Thatcher: A requiem

For former British premier Margaret Thatcher (October 1925-April 2013), the freedom of the markets was the highest liberty and she chained the people indissolubly to them, says Jeremy Seabrook.

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IN one of her last public appearances, Margaret Thatcher is seen coming out of 10 Downing Street after a visit to David Cameron. She is wearing a pale blue suit, her hair is in its characteristic frozen spun-sugar halo. She has to reach for the railings to steady herself. Who, seeing a figure so reduced and enfeebled, could fail to be moved to compassion?

It is a quality for which she herself had small regard, especially towards those communities whose historic purpose was wiped out during her premiership from 1979 to 1990. Revenues from North Sea oil at the time maintained the high value of the currency and made imports so cheap they obliterated much of Britain's industrial base, especially coal, steel and manufacturing. This created a bitterness which, 25 years later, had not abated: in some pit-villages there were spontaneous celebrations over her death; a potent contrast with what the Daily Mail said was a Britain bidding 'an affectionate farewell to Baroness Thatcher'.

Transformational

Thatcher was 'transformational'. She possessed the charisma of the obsessive, the individual in the grip of a single idea. And indeed, her intensity made of her an incarnation, a physical symbol of a process that would erase 200 years of industrialism from Britain. She drew upon herself both unstinting adoration and deep loathing; and the woman herself served as a useful lightning-conductor for the epochal shift occurring in British society and economy, as well as in the wider world. Her admirers saw her as Britannia, and without irony, although she presided over the eclipse of much that had been characteristically British, and heralded the coming of transnational culture - the worship of wealth, celebrity and glamour, which obliterated all that was homely, distinctive, and especially working-class, in British life. It is said that, in her memory, a museum and library are to be set up in order to 'keep her ideas alive'. This should not be difficult: the proposed library would be an exiguous collection indeed, for what would it contain beyond the collected works of Milton Friedman - Thatcher's 'intellectual freedom fighter' as opposed to Nelson Mandela's 'terrorist' - and Hayek's The Road to Serfdom?

When she died, the air was filled with ideological lamentations; but as soon as she was despatched to the crematorium in Mortlake, and her ashes joined those of her husband at the Royal Chelsea Hospital, the media, almost gratefully, it seemed, consigned her, the monotheist of Political Economy and assassin of socialism, to oblivion.  

The funeral itself was a macabre festival of snobbery and pomp, displaying imperial archaisms of precedence (not quite a state funeral, but a ceremonial send-off with military honours, tribute to her imperial fantasy that shed real blood in the Malvinas); a sanctimonious establishment elevated her to premature sainthood, and the government invoked her to lend an aura of sanctity to its own continuity with her malign project.

Repudiation

Her trajectory from provincial grocer's daughter, a frugal, thrifty life over the shop in a small town, in which her father, Alderman Roberts, was a significant political figure, is generally interpreted as having formed her worldview. If he did, her subsequent political career was a repudiation of all he stood for. The values of localism and frugality she is supposed to have learned at her father's knee were jettisoned; she wrecked local government, and abolished the Greater London Council, and also took Britain into the great global debauch of money that came with the City Big Bang in 1986, the deregulation and exaltation of finance. This is the very reverse of all that she is believed to have assimilated in the way of prudence and caution from the lower-middle-class respectability of Grantham and her Methodist heritage. Perhaps the only memorable act which may be attributed to her small-town upbringing was her introduction of Section 28, which banned anything that could be interpreted as the 'promotion of homosexuality'; a miserably prejudiced measure, against the repeal of which in 2003 an enfeebled Thatcher was ushered into the House of Lords to vote.

She was no conservative. In fact, she wanted to conserve nothing, not even wealth where it was already concentrated, because under her, the making of money became the supreme good, and indeed brought to prominence many people, some of modest talent but large ambition, in the fields of entertainment, business, public relations and finance. Of course, making money was scarcely new, but she presided over a free market which invaded spaces from which it had been formerly excluded; and having trodden down the barriers, it set up its own temples in monoliths of steel and glass, shrines at which Thatcher's long pilgrimage may be said to have ended. It is, perhaps, fitting that she died in the Ritz - a sojourn subsidised by its owners, the Barclay brothers, also proprietors of the Daily Telegraph, ardent admirers of Thatcher. Not for her the pinched existence of the infirm elderly in care homes; unable to manage the stairs in her London home in Belgravia, she retreated to that fabulously expensive alms-house to end her days. 'Let them die in the Ritz' might be carved on her tombstone.

For Thatcher the freedom of markets was the highest liberty, and she chained the people indissolubly to them. Single-minded and relentless, she dismantled state involvement in the economy. To her heirs and assigns she bequeathed the task of deconstructing the welfare state, the next logical step in the epic project of this bogus conservative enterprise.

