There is a touch of confusion about Theresa May’s political posturing. The apparent lurch ‘to the left’ signified by her abandonment of Osbornomics (and, of course, Osborne himself) for soft Keynesianism sits uneasily with a commitment to hard Brexit. The homage paid to official anti-racism is at odds with her immigrant bashing. And her fabled competence, her ‘no Flash, just Gordon’ schtick looks ridiculous when she puts off key decisions, slaps down cabinet divisions, and every time one recalls the three fools she’s placed in charge of Brexit. Is May riddled with contradictions? Yes, but the answer doesn’t lie in character flaws. One has to look to the nature of her political project, the class relationships underpinning it, and the economic and political crisis engulfing British capital and the British state. Continue reading
Tagged with Thatcherism
Is Thatcherite ideology working?
In a general election a great number of things will be said, but only a few or even one really matters and that will determine who wins. This 2015 election is in effect a referendum on Thatcherite ideology. Here is what Labour should be saying, but isn’t.
Point 1: For 35 years since 1980 the Thatcherites, which includes for this purpose Brown and Blair, have been pursuing major cuts in corporation tax on the grounds that that would stimulate the economy, produce a surge of investment, unleash higher wage jobs, and thus increase government tax revenues to pay down the deficit. The opposite has happened: corporation tax has been cut from 52% in 1980 to 21% today, and the proportion of government revenues generated by corporation tax has almost halved to just over 5%. But none of the benefits promised have materialised, so why do we not reverse this failed policy? Continue reading
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The Thatcherite agenda lives on more for Blair than for Britain
The poll conducted by You-Gov Cambridge and published this week in The Guardian shows that the British are more ready than the Americans, French and Germans to affirm their continued belief in the values of fairness, compassion, and concern for others, and to look to their government to act in line with those values.
The poll’s message is salutary, coming as it does in the week of Thatcher’s funeral and a few days after Tony Blair’s advice to Ed Miliband that he should not risk any re-affirmation of traditional Labour values. We are a less Thatcherite country than her acolytes would have us believe, and the route to electoral success for Labour is a braver one than Tony Blair understands. Continue reading
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Was Blair the ideological child of Thatcher?
To steal a joke from the late John Sullivan, Tony Blair’s tribute to Baroness Thatcher sounds like a eulogy to John the Baptist from Jesus. However, while it may be difficult for some on the left to accept, particularly those of us who ten years ago were fulminating against the crime of Blair’s war on Iraq, there is a massive difference between these two former Prime Ministers.
Frankly put, Thatcher left Britain a worse, meaner and more dysfunctional society than when she took power; in contrast Blair made life better for most working people in Britain. The myth that Blairism was a continuation of Thatcherism is not entirely without foundation, but it is also highly misleading. Continue reading
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Mrs T – a depreciation
The New York Times epithet machine used to describe Margaret Thatcher for American readers as “the prime minister who privatized the loss-making state industries.” Of course she did no such thing. The enterprises she sold off made huge profits for the Treasury. BP was, after all, the state-owned creation of Winston Churchill and kept a constant flow of petropounds going into the Treasury. Selling it off to her friends in the City of London benefited its executives and shareholders but hardly the British public, let alone the US citizenry around the Gulf of Mexico. Continue reading
