I come from a professional background and live in a detached house in a pretty part of the countryside not far from the sea. Sometimes I am called a “closet Tory”, although, as a floating voter and independent councillor, I haven’t voted Conservative for decades. I’m the kind of voter the Tory party might have expected to attract. So, what must they do to get people like me to vote for them?
It all goes back to Mrs. Thatcher. Before she broke the political consensus, the only real, substantial difference between Labour and Conservative was Labour’s controversial determination to keep the “commanding heights of British industry” in public ownership. Mrs. Thatcher broke the consensus and changed all this.
Conservative party members are as amiable and easy to get on with as anybody else, but the moment there is any criticism of Mrs. Thatcher, they soon stiffen up. They regard any criticism of her as heresy and set her memory up on a pedestal almost as high as Churchill’s. I would suggest that, if the Tory party wants to return to the mainstream, they need to review and reassess Mrs. Thatcher’s legacy.
The Thatcher government did many good things. They won the Falklands war; they reformed local government, particularly planning law and practice, and required all council committees to be politically balanced proportionally. Instead of breaking with Europe, a valuable rebate was negotiated. The Trade Unions had become far too powerful, and she took them on and won.
But it was the aftermath of the Union battles which has ruined the country. To me, in any large industry, unions and management are two sides of the same coin. When both work together, the business prospers: when they fall out, the business gets into difficulty. Mrs. Thatcher never understood this.
Her government had enacted perfectly reasonable legislation which required a vote before there could be a strike. It was the failure of the NUM to accept this that enabled her to crush the miners’ strike, and the defeat of the miners that brought the leaders of the other unions to their senses. This presented a golden opportunity for Mrs. Thatcher to be magnanimous and make friends with the unions. Instead, she treated them as public enemies and one piece of vindictive anti-union legislation followed another until their power and influence was almost completely eviscerated.
Perhaps she thought that one way of destroying the unions was to wreck the heavy engineering industries which nurtured them. I can remember working for a Cornish authority in 1979. The Government had decided to review the development areas. There was a map in the Treasurer’s office which showed the development areas at the time. Most of them were to the North and west of a line which ran from the Humber to the Severn estuary. My authority was lucky – we were upgraded. However, with a very few exceptions (Merseyside was also upgraded) the development areas to the North and West of that line were deleted. Many of the big heavy engineering companies in this area had factories which depended on government development area grants and subsidies. They were given six months to adapt, and then the national press began to wonder why it was that, quite suddenly, there were three million unemployed – mainly in places to the north and west of that line between the Severn and Humber estuaries. This is how the north/south divide started. Mrs. Thatcher created it.
She never understood how capitalism worked. In her world, anybody who worked hard could succeed. This may be right for a grocer’s shop, but capitalism doesn’t work like this. A board of directors is only responsible to the company shareholders. Provided the directors can provide a good yield for the shareholders, they can expect very high rewards. They don’t have to work hard – some highly paid directors do less than a day’s work every week.
In a competitive industry, this can work well, as dividends attract investment, but when it comes to monopolies, such as public utilities and public services, privatisation lays itself wide open to abuse. Provided the shareholders get their dividends, why should the directors care about renewing the sewers, the drains, the sewage works or other infrastructure they are responsible for? If economies have to be made, research and development is the first department to close, and if you are on the board of a railway company, why spend money training new train drivers when your company’s contract is only short-term?
Mrs. Thatcher tried to privatise council services because she thought they were overmanned. This was partly true because previous governments had used the public services, particularly in metropolitan councils, to soak up unemployment. What she could not see was that, if workers in public services were well-paid and were not under too much pressure at work, they did not have to make a profit. So, when council services were put out to tender, the successful private tenderers made sure there were loopholes which they could use to optimise their charges, and the overall cost of the privatised services did not substantially reduce.
Mrs. Thatcher’s privatisation policies were a disaster. They didn’t even work for the “commanding heights of British industry” which she privatised. Where are they now? The steel mills, the shipyards, our once famous great heavy engineering plants? Too many are either closed, asset stripped, or owned by foreigners.
The Thatcher government was lucky to take office at about the time that the benefits of North Sea gas and oil began to be realised. The pound became a petrocurrency, and this stabilised the currency and the economy. There was a wonderful feel-good factor for those in work: for the unemployed, there was plenty of money which could be squandered on paying benefits. So, the unemployed languished on benefits as their pride was taken away. An underclass grew – generations of people who have never worked - many of them susceptible to crime and drugs. Wouldn’t it have been better to have kept those people in work, albeit in overmanned services and industry, given them pride in their work and paid them a wage instead of benefits? Wouldn’t it have been better to use those North Sea revenues to support, revitalise and regenerate the ailing industries to the north and west of that line between the Huber and the Severn estuaries?
The last time I voted Conservative was in 1979. If the Tory party want people like me to vote for them again, they could start by ditching Mrs. Thatcher. She never did deserve that state funeral. She was no hero.
NB The Yorkshire Post published an abridged version of this article - the passages omitted by YP are in italics.
