Another great article in todays times. Best read for the objective ones willing to understand the situation
The selfish Left, not Thatcher, divided us
Daniel Finkelstein
In the 20 years before her time in office, the nation endured far more conflict than in the 20 years after it
In the dying days of the Heath administration, Sir William Armstrong, the head of the Civil Service and the Prime Minister’s closest adviser, lay on the floor of the waiting room in 10 Downing Street, waving his arms wildly and babbling about Armageddon.
Sir William was using the room because he thought it the one place that wasn’t bugged. He was, said a witness, talking in a way that was “really quite mad”. A few days later he was sent for enforced rest at Lord Rothschild’s villa in Barbados.
In the months leading up to Sir William’s breakdown, the miners had begun their campaign for a 35 per cent pay increase on top of the large settlement that they had won only two years earlier, in defiance of the Government’s pay policy and despite special concessions offered only to them.
The Prime Minister had announced that industry would be confined to a three-day working week in order to conserve energy. The miners’ response was to go on strike.
Yesterday’s coverage of the death of Margaret Thatcher contained a great deal of comment about how divisive she was. It is obviously ridiculous to respond to someone saying “I found her divisive” by saying “well, I didn’t”. And in any case, it’s not as if I can’t see what they are driving at.
In my personal encounters, I found her formidable, impressive but hard to engage with. She would argue with some minor detail of what you had said until you had almost forgotten the point you were originally trying to make. And as I worked for John Major, and still feel personally and politically warm towards him, I thought I might say on his behalf (without asking him and in order that he need not say it) that her behaviour towards her successor was sub-optimal.
So I appreciate that she could be difficult and her way of approaching a political argument could scarcely be more different from mine. But the idea that the fault for the great division in British politics in the 1980s lay with her? No. Sorry, but no. Or perhaps that should be no, no, no.
By the time she became Prime Minister, the government of Britain had begun to crack under the strain. Sir William’s breakdown is part historical event, part metaphor.
Margaret Thatcher’s promise on the doorstep of No 10 — “where there is discord, may we bring harmony” — was last night being intercut on the television news with footage of the miners’ strike of 1984 to suggest that the opposite occurred. But this ignores the reason why she used these words. She made the promise — the words seemed the right ones to use — because when she took office Britain was already divided; there was already discord.
Inflationary economic policy, designed to produce full employment, had handed the trade unions great power. Government needed them in order to try to control prices. And the behaviour of the Left, granted this power, was unconscionable. They made demand after demand, becoming increasingly difficult to deal with. The results were strikes, demonstrations, crises and hyper-inflation.
Since the time of Harold Macmillan — with the exception of a short, but unsuccessful burst of activity by Ted Heath — governments had sought to achieve harmony by conciliating the unions. But this had been a miserable failure.
Margaret Thatcher tried to end discord by defeating those causing it. She ended inflationary finance, ceased conciliation, and then waited until the unions, led into battle by Arthur Scargill’s miners, had over-reached themselves and were defeated. Many people felt, and still feel, a burning anger at this but I argue that it worked. In the 20 years after Mrs Thatcher, Britain was less discordant and more harmonious than in the 20 years before her.
The politics of the Thatcher years were divisive but they couldn’t be anything else. The Left wanted policies that were simply impractical and unacceptable. They could
not be conceded, no matter how angry it made the unions that their demands were denied.
I was a member of the centrist Social Democratic Party during the miners’ strike and argued then, as I do now, that the Government might have done more to help those in pit villages find alternative work. But this was not what the fight was about, nor what the miners asked for. They argued that there was no such thing as an uneconomic pit and that we should use deep-mined British coal, however difficult or expensive to extract.
Such a demand was impossible to yield to. Margaret Thatcher was not being divisive by refusing to yield to it. Yesterday Dave Hopper, general secretary of the Durham Miners’ Association, said that the former Prime Minister’s death on his birthday made it “one of the best birthdays I have ever had”.
What sort of human being says something like that? The sort she was right to resist and we should be pleased was defeated. And the sort who takes all the blame for the brave miners he took down with him.
On the front page of The Guardian yesterday Mrs Thatcher was accused of sending “Bobby Sands to an Irish hero’s grave without a blink”. But Sands was not a hero and she didn’t send him to his grave. He starved himself to death. The Government rightly didn’t give in to his demands to be considered a political prisoner with extraordinary privileges, and he starved himself to death.
Was this a dreadful, tragic, chilling moment? Yes. But does it mean that it was Mrs Thatcher who divided politics? Only if one prefers the alternative, which was to surrender to something that should not be surrendered to. Bobby Sands divided politics.
Is this all just history? A few days ago, the MP Tom Watson published (I promise you that he did) the following on Twitter: “Bad man @george_osborne: Booooooooo Boooooooo Booooooooo #booGideon.” Mr Watson is 46 years old. And a member of the Shadow Cabinet.
The Left’s approach to the fiscal crisis has been inarticulate rage of this sort coupled with hyperbole and menace and threats of general strikes. Every reduction in spending has been resisted, the attacks invariably intemperate. And the thrust of the rhetoric, without irony, is that by cutting unaffordable welfare, and arguing for those cuts, it is Mr Osborne who is being divisive, bringing discord where there was harmony.
But the lesson of the Thatcher years is that what broke the harmony is borrowing more than we can afford, that what causes discord is unreasonably demanding that welfare be left untouched when it cannot conceivably be left untouched, and that what seems in the short run to be divisive may, in the long run, be the only way of restoring social stability.
