In the fractious debating society that was my childhood, my father
would sometimes grow eloquent on the evils of socialism. By his own account, he
had fallen for left wing ideals in his youth, but had come to see the error of
his ways. Education paid for by the state, healthcare free at the point of
delivery with government-issue orange juice thrown in, a generous family
allowance to be collected every week from the post office – we benefited from
all these provisions, and I never heard him utter a word against them. But
socialism he was definitely against.
This might sound like a paradox but it made more sense back
then. For one thing, there was a lot more socialism around. When my father complained
about socialism he wasn’t thinking about health and education. He wasn’t thinking
about pensions either, or the Gas Board or British Rail.
He'd grown up in harder times. He pursued
education as long as scholarships would allow, but at 16 he was apprenticed to
his father’s trade and became a carpenter and joiner. During the postwar
housing boom, he worked as a foreman for a house-building firm. After a couple
of years, he asked for a pay rise. When the boss refused, they got into an argument
and he was fired on the spot. Living in a company house and with a wife and
seven children to support, he decided to go into a partnership with a
friend who had £1,000 to invest, and embarked on a precarious business as a
speculative builder. We might have been children of the
welfare state, but he was a self-made man.
What he was really talking about when he talked about
socialism was stroppy workers holding the country to ransom, and people
thinking the world owed them a living, and union leaders with the power to
bring down governments lording it over the rest of us with their beer and
sandwiches at number 10. When Margaret Thatcher was elected Conservative leader
in 1975, he and my mother finally joined the party they’d been voting for all
those years, and from then on their faith never wavered.
I heard about Thatcher’s death from a homeless man sitting
outside Holborn tube station. He held a scrappy cardboard sign that said: RIP Thatcher. Dingdong the witch is dead.
I had no idea this old song was about to go viral. The homeless man looked
about 28, too young to remember Thatcher in office, a generation too young to
have rioted against the poll tax, bought his own council house, lost his job in
a Yorkshire coal pit or bought shares in a newly privatised utility company. I
was surprised he cared one way or the other.
Next day I learnt from the front page of the Daily Mail that
he was part of a movement: “30 years of left wing loathing for Lady T explode
in sick celebrations of her death”. Violence had, apparently, “erupted at ‘death
parties’ across the country”. More young people with eerily long memories. Even so, it struck me as an odd choice for a conservative paper to relegate to the inner
pages all its pictures of their heroine with her children, and with the Queen,
and with victorious troops in the Falklands, so that it could lead with THE
FLAMES OF HATRED. But I suppose the Mail knows how to keep its readers happy.
American TV took a more upbeat view. From a quick sampling
of CNN and MSNBC I gathered that Thatcher’s greatest achievement was working
with Reagan to bring the Soviet Union to its knees, though no one asked how the
two leaders had brought this about, and that without Thatcher Britain
would have turned into Greece, though no one explained why it might not just as
easily have become Sweden. Mysteriously, Thatcher was also credited with being
Britain’s first working class prime minister. I wondered what her father, Alderman
Roberts, whom she revered for his business acumen, would have made of that.
For a more nuanced view, I turned to the Guardian. They had Philip
Hensher on hand to imagine an alternative history in which Thatcher lost the
Tory leadership election, leading to a present in which “Perhaps we would be
waiting six months for a mobile telephone, and paying the bills to the post
office… I don’t believe it would be a very advanced telephone, either.” Scary
stuff. On another page, Ian McEwan was explaining that “There was always an
element of the erotic in the national obsession with her… She exerted a glacial
hold over the (male) nation’s masochistic imagination”. This put my father’s
enthusiasm in a whole new light, though it didn’t explain why, to the day she
died, my mother kept a commemoration Thatcher plate on display among her very
best china.
Personally, I won’t be worshipping at the Lady’s shrine, but
I won’t be dancing on her grave either. I’ll admit it’s hard to forget the
particular air of vindictiveness that she brought to the task of redistributing
wealth from the poor to the rich, a job her successors have attended to with greater
tact and more polished smiles. But although she seemed to make it all happen by
sheer willpower and self-belief, there have clearly been larger forces at work
in our increasing subjugation to unregulated markets.
Thinking about those debates of my childhood, I recognise now
that what allowed me to fulfil my parents’ aspirations for me was neither pure
socialism nor untrammelled capitalism, but a mixed economy, with scope for
individual enterprise, support for those who needed it such as mothers with
children, and the opportunity for anyone from any background to achieve their
potential. The educational doorway I stepped through, which was opened by
Atlee’s Labour government in 1946, has been squeezed shut in successive stages by New Labour and the
ruling coalition. You can’t pin that one on Thatcher. And she didn’t bring down
the Soviet Union either, and she didn’t invent global capitalism, and she
wasn’t actually a witch.
