I’ve just started reading Vince Cable’s Money & Power, in which he discusses 16 leading politicians and economists and their policies. These include Edmund Hamilton, Bismarck, Lenin, Roosevelt, Erhard, the architect of the German Wirtschaftswunder, Tage Erland, who was responsible for much of the SDP’s success in Sweden, Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore, Park of South Korea, India’s Manmohan Roy, Juan Peron, Shinzo Abe, and Donald Trump. There’s also Maggie Thatcher, of course, though I’m definitely putting off reading the chapter on her. These are important politicians and economists, but they also seem to reflect Cable’s own views on privatisation and the free market. The SDP did well in Sweden by largely keeping the economy private and using its profits to fund the country’s welfare state. Manmohan Roy liberalised the state economy after years of socialist planning, which had created an economic disaster by the mid-70s under Indira Gandhi. Erhard was a liberal, who championed the free market and small businesses against nationalisation, big business and socialism. He liberalised the German economy from the strict economic controls imposed on a defeated Germany that had had its economy and manufacturing destroyed by the war. Abe revitalised the Japanese economy, moving it away from the strict war time controls geared to export through a mixture of Keynesian public works and various fiscal stimuli. Although the gaol still seems to be to maintain the country’s focus on export. As for Trump, his economic ideas are contradictory. He’s a small-government republican, who distrusts trade deals because he thinks they’re a zero-sum game which America will lose. He doesn’t like trading blocs, because he feels he can get a better deal through one on one negotiation.
I’ve glanced at the chapter on Thatcher. It concludes by noting one of the New Labourites that ‘we’re all Thatcherites now’ and that her main legacy is nationalism. Well, that’s one, obvious part of it. But in fact her legacy is an utterly wrecked economy, failing welfare services and an impoverished working class. Privatisation is massively unpopular, but continues to be promoted by the political, media and corporate elite. Mind you, Cable also asserts that Corbyn was wiped out electorally because he was returning the party to Marxism. The Labour party, as a whole, has never been a Marxist party although some of the early socialist groups that initially formed it were. And neither was Corbyn, despite the screams of the press. As for Thatcher, I prefer this assessment of Thatcher by Seumas Milne in his book, The Revenge of History: The Battle for the 21st Century (London: Verso 2012)
‘Not only in former mining communities and industrial areas laid waste by her government, but across Britain Thatcher is still hated for the damage she inflicted – and for her political legacy of rampant inequality and greed, privatisation and social breakdown. Now protests are taking the form of satirical e-petitions for the funeral (Gordon Brown wanted a state funeral for her) to be privatised: it is goes ahead there are likely to be demonstrations in the streets.
This is a politician, after all, who never won the votes of more than a third of the electorate; destroyed communities, created mass unemployment; deindustrialised Britain; redistributed from poor to rich; and, by her deregulation of the City, laid the basis for the crisis that has engulfed us twenty-five years later.
Thatcher was a prime minister who denounced Nelson Mandela as a terrorist, defended the Chilean fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet, ratcheted up the cold war, and unleashed militarised police on trade unionists and black communities alike. She was Britain’s first woman prime minister, but her policies hit women hardest, like Cameron’s today.
A common British establishment view – and the implicit posi8tion of The Iron Lady (the filmography of her with Meryl Streep) – is that while Thatcher took harsh measures and ‘went too far’, it was necessary medicine to restore the sick economy of the 1970s to healthy growth.
It did nothing of the sort. Average growth in the Thatcherite ’80s, at 2.4 per cent, was exactly the same as in the sick ’70s – and considerably lower than in the corporatist ’60s. Her government’s savage deflation destroyed a fifth of Britain’s industrial base in two years, hollowed out manufacturing, and delivered a ‘productivity miracle’ that never was, and we’re living with the consequences today.
What she did succeed in doing was to restore class privilege, boosting profitability while slashing employees’ share of national income from 65 per cent to 53 per cent through her assault on unions. Britain faced a structural crisis in the 1970s, but there were multiple routes out of it. Thatcher imposed a neoliberal model now seen to have failed across the world.
It’s hardly surprising that some might want to put a benign gloss on Thatcher’s record when another Tory-led government is forcing through Thatcher-like policies – and riots, mounting unemployment and swingeing benefit cuts echo her years in power. The rehabilitation isn’t so much about then as now, which is one reason why it can’t go unchallenged. Thatcher wasn’t a ‘great leader’. She was the most socially destructive prime minister of modern times.’ (pp. 247-8).
That was published, according to the book’s notes, on 5th January 2012. People aren’t rioting today, but they are protesting and striking. And the myth of Thatcher as the great leader needs to be assaulted and destroyed to bring her wretched policies and their legacy to an end, both by the Tories themselves and by New Labour entryists like Starmer.
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