Might Brown's tea-time stunt backfire?

Perry

Nah, . . . surely not even the plyt-clee touchy_feelies on the Grouniad could miss that the (new) Beloved Leader is as astute and quietly subversive as his predecessor, - albeit without the gush. I’m surprised they’re a bit miffed. But, - hey, they’ll wake up one day.

antifrank

I can't see how anyone could see this as a political masterstroke. What was Gordon Brown trying to say? He is never going to govern Britain according to Thatcherite principles, so this kind of political cross-dressing will win no votes while alienating his core vote. Since the Labour core vote sat at home in large part at the last election, that's a pretty daft thing to do.

Marco

"Thatcher was, like it or not, a great leader, I will be the next". That's what he was saying. He may be right. Have you noticed that every new P.M. continues to pay tribute to the Lady? Nobody would dream of doing so to Major, nor probably to Blair in the future...

David Lindsay

They do, Marco. But they need to get a grip. What, exactly, was “Thatcherism”? What did she ever actually do? Well, she gave Britain the Single European Act, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Exchange Rate Mechanism, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the replacement of O-levels with GCSEs, and the destruction of paternal authority within working-class families and communities through the destruction of that authority’s economic basis in the stockades of working-class male employment. No Prime Minister, ever, has done more in any one, never mind all, of the causes of European federalism, Irish Republicanism, sheer economic incompetence, Police inefficiency and ineffectiveness, collapsing educational standards, and everything that underlies or follows from the destruction of paternal authority. Meanwhile (indeed, thereby), the middle classes were transformed from people like her father into people like her son. She told us that “there is no such thing as society”, in which case there cannot be any such thing as the society that is the family, or the society that is the nation. Correspondingly, she misdefined liberty as the “freedom” to behave in absolutely any way that one saw fit. All in all, she turned Britain into the country that Marxists had always said it was, even though, before her, it never actually had been. Specifically, she sold off national assets at obscenely undervalued prices, while subjecting the rest of the public sector (forty per cent of the economy) to an unprecedented level of central government dirigisme. She presided over the rise of Political Correctness, that most 1980s of phenomena, and so much of piece with that decade’s massively increased welfare dependency and its moral chaos, both fully sponsored by the government, and especially by the Prime Minister, of the day. Hers was the war against the unions, which cannot have had anything to do with monetarism, since the unions have never controlled the money supply. For good or ill, but against all her stated principles, hers was the refusal (thank goodness, but then I am no “Thatcherite”) to privatise the Post Office, as her ostensible ideology would have required. And hers were the continuing public subsidies to fee-paying schools, to agriculture, to nuclear power, and to mortgage-holders. Without those public subsidies, the fourth would hardly have existed, and the other three (then as now) would not have existed at all. So much for “You can’t buck the market”. You can now, as you could then, and as she did then. The issue is not whether these are good or bad things in themselves. It is whether “Thatcherism”, as ordinarily and noisily proclaimed (or derided), was compatible with their continuation by means of “market-bucking” public subsidies. It simply was not, as it simply is not. Hers was the ludicrous pretence to have brought down the Soviet Union merely because she happened to be in office when that Union happened to collapse, as it would have done anyway, in accordance with the predictions of (among other people) Enoch Powell. But she did make a difference internationally where it was possible to do so, precisely by providing aid and succour to Pinochet’s Chile and to apartheid South Africa. I condemn the former as I condemn Castro, and I condemn the latter as I condemn Mugabe (or Ian Smith, for that matter). No doubt you do, too. But she did not, as she still does not. And hers was what amounted to the open invitation to Argentina to invade the Falkland Islands, followed by the (starved) Royal Navy’s having to behave as if the hopelessly out-of-her-depth Prime Minister did not exist, a sort of coup without which those Islands would be Argentine to this day. There are many other aspects of any “Thatcherism” properly so called, and they all present her in about as positive a light. None of them, nor any of the above, was unwitting, forced on her by any sort of bullying, or whatever else her apologists might insist was the case. Rather, they were exactly what she intended. Other than the subsidies to agriculture (then as now) and to nuclear power (now, if not necessarily then), the definition of New Labour is to support and to celebrate that record and legacy, because it did exactly as it was intended to do, entrenching, in and through the economic sphere, the social revolution of the 1960s. You should not so support or celebrate unless you wish to be considered New Labour. But then again, who cares these days? Or, rather, who really ought to care? When the next General Election is upon us, people will have the vote who were not born when she was removed from office in order to restore the public order that had broken down because of what, in her allegedly paradigmatic United States, would have been her unconstitutional Poll Tax. At that Election, post-Thatcher teenagers will first enter Parliament in some numbers, a few being already there. And by the time of the Election after that, she will be dead. Get over her!

Marco

On some things you wrote I agree, on others I do not. It is true that her "revolution" was not entirely conservative in ethimological sense of the word: there was a strong libertarian element in it, and I believe she was not entirely aware of that. That probably happened because she used to act and decide relying a lot on her instinct, on deep convictions and ideosyncrasies that dated back to the Grantham years. I very much doubt she ever really asked herself what the premises and the consequences of that practical ideology, that tranchant division between good and evil, "our people" and "those people", were. In some ways it is true that she ended up with presiding over the continuation of the social revolution of the 1960s. She didn't mean that though, I believe. We should always remember that after having declared that "there is no such thing as a society", she continued with saying that "there are just the individuals with their families and their interests". Family was not the same as society for her ; it was something more. She didn't defeat the Soviet Union, that's true. But she defeat socialism in Britain, demostrating to everybody in Europe that democracy without marxism was possible and that free market economy was not doomed to death. Theorically, one could have done better. But who did? Anyway, I believe that being a great leader has much more to do with one's character than with his policies, more with will and courage than with intelligence. Some years ago, on a very sad occasion, I heard Brian Mulroney saying that leadership is "that magic gift of dreaming high and making the people follow your dream". It is that definition I have in mind when I say "this is a great leader". Churchill was probably not an excellent statesman, but he was a great leader; Mao was simply a monster, but nonetheless he was a great leader; Pinochet was a criminal under Western standards, but still he bore modern Chile. Thatcher was a great leader because she standed out among her contemporaries, because she fought and won so many times, because she embodied a certain vision of the World and, though making mistakes, she made it succesful, so that she is still a symbol and an inspiring example for conservative people around the World.