The left hated Thatcher because she thrashed them

Margaret Thatcher, 1925 – 2013

On Gee Street in London there is a Stafford Cripps House named after the post war Labour Chancellor. In Fulham there is also a Stafford Cripps House which contains a Clement Atlee Court named after his boss. In East London there is the Kier Hardie Estate, named after the first Independent Labour MP. In Clapton there is a Nye Bevan Estate named after the former Labour minister.

So I was baffled when, today, my various inboxes, feeds, and walls were swamped by left wing friends asking how bothered I was by the passing of Margaret Thatcher. One or two seemed rather put out when I responded that I wasn’t massively. As someone who could be considered a ‘Thatcherite’ I believe in the individual not an individual. I’ll leave the veneration of Dear Leaders to the left with their crumbling municipal buildings.

At 87 Margaret Thatcher lived a long life. Insofar as we can tell about the private life of this most resolutely political of people it was also a rather happy one. The daughter of a provincial, middle class shopkeeper, born during the Depression, she went to Oxford, became a chemist, and then became a lawyer. Elected to Parliament in 1959 after a decade of trying she rose against incredible odds to become the first female leader of a major British political party in 1975 and Britain’s first female Prime Minister in 1979. She was accompanied every step of the way by her beloved husband Denis.

Her period in office was marked by internal division and conflict of a degree not seen under any other prime minister of the century. Thatcher took on the Labour Party (three times), the Argentines, the National Union of Mineworkers, and crushed them all. By the time Thatcher left office even the Soviet Union and its miserable communism were history.

But in 1988 Thatcher gave her famous Bruges Speech in which she stated “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.” For the European federalists, including many in the Conservative Party close to Thatcher’s predecessor Ted Heath who had never forgiven the grocers daughter for beating the grocer, this was a step too far.

In 1990 Thatcher was finally brought down, not by a bunch of troublemakers rioting in Trafalgar Square, but by her own Europhile backbenchers, angered by her refusal to sign up to a single European currency. History has proved Thatcher emphatically right.

She brooded on this betrayal in retirement but, judging by her memoirs, she was fully aware of just what she had helped achieve, even if she was typically modest about it. She had taken Britain from an increasingly chaotic, sclerotic, and socialist place, to a place which was on the up again. Internationally she had restored some of Britain’s old standing and seen off the communist threat.

Both in Britain and abroad, with the help of her great ally Ronald Reagan among others, she had shown that the inevitable, onward march of socialism was nothing of the kind.

And, perhaps most uncomfortably for her detractors, she was popular and remains so. She won three elections on the trot. In 2011 a YouGov poll for The Sunday Times placed her firmly at the top of a list of post-war British prime ministers with a whopping 27 percent, more even than Winston Churchill.

The sainted Clement Atlee, architect of the welfare state, nationaliser of industries, and namesake of a court in Fulham, limped home with just 5 percent of the vote behind Tony Blair and, mysteriously, Harold Wilson. The much-vaunted street parties celebrating her demise might be rather more thinly attended than the guests have convinced themselves.

Those who profess to hate Thatcher have committed the error of taking something they believe (or claim to, I’m not convinced many of them are actually serious), repeating it loudly and often to other people who also believe it, and assuming from this fusillade of confirmation that everyone else thinks it as well.

These people can often give you a list of reasons they hate Thatcher, lists which are often so suspiciously similar that you have to question how many are the product of original thought and how many are just being parroted to feign an opinion. Most of them, from the mass unemployment to her supposed destruction of Britain’s industry, are easily dealt with.

But the truth is that she would have been disliked intensely no matter what she did. Owen Jones wrote recently that “Thatcher hate is not kneejerk anti-Toryism, after all, there will be no champagne corks popping when John Major dies, and there was no bunting on display to celebrate the deaths of Ted Heath, Alec Douglas-Home, Harold Macmillan or Anthony Eden.”

But remember that in 1948 Nye Bevan, one of the most venerated and overrated figures in British political history, said, “No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social  seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party.  So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.”

Remember also that Bevan didn’t say that about a Conservative Party containing right wing ideologues like Thatcher, Norman Tebbit, or Keith Joseph. He said it about a Conservative Party which contained such Keynesian, welfare-state-loving, consensus-supporting politicians as Harold Macmillan, R. A. Butler, and Alec Douglas-Home.

