An American news network rang, on 8 April 2013, to tell me that Margaret Thatcher was dead. Yes, I was happy to be interviewed. There was the usual awkward silence, long enough that I wondered whether they had forgotten me, and then I heard the words: “Thank you Dr Kissinger, now over to Richard Vinen in London.” It did not last long. By the evening, the death of Christine White — a middle-ranking Hollywood actress — was beginning to rival Thatcher’s in the American media.
British reactions to Thatcher’s death raised all sorts of questions. A Korean journalist told me that he had spent all afternoon trying to find someone who would admit to having voted for her, and came to wonder how she had won three elections. Meanwhile, the burning of effigies in mining towns seemed to me uncomfortably reminiscent of the head shavings inflicted on French women accused of “collaboration” with the Vichy government: misogynistic violence by men seeking to allay the humiliation of their own defeat. “Ding Dong the Witch is dead” was sent to the top of the British music charts: this, too, seemed simultaneously sexist and naïve. Britain was not a fairy-tale village that would live happily ever after if freed from a spell cast by one woman.
The focus on Thatcher as an individual in 2013 contrasted with the Left’s criticism of Thatcherism as a system through much of the Eighties. The term “Thatcherism” was first used, in a systematic way, by Stuart Hall in Marxism Today, in an article published in January 1979, before she had even been elected. It referred to “Thatcherism” nine times and only once to “Mrs Thatcher”. Hall, married to the eminent feminist historian Catherine, understood how personal attacks on Thatcher slid into sexist sneers. But his austerely impersonal approach was also representative of the Left’s at the time, which emphasised structures. Whereas I sometimes wonder whether my younger colleagues today are aware of anything that is not reported in the Guardian, Hall’s generation of Left-wing intellectuals were assiduous readers of the Financial Times, and always on the look-out for a “crisis of capitalism”.
Early Left-wing writers on Thatcherism were rarely sentimental about what it replaced. They had disapproved of the Heath government of the early Seventies — particularly because of its attempt to implement legislation that would have restricted trade union power. Equally, they often recognised that Thatcherism was part of broader wave of political rethinking that sometimes encompassed the leadership of both major political parties. The Labour government of Jim Callaghan, from 1976 to 1979, had been marked by both a degree of social conservatism (not for nothing was Callaghan a parliamentary representative of the Police Federation) and by a move to a more free-market kind of economics. Peter Jay — Economics Editor of The Times — was the leading British advocate of monetarism. He influenced people in both the Labour and Conservative Party, but he was himself a member of the former, and Callaghan’s son-in-law.
Now, sixth formers are ritualistically trained to write about the end of the post-war consensus; but they are rarely taught one simple fact: in the early Eighties, the fiercest attacks on consensus came from the Left. It was Labour who fought the 1983 election on a manifesto that would, among other things, have meant British withdrawal from Nato and the European Economic Community. Some on the Left had even felt a grudging admiration for the radicalism of the first Thatcher government. They shared its distaste for condescension that some citizens experienced when they dealt with powerful agencies of the state. Like Thatcher, they disliked the complacency that they associated with established politicians of both parties.
Everything changed after Labour’s crushing defeat in 1983. The challenge of Thatcherism demanded that the Labour Party ease its way back to the centre ground. The Tories, too, saw that there was not much point in ostentatious radicalism, once the major victories of the early Thatcher period had been won — particularly after the National Union of Mineworkers had been broken in 1985. They were now presiding over a new consensus, in which weaker trade unions and the sale of council houses were widely accepted. Privatisation, a word that they had barely dared use as late as 1979, was commonplace. Thatcherism had triumphed.
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