If there is one thing, and perhaps one thing alone, that the Left should draw from Thatcher’s hegemony, it is the need for a leader with the same uncompromising conviction and steely determination as she repeatedly demonstrated. She interpreted her mission in 1979 as confronting trade union power, rolling back the State, instilling unabashed individualism, and subjecting everything to the disciplines of an amoral market. All were deeply controversial, and indeed the limits and downsides of all have been steadily exposed over the two decades since she left office, but she never wavered in her passion to fight for what she believed in.
The same unwavering conviction is needed just as badly today to confront the threats that are dragging down Britain now – the excesses of corporate power, the straitjacket of prolonged austerity, the over-dominance of the banks, a grossly unjust system of pay and remuneration, and the destruction of the public realm as the underpinning of fundamental social and community values.
Just as Thatcher faced in the early 1980s, that means confronting a power structure focused on an entirely different set of goals. Britain is still run today (even if now partially discredited) by an out-of-control finance sector, a business sector weighed down by a short-termist and broken business model, a media in many cases dominated by foreign tycoons who use their newspapers to propagandise for their own self-interest rather than the national interest, and a parliament that has become too careerist and too ineffective at holding a wildcat Executive to account. Confronting these multiple dysfunctions will require a strategic plan to assemble the necessary forces for real transformation and then the hard-headed resolve to face down the inevitable conflict as Thatcher so dramatically displayed. For in politics there cannot be major change without sustained confrontation.
Nor is this impossibly challenging. As Thatcher (and many others) recognised in 1979, Britain could not carry on the way it was going. Exactly the same applies today. We cannot continue now with an economic decline that is leading to unsustainable trade deficits, with an import bill for traded goods more than £110bn larger than the exports we managed to sell. We cannot carry on now with a manufacturing base bereft of an industrial strategy and deserted by the banks. We cannot maintain the cohesion of our country when a deeply self-interested elite of 1%, even 0.1%, monopolise the build-up of income and wealth while the vast majority of the population are increasingly deprived. We cannot preserve the foundation of security for our people if the public realm is sacrificed to the vagaries and price mechanisms of the private market.
Britain’s problems today are as great, if not greater, than in 1979. A new settlement is now needed which will have to be built on a conviction and force of purpose at least as fierce as Thatcher’s.
