliberate wholesale destruction and alienation of
much of Britain’s heavy and extractive industry and the placing in
private hands of the public utilities, especially those of gas,
electricity and water. This was because Thatcher had the great good
fortune to arrive as Prime Minister just as North Sea oil and gas was
coming on-stream in large quantities. Those revenues alone would have
provided any government with a very large safety net to finance
temporary difficulties caused by serious confrontations with the
larger trade unions. But she also had the very large receipts from
the big privatisations such as gas, electricity and BT.

There was absolutely no economic need to destroy so much of British
industry or place much of the state-owned organisations into private
hands. Continental countries such as Germany and Italy retained their
shipbuilding; France, Germany and Italy retained a native mass
production car industry. Germany still has a substantial coal mining
industry. Privatisation proceeded at very different speeds throughout
Europe. That no other large industrialised country followed
Thatcherite policies with anything like the speed or fervour of
Britain yet survived demonstrates that Thatcher’s policies were not
a necessity but simply an ideological choice.

Her government could have spent the 1980s taming the unions
sufficiently to prevent the excesses of the 1970s. It is true that
the very high level of unemployment of the 1980s was an aid to this,
but it was probably not the main rod which largely broke the Trade
Unions’ back. Home ownership had been rising steadily throughout the
twentieth century and by the time Thatcher came to power in 1979 not
far short of 60%. The highest it reached even after Right To Buy was
only 69% – the idea that it was Thatcher who made it possible for the
working man and woman to own their homes for the first time is another
myth (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/houseprices/
10005586/Home-ownership-falls-for-first-time-in-a-century.html). .

The fact that so many people were owner occupiers with mortgages
meant that they were much less willing than they had been to strike at
the drop of a hat because they feared losing their home. Even those
who were not owner occupiers had much more to lose in terms of general
comfort, security and prospects of greater opportunity for their
children than had been the case before 1939. To take just one
example, children from poor families had a greater opportunity than
ever to enter higher education. This growing reluctance to come out
whenever the union called for strike was why the National Union of
Miners’ leader Arthur Scargill was not willing to hold a ballot of
all his members before calling a strike. He feared such a ballot
would be lost.

The combination of this growing reluctance to strike amongst union
members together with the legal restrictions on unions such as no
secondary picketing and severe penalties for strikes called with a
formal ballot would have been enough to end the anarchy which
prevailed in the 1970s.

Apart from the social and economic upheaval of the Thatcher years, she
can also be blamed for a continuation of the damage she caused both in
the continuing structural unemployment but also in the fact that she
subverted the Labour Party so that it adopted most of what was
damaging from the Thatcher period, most particularly in the adoption
of her devotion to laissez faire economics and in Labour’s all too
ready acceptance of the EU elite’s desire for comprehensive political
and economic union.

The 1980s could have been so very different. The revenue from North
Sea Oil could have been put into a sovereign wealth fund which by now
would be worth hundreds of billions. If the Single European Act had
not been signed the movement towards a federal EU would have been
halted in its tracks (national vetoes applied to this area of
decision making at the time). If Thatcher had not argued for an ever
wider EEC the poorer nations from the east would not have joined and
the immigration threat they carry would not exist. Indeed, Britain
could have left the EU entirely because the Tory Eurosceptics could
have allied with Labour under Michael Foot or even Neal Kinnock. New
social housing could have been built with the proceeds of Right to Buy
thus obviating to a large degree the shortage of housing now. If the
nationalised industries had been sustained there would have been no
serious structural unemployment. Had proper attention been paid to
the strategic importance of essential economic areas such a food and
energy self-sufficiency we should not be so dangerously reliant on
foreigners for such things today. Most importantly, if that had been
the general thrust of politics in the 1980s it is doubtful in the
extreme that Blair and NuLabour would ever have arisen.

The tragedy of Margaret Thatcher is that she had a sense of patriotism
and probably genuinely thought she was doing the best for her country
at the time she implemented or advocated policies (her honesty when
policies went wrong was another matter). The problem was that her
judgement and understanding was all too often hideously wrong or
defective. She so often provided comforting rhetoric especially on
Europe and immigration but she never delivered the goods. The fact
that she was such an overpowering political figure made things worse
because it meant she could steamroller her cabinet on most issues at
most times. It is difficult to think of another politician in the
past three centuries who wrought so much damage on Britain.

Read more at http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/margaret-thatcher-and-the-cult-of-personality/

[RH]