Thatcher: Conservative Revolutionary?

Just finished the first volume of Charles Moore´s splendid new biography of Margaret Thatcher. This volume covers her early years, including her formative years as a young parliamentarian through to her becoming the first female leader of the Conservative party, then the country (she was Prime Minister from 1979-1992). The book finishes with a riveting account of the Falklands war in 1982.

Those – and there are many – who viscerally dislike her, would do well to remember the situation she inherited when coming to power. By the 1970s Britain really was the ´sick man of Europe´. Militancy was rife - strikes regularly crippled the economy - manufacturing appeared to be in terminal decline, inflation was endemic and economic growth stagnant. The country needed to go cap-in–hand to the IMF for loans to keep it afloat. As with the country, Keynesian ideas appeared bankrupt. The backdrop then, was a sense of crisis and Thatcher, along with a small group of like-minded supporters and intellectuals thought they had a solution – in a sense they were revolutionaries. But can you be a conservative revolutionary?

I think you can. Perhaps. Edmund Burke pointed out that in order to conserve a way of life a country sometimes needs to change. In the case of Thatcher the things worth conserving – things she thought were being undermined - included the importance of the rule of law, of the responsible but free individual, of paying your own way in the world, hard work and rewarding hard work and an almost jingoistic belief in Britain´s greatness. Much of what she believed derived from the values she imbibed from her religious father, but they remained core beliefs she connected to the conservative tradition and somehow connected to market-based solutions to problems.

Her solutions were at the time, novel, radical, and by no means accepted, not even by her party (most of whom were – at the higher echelons – men). In delivering them she faced an uphill struggle, and she knew that the sort of medicine she advocated would be difficult to swallow. Unlike many of today´s politicians, she was determined to win the battle of ideas; she was not about asking the electorate what they wanted! She was in the business of telling them what they needed. In her words, ´you don´t exist as a party unless you have a clear philosophy and a clear message´. It is hard not to admire this determination.

There aren´t many politicians that have an economic theory named after them. She did. Thatcherism favored a minimal role for the state. Her view was that taxes had to be sharply reduced, and inflation controlled, even if it led to a higher (some would say intolerably high) unemployment rate. Entrepreneurial flair – seen as the ultimate source of economic growth – was crucial. She thought trade unions were too strong and too militant and undermined the rule of law and the democratic process; they had to be broken. Inefficient nationalized industries had to be privatized. Fundamentally, Thatcher believed that the country had to stop ´living beyond its means´. Through the 1980s, this medicine was administered with determination and against great resistance. The changes she pushed through, and the pain they caused many in the form of unemployment and broken communities, remains a bitter topic in the country – dividing the left and right to this day.

This volume ends in 1982 with a brilliant account of how the country manages, against all odds, to take back the Falkland Islands following the Argentinian invasion. Victory in the Falklands did much to implant the idea of Thatcher as the Iron Lady. It cemented her appearance in the public imagination as the right person able to return a certain  ´greatness´ to the country. It was a close thing – a gamble - that had it not been for (tacit) American support might of ended badly. It also ends the book on a bit of a high. The difficult battles – particularly those she still faced with the unions – are still ahead.

A close friend, Enoch Powell, once remarked that all successful political careers end in tragedy. It will be hard not to read the next volume with a sense of foreboding, in the full knowledge that things will end badly. By the time she is ousted, her party has turned against her, as had the country: the pendulum had in effect swung too far in the free market direction. Many of the solutions to the problems of the 1970s were creating new challenges she simply failed to recognize, problems that haunt us to this day. The changes were just a little too revolutionary, and no longer consistent with basic conservative sensibilities.

But that is to come. This volume is highly recommended – as good as it gets when it comes to political biography. If nothing else it reiterates the idea that great men (and women) still matter in the historical process. They say to condemn much is to understand little. Those on the left – I include myself – would do well to read this book. It is hard not to be left with a sense of admiration for the women who, more than any other, left a legacy that we have still not yet moved beyond.

-Chris

Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume One: Not for Turning, Penguin Books, 2013.



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