Cameron called her a great Briton, a patriot, and spoke - in one of those historic echoes Britain does so well - of her lion-hearted love of country. This is also mummery. Her commitment was not at all to the pious parochialism of the cornershop, small businesses, much less to the workers; her passion was for the supranational realm of wealth, which acknowledges no homeland but nestles in tax havens, remote imperial islands, or floats above the earth in private jets, settling only on citadels well guarded against the invader. This is not love of country, for if this had animated her, she would have been moved by the plight of ruined communities and wrecked livelihoods, the result of the transformation of the material and moral landscapes of Britain.

Something she did bring to politics from her early years was played out within the Conservative Party. Was her distaste for the 'wets', the last vestiges in the Tory party of noblesse oblige, the one-nation tradition, a remnant of the humiliations she - and her father - had perhaps suffered, when the family were still purveyors of groceries to patricians in fine houses who rarely paid their bills and treated tradespeople with condescension and scorn? When she came to power, were the 'wets', as she called the old grandees, perceived as remnants of provincial gentry who resisted the disposal of public goods in her orgy of privatisation, and her vision of a country, which, she warned in an early speech, was to become 'a less cosy, more abrasive place'? Perhaps, too, her branding of the African National Congress as a 'terrorist organisation' owed something to the monochrome xenophobia of her pinched upbringing, as did her notorious remark about people 'swamped' by immigrants.

The legend runs - and she is already mythologised as the warrior queen, a late Boudicca, an embodiment of Britannia - that the country in which she came to power was in ruins. It was just after the 'winter of discontent', when public service workers had been on strike, the dead were unburied, garbage strewed the streets and union pickets stood in angry knots around braziers compelling those who wanted to work to turn back. According to David Cameron, she saved the country. What he didn't say was that she saved it from the Labour Party, but the subtext is there, as is his own desire to repeat this political rescue-mission. Tory mythology runs that she lifted Britain from its knees and enabled us to walk tall in the world once more. Deeply unpopular in the initial stages of her premiership - as unemployment rose, there were riots in Liverpool and Brixton - she was saved by the Malvinas conflict, which allowed her to replay in miniature a ruling of the waves. The theatre of nostalgia continues to have potent electoral appeal in Britain. 

Agent and emblem

Actually, the exhaustion of Communism and of its weakly offspring, social democracy, was already clear when she came to power. The world was ripe for the second coming of political economy, deregulation, liberalisation, and the 'integration' of Britain into a world economy, no matter what forms of social disintegration occurred in the process. She was agent and emblem, but no initiator of this process. She may have supplied Ronald Reagan with the ideological rhetoric, but this only rationalised changes that had been under way for many years. Even the de-industrialisation of Britain was well advanced before she came to power, since the national division of labour was already giving way to its global successor. 

Thatcher's defeat of the unions was accomplished by the erasure of the industries which had made them necessary in the first place. Coal-mining had for two centuries been the bedrock of the country's industrial wealth; pit-villages across Britain were laid waste, their people left to the consolations of drugs, drink and unemployment. Thatcher exemplified the joke of Brecht: if the government didn't like the people, it should change them. The people were indeed changed, and even the memory of industrialism was obliterated; a sad forgetfulness, made more poignant by her own affliction in the last years of her life, as she became more disoriented and detached from the reality she had helped bring about. 

Ideological bequest

For Thatcher, actions spoke louder than words; and true to this axiom, she said barely one memorable thing, and proffered no piece of wisdom, for all her 11 years in power. She was illuminated solely by the inner grace of which, in the puritanical nonconformist tradition, wealth was the outer sign.

Yet her inheritance is inescapable. She terrified the Labour Party into acquiescence in her money-drenched view of the world. This produced Tony Blair, an interregnum before her true ideological heirs would come into their own, Cameron, Osborne and Clegg, who carry forward her 'revolution' by tearing down, discreetly but unmistakeably, the last vestiges of the welfare state, and privatising the health service. This will ensure that each individual will be forced to make her or his private accommodation with the vast impersonal forces of capital, or perish.

The banking crisis, widening inequality, the indifference of free markets to mere people, the raising of business into a force of redemption, and the making of profit into the true calling of humanity - this is her bequest. The most fateful of all her utterances was actually not hers at all; it originated with her guru, Sir Keith Joseph: 'There Is No Alternative,' she declared. This apparent absurdity was derided at the time; but as the years have passed, it has become part of the common wisdom, and its significance is only now being registered. For if all other ways of ordering human affairs have indeed been cancelled, and capitalism is uncontested (for that is what she meant), these words, far from representing the triumph of freedom, are its death-knell. If it is true, the liberties fought for and re-asserted by this benign providential figure are negated. An absence of alternatives locks us permanently into the compulsions of a single system; and Thatcher, doughty warrior of the free world, set it on the way to a deepening captivity.

In that shop on a Grantham street corner in the early 1930s, was it the exotic whiff of tea, coffee and cocoa, the smell of cloves, pepper and fragrant rice which filled the nostrils of Margaret with the heady scent of a globalisation to come, the rationalisation of production in a world governed by the deepest unreason?    

Jeremy Seabrook is a freelance journalist based in the UK.

*Third World Resurgence No. 273, May 2013, pp 41-43