Thatcher was born 100 years ago, and her reign seems to be over for life. Why is its influence on the country still so huge? | Martin Kettle
YYou must be approaching your mid-50s or older to be of voting age during Margaret Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister. A third of us alive today were adults when she finally left Downing Street in November 1990. Even fewer remember Thatcher’s 11 years in Downing Street.
For at least the other two-thirds of Britons, the name Thatcher is a name of the past, and little more than that. The fact that she will turn 100 next Monday only confirms the huge gap that now separates her era from this era. However, the centenary may be an instructive moment anyway. It can provide a contemporary opportunity to reflect on what it really means – and what it does not mean – for modern Britain.
This seems more difficult in some ways for those of us who can remember. We tended to take sides. Supporters believed Thatcher could do no wrong. Opponents they can’t do anything right. Unsurprisingly, the truth is much more nuanced, complex and interesting – as I can confirm from two short interviews I conducted with her (once, oddly enough, at the Kiev Opera House).
As a subject of study, Thatcher has been underserved, both by those who worship her and those who are highly critical of her. Listening to both, it’s helpful to keep in mind that the lady who wasn’t concerned with transforming in public was also the lady who thought long and hard in private about making stunning changes in direction. For example, the Warrior Queen who refused to settle with IRA hunger strikers in the early 1980s was also Thatcher who allowed back-channel talks with the IRA, and allowed her cabinet to discuss Irish unification.
But Thatcher’s individual battles in the 1980s now belong mostly to the past. The world has moved. At this distance, what matters is not Thatcher herself, notable though she is, but rather her influence.
Its influence is hard to miss but rarely fully recognised. Each of us lives in a country that has been influenced more by Thatcher than by any other politician of the post-war era. To this day, they are part of the reason why we cannot balance national finances, and why politicians fear tax changes. It’s part of the reason we remain so devastatingly divided over Europe. However, they are also part of the reason we take the climate crisis so seriously, while at the same time they are even part of the reason why our rivers and lakes are so polluted.
The most important aspect of her legacy has always been her determination to speak out for business – both small and large – against the state. She saw entrepreneurship and lower taxes as the foundation of a successful society, and during her years in power, she never deviated from that belief. It wanted to reduce government spending and reduce the government’s role in all areas other than national security. It is easy to forget that when she came to power in 1979, her viewpoint was almost insurrectionary. When I left in 1990, it became the collective wisdom. In many ways it still is.
Other parts of her legacy also help prove the point of Hugo Young (who has written about her better than anyone) that her career provides proof positive of the importance of individuals in history. Thatcher was not a liberal, but she left an individual legacy. She thought the family knew better than the official in Whitehall – and in the city and county council as well – what was good for them. It changed the housing system to promote home ownership in a way that still distorts the housing market and planning decisions today – as well as electoral politics.
In the years after Thatcher’s downfall in 1990 until her death in 2013, many of her admirers believed that she nonetheless served as a guiding light for what should happen next. These aides believe that she has not only done big, radical things. It also set the agenda for those who came after. Thatcher’s funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral, which she attended in person, was an attempt to portray her as a second Churchill. It never was. But it was also an attempt to pretend that the Thatcherite revolution was now the settled reality of modern Britain.
After promoting the newsletter
That wasn’t true either. What is true is that Thatcher and Thatcherism provided one set of answers at a given time – at the end of a crisis-plagued period – to the endemic problems facing all modern nation-states. Among the biggest of these problems is reforming the efficiency and cost effectiveness of the public sector, and the search for a more socially positive and economically innovative balance between the private and public sectors.
However, Thatcher was unable to solve either of these problems. In some ways, it made it more difficult. New Labor soon had to deal with them in new ways. When she died in 2013, David Cameron’s coalition government was struggling with them again. The same problems proved intractable, and answers remained elusive. Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and now Keir Starmer have all suffered.
So the lesson for Thatcher in her 100th year is not that everything about her legacy must recede until we rediscover the sunlit heights of the pre-Thatcher years. This would end in tears. But it is not certain that it holds the key to solving Britain’s problems. Its driving form is unrepeatable.
It can’t solve the Tories’ problems either. Thatcher’s privileged status meant Kemi Badenoch had to offer the obligatory prayer yesterday. But Badenoch is only the latest Conservative leader who cannot see what is hiding in plain sight for the party – and the country. Thatcher is not the solution. In many ways, it’s still the problem.