The Big Bang of City deregulation was among the hallmarks of the Margaret Thatcher era in its mid-80s pomp. Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/Rex Features
This article titled “Margaret Thatcher’s Britain: we still live in the land Maggie built” was written by Jonathan Freedland, for The Guardian on Monday 8th April 2013 19.50 Europe/London
Margaret Thatcher’s Britain: we still live in the land Maggie built
Back when we called her Maggie, when it seemed she would have her wish and “go on and on” in ruling the country, her opponents would lament some new step towards social ruin with the withering, two-word verdict: “Thatcher’s Britain.”
It was meant as a term of condemnation, a concise way of arguing that riots in the street or the devastation of a pit village were the inevitable features of this new land that had arisen in the 1980s, a country reshaped by the woman at the top.
Curiously, the phrase does not sound as dated as it should. That’s because, 23 years after she was ejected from Downing Street by her own party in a move whose psychic wounds linger on, the country we live in remains Thatcher’s Britain. We still live in the land Margaret built.
Just look around. Visit a station and notice the plethora of competing train companies, replacing the single British Rail that operated in the pre-Thatcher days – the fruit of a rail privatisation that was not hers, but was made possible only by the serial privatisations she had pioneered and made normal. Look at the cars on the road, none made by the old, nationally-owned British Leyland and only few by the British marques that once dominated but which went the way of much of British industry – unable to survive the chill wind of “market forces”, another phrase which filled the air back then.
Look inside your own house, at the water coming out of the tap: once a public utility but, after Thatcher, the property of private companies, many foreign-owned. Gaze at the telephone. When she took over in 1979, the bottom of that device would have carried the legend, “Property of the GPO.” It was not yours, but belonged to the Post Office: in effect, the government. What’s more, it was moulded to the wall – as one commentator recalled – and you had no right to change it, not without becoming entangled in a state-managed bureaucracy. That was before Thatcher modishly renamed the service British Telecom and sold it off.
Viewed from today, that past Britain is indeed a foreign country. In her 1982 party conference speech, Margaret Thatcher offered a prediction for the future: “How absurd it will seem in a few years’ time that the state ran Pickfords removals and Gleneagles Hotel.” Absurd or not, it does indeed seem alien – not least to those born in the 1980s, the generation we shall always call Thatcher’s children.
Selling off the family silver Labour called it, as Margaret Thatcher set about reversing the 1945 nationalisations that had put oil, gas, coal, electricity and an airline as well as a house removal company in public hands.
For some, the only consequence of that shift, still visible today, will be a changed brand name or higher bills. But for others, the change in landscape is all too real. Across Yorkshire or south Wales, Kent or Nottinghamshire, there are villages that have never recovered from the closure of coal mines, ordered by a Thatcher who ruled there was no place for pits that were not “economically viable”, regardless of the social consequences. Some places have become heritage parks, remembering an industry now vanished. But other villages have never recovered, their heart and purpose ripped out. Those abandoned places are also landmarks in Thatcher’s Britain.
To have achieved all this alone would have made Margaret Thatcher a towering, transformational figure, one who altered the physical fabric of the nation. But these concrete achievements do not wholly explain why she still looms so large, large enough that not one but two current West End plays – The Audience and Billy Elliot – grant Thatcher a pivotal, if largely unsympathetic, role, whether seen or unseen.
For she changed the ethos of Britain as well as its landscape. In 2009, Boris Johnson lamented that Thatcher had become “a boo-word in British politics, a shorthand for selfishness and me-first-ism, and devil-take-the-hindmost and grinding the faces of the poor.”
The London mayor regretted that usage, but he surely understood its origins. The set text is still Thatcher’s declaration – quoted in The Audience – that “There is no such thing as society”. Her defenders always insisted that sentence had been misunderstood, but it stuck because it seemed to capture something essential about the Thatcherite creed: its embrace of individualism and apparent disdain for the collective.
At its best, that has meant a mood of freedom and choice that has made these islands a brighter, less drab place than they once were. One might even credit Thatcher with a willingness to jettison the old rules and conventions that used to prevent individuals deciding their own destiny. For her own part, she was a social conservative – and yet today’s right for, say, gay couples to marry if they want to fits with one aspect of the Thatcherite vision of personal choice.
But at its crudest, the Thatcher ethos translated into the get-rich-quick, greed-is-good spirit of the 1980s, satirised by Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney creation. The Big Bang of City deregulation, the Tell Sid scramble for buying and selling shares, the sense that money is the highest value, wealth the greatest sign of worth – all these were hallmarks of the Thatcher era in its mid-80s pomp. Few would argue that they have not endured. On the contrary, consumerism and materialism have been the norm ever since, rising inequality the consistent trend as the rich soar ever further away from the rest.
Moreover, it’s hard not to see the roots of the 2008 crash in the unshackling of the City two decades earlier.
More subtly, Thatcher bequeathed a kind of instinctive rejection of once-valued forms of collective activity. Her onslaught on the trade unions left those movements pale imitations of their former selves, too weak to resist the drive to the “flexible labour market” which has seen Britain become the home of what one senior Labour figure calls “crappy jobs”, with low pay and no protection.
But there are less obvious manifestations of the same habit. Witness the steady downgrading of local government or the persistent assumption that the private sector will always be better than the public. As the coalition sets about shrinking the welfare state, it’s still embarked on Thatcher’s project of rolling back the frontiers of the state, dismantling the settlement that held from 1945 until it unravelled in the 1970s.
Of course, it’s in politics that the shadow looms most clearly.
Today’s Tories walk in Thatcher’s footsteps, battling with their estranged cousins in Ukip over who is the rightful heir to her Eurosceptic legacy.
But Labour is no less in thrall. The Lady forced the opposition party to accommodate itself to the new, Thatcherite settlement in which the market would rule unless stated otherwise.
It’s telling that Tony Blair’s domestic legacy amounts to two responses to Thatcherism: forcing Labour to accept it and then compensating for the damage the Tories had wreaked through sustained underinvestment in the public realm.
She had left a Britain marked by private affluence and public squalor. It fell to Blair to do something about the latter, while giving free rein to the former.
So look around this kingdom of ours, at a devolved Scotland contemplating independence – a state of affairs that owes much to Thatcher’s antagonistic relationship with that country.
Look at the trains on the track, the phone in your house, the trio of 1980s teenagers who lead the three main parties. What you see is a nation ruled for 11 turbulent years by a remarkable woman – and which still lives in her image.
