30 years on

Grunt

1979 Election night special on BBC Parliament was hypnotic television.

Highlights:

- Peregrine Worsthorne's jacket lapels,

- Robin Day smoking a cigar,

- The Dr Who or Blake's Seven-inspired election night studio sets.

Kittler

So Fraser, it's a time for the transfer of power and money. True, but not as you expect. Take a look at your own Debt Counter. Debtors end up losing their assets. In recent years there has been the relentless transfer of UK assets overseas. Example, almost all the Utilities foreign owned. Expect this to accelerate as indebtedness grows. The future, a Kingdom of Helots working for the profit of foreigners.

The Welsh Jacobite

Actually, none of the prayer has anything to do with S. Francis.

It first appeared in France in 1912. The erroneous attribution to the saint dates from 1927.

http://www.franciscan-archive.org/franciscana/peace.html

David

Just watching the 79 election programme in BBC parliament. Bob MacKenzie has just noted that Thatcher undertook not to touch NHS spending.

Much like Cameron, then.

Tom Pride

Fraser

Thank you for marking this 30 year anniversary.

“When Cameron first became leader, he started out saying that Thatcher was right for her time. . ” I would like to add one lesson that The Lady taught us which is valid for all time.

You had to live through the seventies to understand and appreciate “The Ratchet”. It was the idea that the march of history was collectivist. Each Labour Government would legislate further socialist measures, increase the role of the State, nationalise, raise taxes but each successive Conservative Government would never fully reverse those measures. There was a Socialist Ratchet, progressively tightening, and a consensus that it should not be or rather could not be loosened.

The Lady’s revolutionary idea was to reject the Ratchet theory and the consensus. The ideas of Ralph Harris and others in The Institute of Economic Affairs and Sir Keith Joseph showed the means. (Have you ever seen the treatment of Sir Keith when he lectured at Universities during the 1970s? The collectivists really did show their true feelings regarding freedom of speech and intellectual freedoms when their cosy consensus was threatened.) Where the collectivists nationalised, they would privatise; where collectivists had built the Tories out of cities, council houses would be sold to occupiers; the unbridled power granted to Union Leaders, they would constrain.

The ideas were truly revolutionary but the underlying principle was the Jewel in the Crown: anything the Collectivist does can be reversed. The Ratchet was a myth. This is as relevant today, in social policy or economic policy, as it was 30 years ago. To me it is the essence of what The Lady gave us and it will never be irrelevant not can it be taken away.

Grunt

A point for Cameron to note, made by Paul Johnson - the shift from pessimism to optimism, also made recently by other commentators.

Shep

I wish some of your lot, particularly Alex Massie, would remember the Spectator's own words from 1975 when he jumps on David Frum's bandwagon to denigrate and demean every attempt by American Republicans to restore the party and save the American Republic by standing by and for "the family and the individual. Against the state and against bureaucracy. Against monopolies and cartels. For people and against collectives."

TGF UKIP

Cameron is not Thatcher and, I'm very much afraid to say, neither are you, Fraser, any Cosgrave.

If you were you would be issuing a clarion, cosgravian call for Cameron to stand up and be a conservative and make a conservative case by echoing conservative convictions. Being a political realist, however, you most probably understand that this would be not just beyond but quite alien to Dave.

At this most pressing point of time if ever in the service of Great Britain a party needed to change its leader, it is,not the Labour Party, but the Tory Party.

Where is a Cosgrave to sound the alarums when we need him!

Short the UK

The problem for the Tories is that they are seen as the Ferengi. The Borg (socialists) have so stigmatised the Tories with the Ferengi smear that it has stuck in the collective consciousness, just as the Borg wanted.

The Borg are now in meltdown as their head of hive is going insane and creating confusion in the collective. The Borg truly believed they had won the collectivist argument, that racking up huge debts on inflated assets was the sure way to Borg-paradise.

