Reflections on the milk-snatcher

Margret Thatcher. Is dead. I never liked her that much, but I feel pretty sad about it anyway. Here’s a post for her, on the day of the public funeral, to show respect, and not at all because I write slowly and kept getting distracted. So, lets’ get the really obvious thing about how obviously her funeral can’t remain a state funeral, and how it should be privatised, out of the way now, and move swiftly onwards.

So, um, my view of Thatcher is probably a lot different from a lot of British people’s, for two reasons. Firstly, I am very young. I never lived through her time in office – she was gone by the time I was born. Secondly, I have some fairly good links with the ASI. And even though (despite popular belief) the ASI is not really a Thatcherite think tank… well, they ARE pretty pro-Thatcher (I think that it’s become a lot more pro-Thatcher than it was back when she was actually in Parliament). So when I hear people talking about Thatcher, it’s almost always positively, or at least ambivalently. Which means it’s really hard for me to feel the kind of anger a lot of people feel towards her. I disagree with a lot of her policies*. I disagree with a lot of what she said. But I have a really hard time not respecting the woman, and not least because she actually had principles of her own.

A lot of people might be a bit annoyed at me for saying that – there were people who got all angry at Obama for expressing sympathy for her death. And some people seem to be convinced too that not only do they hate her, not should everyone hate her, but, inexplicably, that the entirety of the UK actually does share their opinion. I mean, like, she got about 42% of the vote pretty much consistently*. And a load more people didn’t care enough to vote for a party with any chance of actually winning against her. So no. Not everyone hated Thatcher. And a lot of the people who didn’t hate her aren’t complete raving loonies. It’s easy to pretend things were never bad enough that Thatcherism seemed like an improvement, but… they weren’t. Now, to be fair, a lot of sane and reasonable people hated Thatcher too. I’m not denying that. Nor am I denying that the people who seem to think that everyone loved Thatcher really aren’t just as insane. But Thatcher wasn’t just the province of the mad Tories. People who voted for her failed to vote for Major, and not all of that can be accounted for by mass dying. Reasonable people looked at her, and decided she was the best option.

She also did quite a few things we… kinda needed. All in all, I am, in general, pro-change. Like, I know it doesn’t work this way, but my instinct is that if you change things, you can change back if it turns out that that was a really stupid idea, whereas if you keep everything the same, the chance to try out new things doesn’t arise. The term ‘sick  man of Europe’ has been thrown around a lot lately, but it’s not something that should lose its impact. Twenty percent inflation is generally a sign that things have Gone Wrong. She also introduced secret ballots for unions on strike action. In other words, a union could no longer shut down a factory based on a show of hands. Now, I have very little against unions. I’m not very pro-democracy. But um… a show of hands. No. Just… no. Pre-Thatcher, the challenge was managing the decline of the country. Post-Thatcher, it was keeping its place in the Sun. I’m not a patriot. Not by any means – I think my attitude to the English is one I inherited from the Irish side of the family. But I did have to grow up in this country, and I’d rather prefer the one with consistent electricity, a strong (kinda,  ‘til the last five years or so, anyway, and even now compared to a lot of the world) economy, and inexplicable delusions of grandeur than one with realistic expectations of itself, regular power cuts, and an economy held hostage by insanely powerful (and/or just insane) unions.

Of course, she also did the EU thing. Yeah, massive shock, someone who’s argued for one world government is actually pretty pro-Europe****. You might want to stop reading for a while, to calm down from that kind of a shock. Now, I have to be clear here. The UK has never been pro-Europe. I think we have a kinda Napoleon Complex about the mainland. It’s bigger than us, it scares us, and we’re not going to stand for that, dammit! So it’s hard to tell how far she is actually responsible for the UK’s Euroscepticism. I mean, I would never say anything like ‘without Thatcher we would have integrated ourselves into the EU. But I don’t think she helped. I don’t think we’d be trying to get our way against the entire rest of the EU if Thatcher hadn’t given us the impression that UK-EU relations could work that way*****. And yes, I understand the reasons behind the agreement we eventually came to. But the fact is that Thatcher’s major focus was, I think, patriotic. Like, unquestionably abroad, the UK was her major focus (just compare UK-US relations under Thatcher vs. under Blair), and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, even if I’m instinctively pro-compromise. It’s not neccesarily a good thing, either, since that patriotism led to her opposing the reunification of Germany, and a series of other ways of throwing our enemies and/or rivals under the bus. She understood the need for compromise, and she signed the Anglo-Irish treaty, but she didn’t like it. The South Africa, thing, though, was, I think, pretty much unrelated. The thing is, I think she was a patriot on domestic issues, too. This isn’t too much of a leap, since, y’know, she actually said this, but I still think it bears mentioning that I think her purpose was ‘make the UK great again’. It misses the point, I think, to say ‘poverty increased under thatcher’^†. The point is that the UK became greater.

She was also operating in an era where ‘trickle down economics’ seemed like a reasonable idea. Because another idea that goes back to Smith is that what matters isn’t the size of an economy, but how fast it’s growing. If the economy is shrinking, then wages will be low, people will be unemployed, etcetera, etcetera. If it’s growing, people’s wages will be higher, everyone will be employed, etcetera. This isn’t really that controversial, even today – the idea that ‘recessions are bad’ is hardly high level economics. So, there is a rather seductive logical progression that, therefore, what you need to do is grow as fast as possible, and everyone will be better off. A rising tide will lift all boats. There is a really annoying problem with people basing actual economic policy on economic models that don’t exactly… work. Like, not because their wrong – just because real life doesn’t let you simplify things that way, sadly. Trickle-down economics doesn’t work – it produces too much of a distortion, and the money doesn’t move about enough – but it’s a lot more reasonable to know that today than it is to expect that people should have known it back then. It’s still a bloody stupid mistake to have made, and trickle down had been tried before, in the 19^th century, but it’s a lot more forgivable than it would be if someone tried that one today.

