Cameron on Thatcher
Peter Hoskin 8:32am
Last night, David Cameron presented Margaret Thatcher with a lifetime achievement award, and he follows it up with an article on the Iron Lady in today's Telegraph. The article begins boldly:
“Those who say that the modern Conservative Party is breaking with the legacy of Margaret Thatcher are wrong.”
And mixes praise for Thatcher with swipes at Brown:
“She tackled inflation through getting control of the money supply, an enormously difficult task which not only makes Gordon Brown's sole monetary decision - to hand over control over interest rates to the Bank of England - look puny in comparison; it made it possible in the first place...
...Margaret Thatcher is a fitting recipient of the Morgan Stanley Great Britons award, when we judge greatness as it should be judged: the scale of the legacy. She made the landscape in which we live today.
But today's circumstances are different. We still have major economic challenges ahead, largely conditioned by a decade of debt, and the failure by Gordon Brown to keep the roof in repair while the sun shone.
But the most fundamental long-term challenge we face is not the broken economy inherited by Margaret Thatcher in 1979, but our broken society, the consequence of years of failed state planning and the denial of social responsibility. Britain has falling school standards, the worst rate of family breakdown in Europe and an endemic crime problem in our inner cities.”
Cameron's point – that we're living in the Britain of the 1970s, but with social rather than economic problems – echoes Peter Whittle over at Centre Right yesterday. It's a clever strategy – relating today's Tories with Thatcher and her struggles ( for the benefit of doubters like Lord Tebbit), whilst distinguishing them at the same time. But it's also risky. Will the effort to keep everyone happy dilute Cameron's message, leaving no-one happy in the end?
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Comments
Rohan
February 1st, 2008 11:26amIs Cameron economically illiterate? It wasn't the control of the money supply by any definition that controlled inflation - pure monetarism was abandoned early if it was ever truly attempted. You might see it as a way of controlling inflation expectations or building credibility that could then control inflation in itself - but that would be a charitable interpretation of what happened. That’s especially the case when you look at her Government’s later economic policy from 1986 onwards where they seemed to deliberately create an inflationary bubble. What we do know is for better or worse it increased AME spending on benefits hugely during the early 80s (which along with some tax increases through freezing personal allowances created some interesting Keynesian elements into the Government’s policy) and added to the inactive/unemployed count hugely with has had residual effects (see generational incapacity benefit claims). Surely when he was a junior bag carrier at the Treasury he actually read the papers about it?
Jon Pourreau
February 1st, 2008 11:26amI am pleased to see that David Cameron is no longer frightened of praising Margagret Thatcher. At one stage she appeared to have been air brushed out of history by the Conservatives. As with so many great politicians, people are only now beginning to understand the profound Genius of Mrs Thatcher. The Britain that she inherited was an economic basket case, very different from Gordon Brown’s Golden Legacy in 1997, which even he privately acknowledged at the time. The economy has withstood 10 years of political incompetence but is now beginning to show many of the characteristics of the pre-Thatcherite economy of the 1970's. Davis Cameron should now seize the opportunity to nail the lie that Gordon Brown's socialist policies have created a new world economy which is immune to the economic realities of the outside world. He should focus relentlessly on the ghosts which are yet again coming to haunt our economy, such as low productivity and an expanding public sector, which will rapidly increase the levels of Government debt over the coming years and bring back the spectacle of rising inflation, which Mrs Thatcher so successfully fought and won in the 1980's.