The Borg did not understand
that there was a Bubble Of Britain - they are not Ferengi. Many of the Humans joined the Borg and thought Brown was the great leader who would Humanise the Borg and keep the Humans happy with rising asset prices.

Little did the Humans understand that the Borg were destroying the financial infrastructure of the economy and that the percieved wealth was just an illusion. The Borg tricked the Humans, who wanted to be tricked. The Ferengi went along with the Borg as they were drowning in free cash flow - they had never had it so good.

A few Humans understood what was going on but they stood at the margin as the HERD followed the Borg to the cliff, then the economy imploded.

The Ferengi are now vital for our national wealth and must be supported to get business flowing. The Borg in their madness are lashing out at the Ferengi and blaming them for the implosion. Many Ferengi will now leave to seek more vibrant pastures.

The Humans who followed the Borg are confused and don't understand why they fell for the Borg. Are they not as smart as they believed themselves to be? Did they get entranced by property porn? Do they not understand economics and business? Why have they been conned by the Borg? This they will mull and park in the mind.

The Humans who undestood the Borg must now speak out and help contain and destory the Borg. The Borg deserve to die.

We must kill the Borg as they are killing our country.

Ian C

I don't think Lady T would agree with you, Fraser that today is time for consensus. That happens only in times of 'war'.

If you read Maurice Saatchi's piece in today's FT you would not have this opinion.

The crucial piece is this: -

"Economics was always her priority: “National solvency is not so much an objective as ‘conditio sine qua non’ for the attainment of any objectives.” [By New Labour’s appearing to be willing to stick to Tory spending plans they fooled many into thinking that they had bought into this – their real deception].

For this, she was routinely condemned for ice-cold brutishness by the left, and by some in her own party. They said she was “money-obsessed”.

But she did not accept that an interest in economics implied a heart of stone. On the contrary, she believed that individuals could not be free if they were poor, because, as J. K. Galbraith said: “The greatest restriction on the liberty of the citizen is a complete absence of money.” "

If we all would remember this, then we would not have to be 'called out' as Thatcherites, merely as those who are unafraid of the truth. For Galbraith and Thatcher to be quoted in the same breath as allies in their exposition of the economic fundamentals is for her (and perhaps for him too) to be properly understood.

Paul B

When Mrs T was first elected, I as an angry 19year old young man,who thought the world unfair, against him.I sort solace in rugby, beer and women, not necessarily in that order. I believed that socialism & the collective was the only fair way to live. However, there was always a nagging doubt in mind, a small voice that suggested, that if I were to work hard, why should I give my money away, why after 10 hours on site, slogging on the hod, up & down ladders, that by the end of the day I hardly crawl into the public bar (remember them ?) of the local pub,why should I share it with others, at the threat of imprisonment if I didn`t cough up, with others who would not know an honest days hard work if it hit them in the face with shovel I used to load the mixer with. Then Mrs T exploded into my life and like Mary in the Sutherland Brothers song Maggie was the girl who taught me all I had to know, she put me right at my first mistake. She explained and I listened, she was a breath of fresh air, there was no waffle, she gave it to you straight, told it like it was, there are no free lunches in life , the nations budget needs balancing like a household budget. You have to work for what you want and through work, comes freedom, independence and pride. I worship Mrs T, I will not hear a bad word said about her. I believe the poll tax given its chance would have worked. Oh, for her like again, if DC can be half as effective as her, he will be great leader, I still believe he can, cometh the hour cometh the man.

David Ossitt

Tom Pride.

I enjoyed your post; thank you.

David

Michael Crick in 79 "They decided she should fight on very few specific promises but on general themes"

Sounds familiar.....

The Huntsman

Watching with considerable fascination the BBC 1979 election programme, I was most struck by the extent to which Labour and the Unions were in a state of utter denial about the causes of their defeat and by the extent to which they did not understand for a second what MT's coming actually meant.

