Greasy Pole: Thatcher: the voice is stilled (2002)

The Greasy Pole column from the May 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Thatcher: silenced at last

The nation did not mourn at the news that Margaret Thatcher had been forbidden by her doctors to make any more public speeches. There was no sense that something we all valued will now be missing from our lives. Of course the nation might have marvelled at the bravery of those doctors, doing something her political colleagues never managed – stopping her making those drawn out, haranguing monologues for which she was once so notorious. Thatcher herself probably mourned; she was never averse to the sound of her own voice and then there is the effect of her silence on her income. All those after dinner speeches and so-called lecture tours (she was due to embark on one in America when the doctors intervened) yielded staggeringly generous fees for the regurgitation of some assorted delusions and prejudices.

When she won power in 1979 Thatcher promised a revolution – a word often misused by politicians when what they intend is to re-arrange some of capitalism's shortcomings. Outside Number Ten, glowing with her triumph, she quoted St Francis of Assisi:

"Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope".

That just about covered everything, except that Thatcher had already indicated how she saw things as far as harmony, truth and faith were concerned. “As Prime Minister,” she had said a little before she got the job, “I could not waste time having any internal arguments”.

Revolution 

Like most new governments, the Tories had encouraged the assumption that their “revolution” would succeed because it was based on principles which had somehow eluded all those in the past. In fact things went on much as before and Thatcher's ministers quickly found that they were as tightly in the python-like grip of events as their predecessors. British capitalism was in economic crisis; the chairman of the Confederation of British Industry economy committee revealed the flavour of a current survey of business optimism – or rather the absence of it: “As gloomy a picture as it is possible for anyone to paint and I fear things will get worse before they get better”. But Thatcher had to insist that her policies were effective and needed only time and patience. At the 1981 Tory conference that year she made her famous “The lady's not for turning” speech, which had the grassroot Tories convulsed with obsequious laughter – and Ted Heath, who accepted it as a sneer at his government's embarrassing change of tack when under pressure, reacting grumpily: “it was an absurd caricature to describe the limited policy changes which had to be introduced between 1970 and 1974 as a 'U-turn”.

The revolution was not, so far, working. Unemployment was rising and expected to reach three million in the near future. In February 1981 Thatcher received a memo from Ian Gow, her Parliamentary Private Secretary and most devoted acolyte, telling her that there was “a noticeable deterioration in the morale of our back benchers” due partly to “increasing concern about the extent of the recession and unemployment”. He said nothing about the effect of unemployment on the morale of the people who were actually experiencing it, floundering in the deeper poverty it imposed on them. To some extent they had their say later, in the riots that year in Brixton, Toxteth and Moss Side. The Tory leadership was anything but united; on 23 July 1981 the Cabinet had what Thatcher later described as “one of the bitterest arguments on the economy, or any subject, that I can ever recall taking place at Cabinet during my premiership”.

Ministers like Heseltine, Walker, Pym, Gilmour, Hailsham and Soames made a formidable opposition. Hailsham, to show that he was a Fellow of All Souls, took an historical stance, reminding everyone that in the 1930s unemployment had been effectively exploited by the Nazis and had severely damaged the Republican Party in America. Soames, Leader of the House of Lords, was a particularly grand landed aristocrat who lived by the principle that everyone had their place and should learn to keep it – it was just a matter of chance that his place was somewhere near the top. He had emerged from Thatcher's first Cabinet meeting in a state of shock: “I would not” he confided to another minister “even treat my gamekeeper like that”. He was angry, in a grand kind of way, when Thatcher sacked him; her impression was that “he felt the natural order of things was being violated and that he was, in effect, being dismissed by his housemaid”.

Falklands 

It was fortunate for Thatcher that early in 1982 the Argentinian scrap dealers should choose to start their work on South Georgia, which provided justification for a good, old fashioned colonial war. The upsurge in hysterical patriotism was a convenient diversion from the damaging fact of unemployment. At the time the war was hailed as a triumph of British professional militarism. Now, twenty years after, there has been a more sober assessment, a recognition that it was a close run thing and that many of the more romantic accounts of the campaign were myths. For Thatcher it was crucial; if the British Task Force had failed to re-take the islands she would probably have gone down as well.

