Future Buried in the Past

Everyone is allowed to express a little extra kindness to the recently departed. It is only a truism to say that eulogies are not objective.

But the death today of (Lady) Margaret Thatcher has prompted the most fawning statements from her political offspring in the modern Conservative Party. Former Cabinet member, Lord (Ken) Baker said when she left office, the UK was the strongest economy in Europe when clearly (West) Germany had outperformed Britain since the late 1960s.

David Cameron went even further by claiming, “she didn’t just lead the country…she saved it.” To be a British saviour is a quality only really attributable to Churchill.  Such prosaic tributes and nauseating hyperbole give a highly false impression of such a domineering figure in Britain’s history.

Former London Mayor, Ken Livingstone, did not cow to the obsequious mood and said, “her legacy was fundamentally wrong.” He pointed to the sale of council houses as root cause of a chronic shortage of housing now. Her tax and industrial policies created the underclass of benefit dependency and as a female politician she did nothing for women’s rights whatsoever.

The Conservatives’ toadying tributes all point to her political demise in 1990 as PM as being prompted by the introduction of the iniquitous flat rate local ‘poll’ tax. One or two suggest she had gone too far over her opposition to policies over the European Union. The truth is she had lost her mental faculties to be able to carry out the onerous task of being Prime Minister. Increasingly eccentric public performances in Parliament were matched by delusional behaviour around the Cabinet table as chronicled by her Deputy Geoffrey Howe when she sacked him in fit of pique.

Many of the political class who are describing her as a great patriot are deeply selective of her version of it. Certainly she, by her powerful political will, enabled the Falkland Islands to be recaptured in 1982. But equally in her determination to break the National Union of Mineworkers in the 1984-5 strike, she ensured the price the country paid was the loss of energy self-sufficiency.

There are few political figures who have attracted such adoration and opprobrium in equal measure. Former French President Francois Mitterand captured both sides when he said, “ She has the eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe.” Dr Jonathan Miller said, “ her odious suburban gentility and sentimental, saccharine patriotism, cater to the worst elements of commuter idiocy.”

It is not altogether easy to find many of Thatcher’s achievements made simply for the good of her fellow man. But she did introduce harm reduction measures and needle exchanges to slow the spread of HIV/AIDS in mid 80s. Her scientific background overcame what appeared to be a highly toxic media issue at the time.

However her political philosophy was heavily influenced by Neo-Conservatives Keith Joseph and the discredited Enoch Powell. Her view that there was “no such thing as society,” will be her epitaph – these words constitute a philosophical heartlessness based on economic consumerism and acquisitiveness as the sole path to the nation’s happiness.

She detested her predecessor’s, Ted Heath, “One Nation” approach and he hated her back. At a formal photograph of former PMs, he was asked if he could stand further to the right of her, “Not sure that’s actually possible,” he grumbled. Her unyielding support for Chilean tyrant General Pinochet during his arrest in Britain in 1998 showed she was morally fallible. 

But her impact on the Conservative Party is still immense. In the Shires of rural Britain, David Cameron is still compared highly unfavourably to her 23 years after she was deselected by her backbenchers, as were the other four party leaders in between.

In many ways Thatcher’s greatest mark has been on her own party, the Conservative Party have only been victorious in one election since she won easily in 1987. All subsequent leaders have been trying to emulate her dominance and conviction but have simply come across as divisive.  

That ultimately is Thatcher’s legacy: a nation uneasy with itself and a party trying to recapture the elusive past.

You Don't Belong Here

There is a long, long convention that Ministers say, "it would not be appropriate to comment on individual cases." The principle reason being that any detail of a simple issue case, when put up against a multi-faceted policy, can come back to bite them in the butt.

But you get the feeling that the Conservatives are feeling a little desperate about the election of 2015 already and are seizing recklessly on any case of immigration or welfare payments which can perpetuate the idea that foreigners and the poor are scroungers and if not borderline criminal then actually criminal.

The murders of six children in Derby by their feckless, reprobate father, Mick Philpott had so many sickening aspects it was often hard to follow the case. After so many biased news stories against welfare recipients it was hardly surprising the Mail felt able to make the twisted and foul judgement that their murderer was not intrinsically self-obsessed and evil but simply a "product of welfare UK".

DWP Minister, Esther McVey, refused to endorse such socially divisive views on Channel 4 News on Wednesday. But next day, Chancellor George Osborne, coincidentally in Derby, started hinting heavily that the deaths were caused by a certain "lifestyle" as if it were a predictable consequence of giving the undeserving poor any money. It was perhaps intellectual laziness but more likely some talking points prompted by back room Svengali, Lynton Crosby, as was, one suspects, Cameron's recent speech castigating the non-existent threat of scrounger immigrants.

Osborne's vitriolic speech this week on benefit changes means the Mail has now been gifted the lead on the debate, always an invidious place to be. But Crosby, IDS and Cameron are firmly of the view this flagellation of the poor  is popular with the non-poor partly because reading these papers for so many years has given the impression that any claimant is a chancer and an enemy within.

The Mail yesterday included a story of a woman who claimed she could live on £1 a day, "anyone can do it," she blithely wittered. There are vast amounts of human interest stories of, for example, dying people being declared fit for work which these papers refuse to print. These editors are more content giving voice to the confused drivel of a single woman pinching soft fruits from hedgerows as a sustainable "lifestyle" for hundreds of thousands of disabled people.

We can expect many more bitter attacks between now and the elections, the Tories look like getting a drubbing in the locals next month particularly in marginal areas like Derbyshire. However this demonisation can only be a diminishing return as more people reflect on the harsh, unyielding judgmental language on poor families from privileged and insincere men.