Editorial: The alternative to Thatcher (1983)

Editorial from the February 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard 

With each passing day the dominance of Margaret Thatcher over the British political scene grows wider and more powerful. To the surprise of many observers, she is proving vastly skilful at the disreputable trade of creating and using opportunities to monopolise the attentions of the news-seeking media. Her recent visit to the Falklands was an example; while she was there firing cannon, flirting with exultant soldiery and encouraging the Islanders, the other parties, for all the publicity they got, might not have existed.

On her return home, apart from one or two embarrassing facts such as the dole queues and the ever more stringent poverty of the increasing numbers of workers who rely on state handouts, she professed to be able to see nothing but sunny days ahead. She trumpeted the news that the official index says that prices now are not rising as fast as they were. Over many years of propaganda, from Labour and Tory governments, workers have been persuaded that the level of prices is a matter for their concern. A Prime Minister who can claim to have controlled prices is regarded as the leader of a successful government.

Thatcher's popularity rests on a reputation for putting things, and people, in their place. She overshadows the rest of her government, who are banished to boring conferences on the EEC regulations for potted geraniums or are left to squirm through potential scandals like the Franks Report and the police trying to execute the wrong man in a London street. She has put General Galtieri firmly in his place; he is now an ex-President with little honour to his name. She has brought the unions to heel, with even the coal miners shrinking from a fight at the cost of leaving their posturing President Scargill looking more ludicrous than before.

All of this, and much more, Thatcher achieves by a simple, well tried technique. She ignores any inconvenient reality and substitutes for it a fantasy cunningly fashioned to appeal to the distorted perceptions of the working class. This fantasy she then propagates, come what may, as the one rocklike, eternal truth which will save us all. In this way Thatcher assumes the image of a resolute leader who knows what is good for us and who cannot be swayed from what she knows is right. Thus she is able comfortably to revive the crasser sentiments of patriotism which many people thought had finally died, after a long decline, in the trenches of 1914/18. She is able to mislead workers whose acquaintance with history goes no further than skin deep that this is the new Elizabethan Age which was supposed to start in 1953 but is in train now that she is queen.

With the Labour Party in disarray and the SDP recovered from the excesses of their first flush of optimism, do we face the prospect of the Tories being in power for ever more? Thatcher haters can take heart; there have been many examples — Baldwin, Churchill, Macmillan. Wilson — of leaders who were once judged to be invincible but who were abruptly brought down. (It is an interesting side-fact that such leaders have a propensity for living a long time afterwards, to write their memoirs and act the Elder Statesman. Such physical toughness is demanded of top politicians; Thatcher all too apparently has it in good measure.)

The likelihood, then, is that if the Tories have their way the next election will be fought on the personalities of the respective leaders. Thatcher will be presented to us as the best Prime Minister in British history; the SDP are already puffing up the florid Roy Jenkins as the most successful Chancellor of the Exchequer since the war, which is probably as startling for Jenkins as for those who remember his spell at the Treasury; and the Labour Party will have to say that Foot is, well, perhaps the finest thinker in the history of Hampstead.

An election in that style — and we have not so much as caricatured what may well happen — would further obscure the fact that what is happening now in the world has historical and social roots and that beside that reality leaders count for very little. The problems of capitalism 1983, as ever, can be dealt with only by reference to, and an understanding of, those roots. In this, which in other words is a development of consciousness among the working class, leaders are unwanted and irrelevant. The superficial, day-to-day patch-up job on capitalism’s ailments which are the policies of these leaders and their parties is equally beside the point.

To look at the roots of the capitalism’s problems is to consider the case for something more fundamental and permanent than a party programme hashed up to win votes, or the plastic personality of some leader. It means to weigh up the case for the abolition of capitalism, for the dispossession of the ruling class and the substitution of socialism — the society of common ownership and democratic control of the means of life.

Socialism will be a democratic society in which everyone will have free — and therefore equal — access to the world’s wealth. The basis of common ownership of the means of production and distribution will nurture the roots of social relationships which are radically different from those we suffer under today. Socialism will be privilege free, its material and moral processes fashioned by human co-operation for the production of abundance.

That is the real alternative to the Iron Lady and to her surroundings — the sordid parliamentary sham fights, the insidious political campaigns, the slick media promotion of leaders as super-human or sub-human, according to taste. Socialism needs, and will have, an informed, conscious commitment on the part of the world’s working class before it can be established. And that will characterise its morality — one not of blind submission but conscious participation.