Having seen off General Galtieri and the Belgrano and some hundreds of soldiers and sailors Thatcher could turn her attention to her other enemies. First there was the 1983 general election, when the so-called Falklands factor was so favourable to the government. She seemed unstoppable, invincible and the voters agreed. An election majority of 144 wiped out anachronistic Michael Foot, not just as hopeful Prime Minister but as Labour leader as well. Then it was time to take on the coal miners, who had forced her into a strategic retreat in 1981 over the issue of pit closures. The intervening years had been well used by the government, to build up coal stocks at the power stations and to organise a more effective strike-breaking force in the police, who had been outflanked in previous disputes by the flying pickets. There was also the fact that demand for coal was down by a third since 1973/74 and that a breakaway union, the UDM, kept some pits working during the strike. The NUM under Scargill held on grimly until they were forced back to work; their struggle went some way to make the name of one Kim Howells, who is now an ardent Blairite minister and, even for New Labour, a notable traitor to what he once called his principles.

It was after the 1987 general election, when Neil Kinnock was added to the list of miserably beaten Labour leaders and Thatcher gave the impression that she intended to live, and be Prime Minister, for ever, that the Tories began to have doubts again. The poll tax was widely unpopular, the stimulant to serious public disorder short of riots. There were some spectacular by-election defeats and damaging resignations – like Lawson (who told the queen that his 1988 Budget would have to be his last because Thatcher “was making the conduct of policy impossible”) and Howe (who had once told a Tory MP that “I would draw my sword for” Thatcher).

Turfed Out 

Some of this dissent was to do with the fact that she was too preoccupied with her concept of her own invulnerability to notice that she was autocratic and out of touch with her Cabinet. Much of it was to do with the growing realisation that she had become an election liability. Nothing concentrates an MP's mind so much as the fear of losing their seat. Late in 1990 it was time for her to go and the men in grey suits lined up to tell her so. She never got over the fact that after winning three elections she was turfed out of office by her own party. She applied her talents to sniping at her successors—Major (who, she said, was “grey” and had “no principles”) and Hague, who she derided for his juvenility. Now, after the intervention of her doctors, if she wants to let us know what she thinks of Iain Duncan Smith it will have to be in writing.

With her going there was something like a sigh of relief in the parliamentary Conservative Party. No longer would ministers be physically sick before seeing her for what promised to be one of her handbaggings. No longer would they be so overshadowed by her that the very name “Maggie” was synonymous with their party. We had eleven years of her premiership and then another seven of her party in power. So we had her revolution and the end effect was no different from the experience of all the other capitalist parties. In 1997 millions of people were so dispirited with the Tories that they turned to the alternative capitalist party of Blair's New Labour. When Thatcher was at the height of her power there were psychiatrists who assessed their patients' contact with reality by asking them who was prime minister. If they named someone other than Thatcher the psychiatrist knew they were a difficult case for treatment. It says something about Thatcher's brand of capitalism, that her very name was used as a measure of insanity.

Ivan

The belated death of a class warrior (2002)

Editorial from the May 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

So, she's finally gone. The BBC dusted off its pre-prepared reels of fawning documentaries and gave Peter Sissons the task of breaking the bad news to the public. Sissons, however, forgot the script and put on a maroon tie, much to the chagrin of the Daily Mail, who seemed to want him charged with treason.

Then one million pathetic crawlers emerged from under their rocks to line the streets of the capital – or at least that's the way it first appeared. In reality, many turned up just to see the spectacle. And for the million who turned up on the day another 57 million voted with their feet and didn't.

Why should they have paid their respects to Britain's most famous parasite anyway? Few in society epitomised the privilege and condescension which are the traditional hallmarks of the owning class better than Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. That patronising grimace and vague wave of the gloved hand (like “opening a jar slowly” she once said, but in reality more like a thinly disguised two-fingered salute) were the body language of one who considered herself “born to rule”.