The left disliked Thatcher because she was a Conservative. It hated her because she thrashed them.

Margaret Thatcher is one of only two British prime ministers to coin an ‘ism’ and unlike the other, Blairism, Thatcherism actually meant something. This is why whether alive or dead she will live on. Her ‘ism’ will be a much more permanent monument than the grey, decayed concrete boxes named after various Labour no marks.

This article originally appeared at The Commentator

Reagan tells it like it is…or was

Bob Crow vs Ronald Reagan

Students new to London ought to get used to this. On the evening of Monday September 6th London Underground workers headed out on strike. London ground to a halt and was not back to normal until Wednesday evening. Similar strikes are expected to continue for another few months.

Tube union leader Bob Crow (as close as London has to Public Enemy Number 1) claims the strikes are in response to the proposed reduction of ticket office hours at outlying tube stations which will lead to the loss of 800 jobs. He claims this will affect tube safety.

Crow’s safety concerns can be doubted. Back in 2004 he shut the network to protest the sacking of a number of maintenance workers who had been caught boozing on the job. So much for safety!

In truth Crow is simply indulging in the age old union trick of cloaking sheer self-interest as concern for the public, the very public he and his union plan to screw next week.

It needn’t be like this. It would be entirely possible for Crow and the RMT union to turn up to work as normal and simply open the gates; hit Transport for London in the pocket but leave the rest of us out of it. What Crow calls ‘industrial action’ is, in fact, industrial inaction.

Crow complains about the effects of coalition cuts on the London economy but his strike is estimated to cost London £48 million pounds. But, as Crow once said, “I’m not one of those union officials who continually say they regret the inconvenience caused by industrial action”.

Indeed, it needn’t be like this. In 1981 the American air traffic controllers union went on strike looking for higher pay and shorter hours. President Ronald Reagan gave the 13,000 controllers 48 hours to get back to work. When they ignored him he sacked them.

It worked. With help from military air traffic controllers Reagan kept the skies open, broke the union, and freed the average American flyer from their whims.

Perhaps this points a way forward in London? First, see if the RMT will agree to limit its industrial dispute to the disputing parties; itself and the RMT. Failing that, bring in trained personnel to operate the Underground network so that a resource we all pay for cannot be turned on and off by workers who earn around £30,000 a year and get 35 to 40 days holiday (the average in London is £26,000 and 20 days each).

So, as you fight your way onto a bus during a tube strike, lets hope the capital’s answer to Reagan isn’t far away. In the meantime, welcome to London.

Written for Caerulean, October 2010

Bill Maher – American Idiot

The Constitution of the United States opens with the words “We the People”. It doesn’t say ‘We the Government’ or ‘We the Politicians” or ‘We the Experts From Ivy League Universities’. From its very inception the government of the US was based on Locke’s idea of the consent of the governed.

Clearly someone needs to explain this to TV comic Bill Maher. A few weeks ago he described the US as a “stupid country”. In response to the flood of opposition he got to this he responded on the Huffington Post blog.

Maher rattled off a list of facts proving the stupidity of the average American that would do the smuggest European proud. Ignorance of American constitutional arrangements, basic science and elementary history were just some of the nuggets trotted out to prove it. Maher asked “And these are the idiots we want to weigh in on the minutia of health care policy?”

Well if you believe in We the People then yes, that’s exactly the sort of people you want weighing in. It is We the People, after all, who will end up footing the bill for whatever healthcare measure is eventually churned out by Congress. These idiots that Maher has such contempt for are hard working taxpayers. Before the elites can do a single solitary thing they must first confiscate the resources to do it from the earnings of these idiots hard work. To simply take their money and then deny them any say in how it is spent is nothing less than legalized robbery. The cry of the American Revolution was “No taxation without representation”. We can only conclude that Maher would have fought with the redcoats at Lexington.

A famous Republican, Abraham Lincoln, once described “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. Maher unashamedly believes in only two of these; government of the people for the people as he views the average American (though, one guesses, not himself) as too dumb to participate in government by the people.

Maher concluded his tirade by saying “And if you want to call me an elitist for this, I say thank you. Yes, I want decisions made by an elite group of people who know what they’re talking about.”

But Ronald Reagan nailed this, discussing the American tradition of democracy, in his 1964 speech to the Republican convention; “This idea? that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/new-rule-smart-president_b_253996.html