They thought it was going to be 'business as usual' with the TUC trooping in & out of Downing Street, ordering the world. And they refused steadfastly to acknowledge that their behaviour in the late 60s and 70s, in particular in the 'winter of discontent' had had any bearing on how people had voted.

With time I had forgotten all this. Looking back we should give thanks to the Gods each and every day we breathe for Margaret Thatcher and for the fact that, with steely determination, she went about the business of removing the left and right testicle of the TUC and the Unions.

There were plenty of other things for which she is rightly worthy of great praise, but for this thing especially I, for one, consider her the Saviour of Britain.

It is also, of course, why THEY hate her so for she removed from the board what was, in effect, the military wing of the Labour Movement.

The irony, of course, is that she thus forced the Labour Party to return to a more democratic way of life and thus gave us, in time, "New" Labour, Blair and then Brown.

Now we have to do much of it all over again.....

Kittler

Tom Pride.

If what you say is true, why is the UK Government about to do a deal with the French state owned nuclear company to build new power stations and stop the lights going out.
Could a state owned enterprise be doing something right?

Nicholas

Can anyone explain to me why the Radio Times should report (regarding this programme) that Mrs Thatcher's election in 1979 spelt the end for consensus politics? Thanks.

THX1138

I saw a teenager walking down the Holloway Road with a T-Shirt that read.

"I Still Hate Margaret Thatcher"

Made me laugh.

David Ossitt

Paul B

Spot on; you have said it all.

Kittler

Mr Huntsman.

It was not Thatcher that was the "Saviour of Britain" but North Sea Oil. Without it, her administration and the UK would have collapsed. This time there is no pot of gold awaiting, only burgeoning debt.

Henry

Of all the pieces I've seen on Thatcher in the last few days, Peter Hitchens' is simply outstanding.

While there is much to admire in Thatcher, if she had gone far enough, Labour could never have wrought the mess they have.

Her biggest failing was allowing the BBC to continue. It has set the political agenda for the last two decades in quite unbelievable and unmerited fashion.

Look at the state of The Grauniad, The Not So Independent and The Mirror. Then look at the New York Times. All these Left wing publications are just leaking money hand over fist, yet the BBC's poll tax enables it to carry on as arrogantly as it pleases and now has the cheek to ask for money from Google.

As if Google wasn't insidious enough! Can you imagine those two together?

The BBC must be broken up into tiny bits and sold off. This spiteful Left wing behemoth must not be allowed to have the influence and power it has been given carte blanche to have over the last two decades.

It must not have an afterlife where the limbs can join together again like Frankenstein. It must be diced and sliced.

If it carries on in the free market the way its print version, The Guardian, does, it too will lose the sorts of sums that paper does.

It is unbelievable so many of us are forced to bail the BBC out. It must, must, must go.

Paul L

The Huntsman - I agree completely. I have been watching it too and they had no idea what was about to happen.

In paricular, the head of the teachers' union was quoted as saying he would be "first in the queue for Downing Street"....I wonder if he is still waiting?

THX1138

Nicholas because it was the end of consensus politics !

Verity

Tom Pride - a very fine post. Thank you!

Ben Elford

I was captivated by today's screening of the 1979 election coverage.

Among many striking aspects was the dignity shown by James Callaghan, and the respect accorded to him.

None of this applies to the present incumbent.

Verity

I would like to see the HoL re-established as a hereditary chamber. The peers were disinterested; they seldom showed up; they were never interested in interfering in the lives of others and they were largely not corrupt.

Now we've got "peers" selling favours, and this Uddin individual has elbowed her way up to the trough. What the hell are peers doing getting "expenses"? And the thuggish "Lord" Ahmad who threatened to send round 10,000 angry Muslims if Geert Wilders was allowed to speak in the Lords.

Point number two, David Cameron is handicapped even if he wanted to make any changes such as I mentioned above, because the socialists would jump up and down shouting the unanswerable "Tory toff!!" Even were he voted in, which, God willing, he will not be, he could only pander to the populists for fear of being slagged as for his class.