Of course, this was an arrogance that was as baseless as it was base. For what was the Queen Mother actually good at? What did she do? Did she ever make things? Or look after people? Or teach them? By all accounts she couldn't even open her own curtains or squeeze the toothpaste from its packet without having assistance from one of her fifty servants. Sure, she drank gin a lot by all accounts but any of us can do that and it can hardly be considered a talent. She liked the gee-gees too – and a flutter – but then so does your average derelict.

Some people in the queues outside Westminster Abbey said she “stood by the nation during the war”, but what exactly did they mean by that? Were the blitzed and beleaguered working class in wartime London supposed to thank their little ration books that she hadn't decamped to join most of the rest of her family in Germany? And why should we all be eternally grateful to her for this since?

During the blitz the working class in the East End of London took a different view of her entirely. When she lorded it over them on one of her walkabouts, they returned her salute to them with interest, pelting her with rotten vegetables. Then, after Buckingham Palace was hit by a couple of stray bombs she made her famous statement that “I can now look the East Enders in the eye” despite the fact that for nearly all the blitz the King and Queen were holed up in Windsor Castle. It was one of first of the many PR stunts for which the entire royal family are now famous.

And some public relations triumph it was – at least for a while. It is in many respects quite amazing that the Queen Mother was able to cultivate the image she did as “the nation's favourite grandmother”, representing an oasis of virtue in an otherwise barren scene. The epithets most commonly deployed to describe her by those who had never met her: “caring”, “considerate”, “dignified” and “loyal”, were phrases devoid of real meaning. How could it be otherwise when she spoke in public rarely if ever, didn't give an interview from 1928 until her death and never wrote an article or otherwise do anything to instil such emotions or elicit such responses?

Her political views were just about as reactionary as they come – far to the right of where popular opinion currently resides, enough to make even Mr Blair blush. She was an old-fashioned ruling class warrior – anti-trade union, suspicious of (and patronising towards) the working class and distrustful of arrivistes like Blair and New Labour. She reportedly said on one occasion that she preferred “Old” Labour but even this was only for their novelty value and so long as they stayed in opposition, where they belonged.

In the end, she died when the popularity of the thing she held dearest – the Royal Family as exemplars of ruling class standards and etiquette – had already started to badly fade. That so few people were really bothered or troubled by her death is testament to this as was the decision by the BBC to significantly scale down its coverage compared to what had been envisaged some years ago.

Socialists – like increasing numbers of the working class as a whole it would seem – will remember her for the things that truly defined her existence: her uselessness on the one hand and her daily embodiment of ruling class privilege on the other. Born in different circumstances into a different environment she may have grown to be somebody genuinely useful to society. But, unfortunately, and to paraphrase the lady herself, she was born to be a parasite. And for that we can only say goodbye . . . and good riddance.

Getting down to fundamentals (2002)

From the May 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is a spectre stalking the world – the spectre of ignorance.

We are used to hearing horror stories about Creationism, and the religious attack on science, from Mid-West America and the Islamic states. But who would have thought such lunacy would penetrate to here? It has. We've had TM (Transcendental Meditation) schools for years which teach kids to meditate and fly. They're just nuts. But systematic idiocy is on the rise. In a recent article in the Observer (17 March), it was reported that a school in the NE of England has refused to teach Darwinism, and is instead putting Creationist ideas. This is not an isolated incident; it is part of the current attack on knowledge, science and rationality.

There are two questions for us to answer: Why is Creationism still rearing its ugly head, after religion had been marginalised by previous generations and church attendance has fallen? And where do all these loony ideas come from anyway?

Understanding of the world is progress, not just in a technical sense – chemistry, satellites, computers – but also in a historical, thus class, sense. Just as the fundamental change from Catholicism to Protestantism was essential for the rise of capitalism as an ideology – for example, the Calvinist idea that God shows his favour on Earth by making merchants rich – so atheism is fundamental to us, the excluded majority, and our claim that the world is ours to run, without gods and masters, as we see fit. After all, to say that there is no heaven in the bye-and-bye translates as a positive call for revolution in the here and now. The post-modern assault on reason, which allows these wacky religious notions to be presented as just someone else's “narrative”, of equal worth to the scientific worldview, is an attack on us as a class. It is “divide-and-rule” for the mind. Whereas pope, ayatollah and archbishop presided over class rule in days gone by, now all that is required is to deny the scientific worldview any superiority.

