By Swapan Dasgupta
The news of Margaret Thatcher’s death came minutes
after I had completed a panel discussion for a TV channel on the theme “Less
Government, More Governance” where Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi had
been the keynote speaker. To me, it seemed the most fitting tribute to an
extraordinary woman whose most enduring contributions have been in the realms
of ideas and policy-making. No discussion on contemporary themes such as
privatisation, fiscal prudence, the ‘minimum state’ versus the megastate, and
the relationship of values to entrepreneurship are ever complete without
reference to the person who delighted in being called the Iron Lady. As someone
wrote, in her lifetime Thatcher had become both a noun (Thatcherism) and an
adjective (Thatcherite).
The real tragedy of Baroness Thatcher was that she
was born in England and consequently had to confine her role as Britain’s
longest-serving Prime Minister. This is not to undermine our erstwhile Mother Country
but only to suggest that had the accident of birth nurtured her as the citizen
of the world’s most powerful country in the post-War world, her contributions
would have been even more far-reaching. As a British Prime Minister, Thatcher’s
long-term impact has been primarily intellectual; had she been a two-term
occupant of the White House, the world would probably have been a different—and
I daresay, a better and safer place.
The tragedy of Margaret Thatcher was that, despite
giving her three consecutive election victories, Britain never appreciated her
true worth. Throughout her political career, she was dogged by facets of
British public life that proved unending irritants.
The first of these was the class-ridden and
hidebound nature of British Toryism—to be distinguished from genuine
conservatism. A self-made grocer’s daughter from the nondescript town of
Grantham who clawed her way into Grammar School and Oxford University, she had
to endure the social disdain of Tory politicians who ran the party along the
line of a Gentleman’s Club in Pall Mall. True, they were eventually
‘hand-bagged’ into submission but their dogged resistance to all attempts to
break the mould of competitive politics created the impression that Thatcher
lacked compassion and that she favoured the creation of a Britain divided
between haves and have-nots. The reality was a little more complex: Thatcher
wanted a nation of haves which was only possible by enlarging the size of the
cake. No wonder her biggest supporters were self-made men such as the
pugnacious Norman Tebbit.
The second problem she encountered was the
perception that Britons were ‘entitled’ to a certain standard of living. By
itself this corresponded to the contours of an aspirational society. However,
the route to constant self-improvement was no longer based on old-fashioned
values that dated back to Calvinism and were later to be called Victorian
values. By 1979, Britain had become excessively dependant on the state to
cushion against individual shortcomings. The Welfare State that was introduced
with such fanfare by the Beveridge Report on education and the creation of the
National Health Service by Clement Atlee’s Labour Government of 1945 was based
on lofty principles: as a route to equal opportunities and as a guarantee
against pauperisation. However, the system as it evolved soon obliterated the
distinction between the rewards of hard work and the benefits of voluntary or
enforced idleness. The moment the Welfare State made it as rewarding for a
person to take a low paid job as to stay at home, the British work ethic
suffered. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for immigration from the former colonies,
Britain’s low productivity levels would have been lower still.
In seeking to revive the work culture of a country that
had become complacent and, consequently, uncompetitive, Thatcher had to break a
mindset. She had to convince Britons that they were living far beyond their
means and that the state had become bloated, over-burdened and inefficient. In
subsidising a carefree society, the Government in turn was taxing too much and
penalising success.
What is remarkable is the simple communications
approach Thatcher adopted in getting her message through. In the run-up to the
1979 election when Britain was plagued by strikes, wage freeze, soaring
inflation and a macro-economic crisis that required the intervention of the
International Monetary Fund, Thatcher used the analogy of household budgeting
to demonstrate the virtues of living within your means. Likewise, and perhaps
more controversially, she invoked the Victorian values of thrift and self-help
to indicate that Britain had ceased being “Great” ever since it abandoned these
simple rules of life. “I came to office”, she told a gathering of business
leaders in 1984, “with one intent: to change Britain from a dependent to a
self-reliant society—from a give-it-to-me, to a do-it-yourself nation. A
get-up-and-go, instead of a sit-back-and-wait-for-it Britain.”
Predictably, this over-weaning thrust on
individualism (which included her of-quoted remark that “There is no such thing
as society”) attracted the ire of the entire intelligentsia of Britain. No
other British Prime Minister of Britain faced such unrelenting opposition from
the citadels of intellectual power as did Thatcher. Apart from a handful of
economists and the odd historian such as Norman Stone, British intellectuals
held Thatcher in deep contempt. Oxford University voted down a proposal to
confer a honorary doctorate—an astonishing act of discourtesy to a
distinguished alumni. To the occupants of the High Table, she was a vulgarian
who distrusted mediocrity, celebrated money and rarely budged from her
certitudes—values she had, presumably, picked up from these very dons
themselves.
In Thatcher’s dictionary, ‘consensus’ was a
euphemism for cop out. In her mind, Britain couldn’t afford the luxury of
aggregation because its post-1945 fall had been so steep. If Britain was to
punch above its weight and remain a global player, it would first have to set its
own house in order. That meant shedding flab and even “selling the family
silver”—the imagery attached to the privatisation of bleeding public sector
companies. Interestingly, in her disinvestment programme, Thatcher wasn’t too
bothered about maximising returns to the exchequer. For her, the sale of
Council flats to tenants and divesting public sector equity to many thousands
of small holders were part of a larger scheme to create a “property owning
democracy.”
Maybe it was due to her experiences of seeing her
father run a small shop that made Thatcher wary of Britain’s entrenched
“gentlemanly capitalism”. Whether in the trades unions or the financial
markets, Thatcher hated monopolies and restrictive trade practices. Just as she
outlawed the closed shop and encouraged Rupert Murdoch to break down the
high-cost guild practices on the shop floor, her Big Bang reforms in the financial
sector opened up the capital markets to competition and globalisation. If
Britain still counts in the capitalist universe, it is almost solely because of
the importance of the City of London. Thatcher made that possible.
On the flip side, it was due to her aggressive
anti-inflationary strategies which led to soaring interest rates that Britain
ceased to be the ‘workshop of the world’. Thatcher is still derided for killing
off British manufacturing that had ceased to technologically alert and
financially competitive. But its demise also led to the decimation of entire
communities in Scotland and the North of England. For many Britons, Thatcherism
was a killer.
The Telegraph, April 12, 2012
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