He really is a most unsuitable candidate in this day and age. Way too much baggage. Unlike Thatcher, who got where she got through hard graft and determination.

Verity

Henry, there is no point in breaking the BBC up because, as you correctly intuited, it would reunite with itself. The answer to the BBC is total destruction. Let them sell off their old comedies and so on to other companies, so they're not lost forever, and then have a controlled explosion. Oh, gosh, I hope James Naughtie and various other hard lefties aren't in the building when they press the plunger! Tee hee.

Anyway, it has to be razed to the ground and left as a brownfield site to detoxify for five years. It will be cheaper to keep the whole staff on welfare, so the taxpayer will be far better off.

David Lindsay

Was she "the Iron Lady" when, within a few months of election on clear commitments with regard to Rhodesia, she simply abandoned them at the Commonwealth Conference in Lusaka?

Was she "the Iron Lady" when, having claimed that Britain would never give up Hong Kong, she took barely twenty-four hours to return to Planet Earth and effect a complete U-turn?

Was she "the Iron Lady" when she took just as little time to move from public opposition to public support of Spanish accession to the Western European Union?

Was she "the Iron Lady" when she gave up monetarism completely during her second term?

And so on, and on, and on.

Get over her.

Ian C

Nicholas,
Because it was sh*t or bust then, as it is now. When it is like that there is no use in waiting for consensus to come along. Like now. Anyone with half a brain knows what has to happen but there will always be the consensus busters who have a stupid alternative to distract with and delay the inevitable.

For all those who doubt Cameron, and I am among them (why would we not be? we have no real proof of his potential), you are in the same boat as those who doubted Thatcher in 1975-79.

As someone whose stag night was the night before the election of May 3rd 1979, I don't seem to recall those doubts at the time, merely the yearning to be rid of what had gone before, including the happennings night before!

Paul B - you are a first class example of what she did for the nation. Great that you realise it, many will not admit it and more are oblivious.

Nicholas

Thank you THX1138 and Ian C for the answers but can you please elaborate further on what is generally meant by "consensus politics" as it applied to pre-Thatcher governments? Was it consensus in the sense of a generally shared understanding of what needed to be done, e.g. less conflict between government and opposition or consensus as in a compromise in achieving limited aims? Was it indicative of a parliament less polarised and constrained by manifesto, policy agenda and/or whipping?

Nowadays it seems to mean a conspiracy (of unspoken truth) where the most obvious questions and their equally obvious answers are avoided for ideological or other reasons. How much of this is down to an entrenched socialist domination of the projected public sector/academia/media response which intimidates what may be discussed or debated? If the difficult questions are raised any discussion of the answers tends to be shouted down in strident socialist propaganda or lost in party political accusations.

Has the relationship between socialist government and socialist movement altered only in the nature of the two contributing components? It seems to me that the socialist unions stranglehold on productivity and enterprise pre Thatcher (in terms of industry and commerce) has now shifted to a socialist bloc (public sector/academia/media) stranglehold on culture and attitude (in terms of philosophy). In other words the battlefield has changed but it is the same old war.

Even the conceded ground that allowed for the re-invention of New Labour (industry and commerce) has now been invaded again. In that context, historically, the Thatcherite gains seem small and the socialist wins very great. The socialist ideology has permeated public discourse to the extent that the supposedly "central" ground is actually the left and what Brown and his crew represent is something more extreme left.

It may be in part, I feel, a romantic association with communist ideals, untested by reality, which has allowed socialist tendencies in this country to aspire to a societal structure long since tested to destruction and rejected in Eastern Europe.

I also lived through these years but I am having trouble reconciling my memories of the politics then with the current history of them now.

Thanks.