It would be intellectually dishonest not to mention here that inflation was higher when Thatcher left office than when she took it, and that she had slightly lower than average growth. It would also be rather stupid to try and make something of this, since, if you actually look at inflation over time, it’s WAY down after Thatcher’s been in office for a little bit, and hasn’t gotten up to the levels it was at just before and/or just after she took office. Whatever you think of her, I cannot see how you can look at the graphs and say that Thatcher didn’t help with our inflation problem. That’s a misleading statistic. The GDP thing is also kinda misleading, since, y’know, that includes the beginning of her term – if you measure from 1979-1990, she’s slightly below average. Measuring the decade 1981-1990, which seems pretty reasonable to me, she’s way, way above average. You can argue that her entire approach was wrong, and you can argue that she severely damaged the underlying structure of the economy. But it’s pretty clear from the stats that the economic prospects of the country as a whole were rather better after Thatcher. And we’d moved from manufacturing-based economics to a… frothier^††… model. A lot of people complain about that but um… yeah, there’s no way we could have survived with that economic model. The UK cannot produce things as cheaply, or even as well, as other countries can. I’m sorry, no. That just couldn’t work. We pretty much had to move away from that model, because it would be nearly impossible for us to compete.

Oh, one last thing. The joke I made about the state funeral at the beginning? That wasn’t entirely pointless. This is Margret Thatcher we’re talking about. She would have hated the idea of this funeral. She said she didn’t want a state funeral, and even if she hadn’t, I think it would’ve been pretty obvious to anyone that the last wishes of Margaret Thatcher weren’t ‘spend state money’! I mean, this is actually possibly the greatest way of spitting on Thatcher’s grave I can think of, and has a lot more to do with making the government look like Thatcher-supporters than with anything to do with actual Thatcherism. The other thing they wanted to do, having a day in parliament dedicated entirely to praising her, was probably about as bad. No criticism whatsoever. If there’s something you couldn’t really accuse Thatcher of, it’s not allowing argument. I mean, if someone argued with her and hadn’t thought it through properly, or if they wouldn’t defend it with complete fanaticism, she’d demolish them. And she probably wouldn't listen anyway. But she’d at least let people disagree with her. Although, at the very least, I can’t complain that it’s not fair that she got something Atlee didn’t. Because I don’t think he would have wanted one either.

Well, I’ve probably forgotten something. And I’ve skimmed a lot of her. This is a thing that happens with someone who was the most important person in the nation for more than a decade. I mean, I haven’t even really mentioned that she was, in fact, a woman (this is the hard hitting insight for which you read Acanthus, yeah)^††††. Ireland, Africa, America, the Cold War, Chile blah, blah, blah. Some kind of scuffle with Argentina might’ve happened at some point. All of this stuff deserves looking at. But I can’t be bothered right now. So there.

Point is, I agree with David Cameron that Thatcher probably did save this country. It’s just that, as with the man who decides to end the Cold War by carpet-bombing every nation with nuclear capabilities, it might just have been possible to do it better^†††. Just possibly. She hurt a lot of people, and was also a complete lost cause on social issues (or most of them, anyway). But I find it difficult to actually condemn her. She was better than nothing. Economically speaking. Just about. I think.

*On Section 28: Yes. It is horrible. But um… congratulations, American conservatives. You’ve reached the point our UK conservatives were at in the 1980s. I should be furious about that, but I have difficulty mustering anger about homophobia existing three decades ago when worse homophobia still exists today.

**Note for Americans – 42% doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s because you have a two-party system. You might have heard that the UK has a two party system too. We do not. We have a two and a half party system. The third parties get a decent portion of the vote, but the system is pretty much designed to avoid actually letting them get any significant say***. 42% of the vote is really good. Like… landslide good. Our current Prime Minister got 36%.

***This system broke down a bit recently, I believe.

****In principle, anyway.

*****It wasn’t the EU back then. I know. Shut up.

^†Incidentally, people who tell you this will generally use the ‘less than 60% median income’ measure. Which is a stupid measure. What people mean is that inequality increased. Yes, there is an extent to which what people consider to be necessary. That’s been a thing in economics since… well, since economics was a thing. Seriously, Adam Smith mentions it in Wealth of nations. But I reject any system in which someone whose only act is to make some people richer can then be criticised for driving everyone else into poverty.

^††I might have to explain that metaphor. It means a more service based, aesthetic, economy. The idea is that most of the value of a Starbucks coffee is the froth – the bit on the top that makes it look all fancy, and makes it into a status symbol. And so, in this metaphor, the UK economy moved from trying to make coffee, to making the froth on top of the coffee, and doing other stuff which noone really needs, but which is somehow highly valued anway.

^†††In the Cold War case, by the way, it was done better. Obviously.

^††††Briefly – I think it was a bit of a mixed issue. She was pretty good at using anti-feminist stereotypes to get away with things that she shouldn’t have been able to. Like staying in the Heath government because the guy wanted a token woman, and I don’t think it hurt in Europe sometimes. Things like that. On the other hand, obviously she suffered from prejudice too, and I’m completely sure there were people who just wouldn’t vote for a female PM.