Permanent revolution of ideas

How is this possible? It is a function of the human brain to generalise, to take two or more concepts together and come up with a broader concept. For example, feet. Each foot has different characteristics, as you find out when you go to buy shoes. But in order to mass-produce shoes, feet are generalised into sizes, and we are left to find the best fit we can. To a shoe manufacturer, there aren't 12 billion feet in the world but only categories of feet, in sizes, and width fittings if you're lucky. As long as you keep your feet on the ground, this is OK. A size 9 boot only has meaning if it fits a real foot – falling orders will soon tell a shoe manufacturer if they over-generalise and make square shoes. But without this constant reference to reality, generalisations get out of hand. A fundamentalist shoe manufacturer may decide that feet are made by God, in His Image, in perfect sizes, and real feet are only imperfect versions of the original Foot. The idea rules the reality, and the loony shoemaker produces ideal shoes and forces people to wear them, since they are getting closer to God by forcing their feet to deform and fit the shoes.

This is how religion works. You generalise from real conditions, keep the generalisation and bin the reality. The generalisations are now an ideal world, to which reality must conform. As our knowledge of the real world changes, the generalisations become outdated. At first, this seems to mark them as eternal truths, a divinely simple and regular account of a disordered and chaotic world. As time goes on, those people who live in the new, more complex world express their lives in new generalisations, and a new system confronts the old. Thus with Protestantism; thus with the Copernican worldview; and thus with evolution.

The scientific worldview attempts to overcome this; it is, at least in principle, the permanent revolution of ideas. The generalisation process is continually subjected to experimental testing: does the theory match up with the real world? You can generalise as much as you like, as long as you can verify or falsify the idea, i.e. that you test it with relation to the real world.

Institutional ignorance

The post-modern retreat from reality denies this faculty of judgment; it says that there is no way to compare ideas against each other. Each person comes up with their own way of generalising the world; their “narrative”. So someone who thinks that the Earth is flat and the moon is a melon suspended a dozen feet over their head has just as much claim to a correct account of reality as, say, an astrophysicist. Just think of Phoebe in Friends (if you watch that) and her insistence on believing in idiotic stuff like her mother's soul being in a cat, and allowing her idiocy to be unchallenged, by emotional manipulation.

This is damn clever stuff. We run society from top to bottom, so we are required to deal with scientific matters whether it be using a computer, understanding food labels, estimating the amount of paint to cover a wall, or whatever. At the same time, however, the logic of our existence as real, capable men and women who need no gods and masters to rule us is denied. Secretaries, checkout workers, or teachers we may be during the week, but we can still have our minds raped on Sunday. They do this to our children in school. The very existence of religious studies in schools depends on official ignorance. And New Labour is officially very ignorant indeed. Blair and Brown are ardent Christians, and in general this government is much more religious than previous ones. No more “White Heat of Technology”; now the black veil of incomprehension.

What is to be done? The Socialist Party stands for socialism and nothing but. However, we require a democracy for our current revolutionary strategy, and Creationism, plus post-modernism in general, is an attack on democracy in the sense of an attack on the ability to make life decisions based on one's real existence. There is no democracy amongst the brainwashed, nor amongst those whose brains have never been filled.

As students, parents, teachers – as human beings – we must fight this cancer of the mind, putting forward our positive understanding of the world against institutionalised ignorance. This is not an anti-religious crusade, it is the campaign to see the world through our eyes rather than someone else's. Religion is a class issue. We must understand our world as it is, make our own generalisations about it, come to our own conclusions. Then we must put our ideas against existing ones, and make the world in our image. Socialist propaganda is our ideas; revolution is our struggle to make those ideas a reality. Ditch god, flying saucers, yogic flying, Earth Mother Gaia, spiritualism, ouija boards, tantric head-shaving, bead-wearing, and all that other crap and join us for a world made by us, for us.

Simon Wigley