Ian C

Nicholas
You seem to distrust your memory which seems sound enough to me. My take is argued without the use of the word socialist or communist for the sake of illustrating that it need not be made an ideological battle that needs fighting.
In the 1970’s there was a ‘consensus’ that the state needed to make the sort of decisions that individuals and businesses needed to be trusted to make and that the citizens and business were obligated to provide the funds to maintain those politically made decisions. This was the case on both sides of the political divide. Heath was a big government Tory as was the Labour Party. If Heath wasn’t initially he was frightened into so being by the disastrous Barber boom which added to the inflationary infrastructures built in the 1960’s, especially under the Wilson government. Those were a consequence of the trades unions driving policy. The corollary of that was the citizen had to live under the yoke of a unionised state ‘system’ that wanted all the resources for itself and if you did not like it then you lumped it as there was no political choice by the 1970’s.
The state had been better placed in the immediate post war years to do what was required to re-establish a modern society for the post war environment. But that inevitably in retrospect, built in a monopoly of state control of far too large a proportion of the economy. And those who had acquired that monopoly powers were reluctant to relinquish it. More damaging still was they pursued their own best interests, maintaining that these were in the interests of the country as a whole. The budget of 1976 disabused us of all that - just like the 2009 Budget (if we needed it!).
The Tories after their massive defeats of 1997 and 2001 were in no state to credibly argue that the New Labour proposition was dangerous and would fail. The ERM debacle of 1992 had destroyed their reputation so no one would listen. This created a renewed, temporary, false consensus by default, that once more, the state could better many things that we all need and should have investment in their monopoly. That has proved a sham with the extent of the debt we have got into, once again, and that ‘consensus’ is now once again broken. The Tory party has been slow to acknowledge and declare this from the roof tops, for fear of ‘frightening the horses’ in order to get elected – unsurprisingly in my view, if too timid for my preference.
That is why I said at the top that consensus is no longer appropriate because the left will never agree to what has to happen – which is, as Fraser says, to “radically chang[e] government by transferring power (and money) from inside government walls to the people outside”. My point is there is no purpose served by waiting to identify such a consensus because with the right unapologetic action, as Thatcher went about in the 1980’s, it will, as it did then, form automatically on its own.
To prevent a return of the old consensus the Tories will have to be at least as radical in their destruction of the public sector unions as Thatcher was in dealing with the miners and the grip the TUC acquired on the country in the 25 years after the war. We, as a country, were taken in by the ‘New Labour’ project. But that was not even as permanent as the leadership of Blair. If there is any doubt about that today, just listen in vain for the calls of ‘bring back Blair’ whereas many yearn for the decisive action of Thatcher. If the Cameron Tories prove only half as good as those of the 1979 to 1988 party they will kill off the Labour party and its monopolistic tendency as the main alternative government after the coming election because the final proof surely now exists that the monopolists, big government way cannot again command a consensus.

Paul B

Thank you Ian C for your blog at 1242.You articulate my thoughts and I believe many others.

My belief is, that it is the Conservatives and only the Conservatives, who are representatives of the working people-workers of all shades and classes- of this nation. From White Man man, to the CEO of a Footsie listed company. Mrs T represented us, she spoke our language, she sold us our council houses, our public utilities, she made them answerable to the shareholders & Sid, to their customers, not to Whitehall and the unions. She was also pragmatic, she picked her fights, she was until the poll tax a lucky General, which is a skill in itself.She undoubtedly restored a sense of pride in the nation in our Military, a can do attitude, rather its someone else responsibility. We were becoming progressively weaned off state assistance/control. Child benefit was withering on the vine, private pensions (with hiccups) were growing, private health care & schools, all starting to expand and lift the burden from the taxpayers. Brown has undermined all that hard hard work, he has destroyed everything, for that I will never forgive him. I feel it personally. It feels like he has wasted thirty years of my life, gone up in smoke, because of his vanity-as outlined by Alex Massie in his blog- his Gordon knows best belief. Was there ever such a repugnant man? Such a stupid, vain & preening man.