Britain in the 20th Century: Thatcherism, 1979-1990 - Professor Vernon Bogdanor

Gresham College presents Thatcherism 1979 to 1990 by Professor Vernon Bogdan all the ladies and gentlemen this is a lecture in the I hope in the series on British history in the 20th century and the last lecture for those who came to it was on pre Thatcherism and next one which will be the last will be on post Thatcherism so it's natural this one should be on Thatcherism and Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of the Conservative Party in February 1975 much of surprise of many leading conservatives Reginald maudling who've been Chancellor and Home Secretary in previous Conservative government's said the party had taken leave of its senses Lord Carrington who was to be Foreign Secretary in Margaret Thatcher's government said that she would be out of the leadership by Christmas but in fact she was leader of the Conservative Party for 15 years and prime minister for 11 and three-quarter years which the longest continuous time of any prime minister since the Napoleonic Wars Lord Liverpool 1812 to 1827 you had to go back that far to find someone who was prime minister for longer but even more than that she gave her name to an ideology Thatcherite and she the only Prime Minister of the 20th century who did that we do talk it's true about someone being Churchillian but I think by that we mean a style rather than a set of ideas but Thatcherite a tourism is a set of ideas and what I will try and do is to describe what these ideas were now Marvin Hatcher was very different from most of her predecessors as leader of the Conservative Party apart ironically from the man she supplanted Edward Heath with whom she Iger sung in common if you look at the four prime ministers of conservative governments in 1951 64 they were Churchill Anthony Eden Harold Macmillan and Sir Alec douglas-home Churchill or the grandson of a Duke Eden was the son of a baronet Harold Macmillan was the son-in-law of a Duke and Alec douglas-home had been a 14th Earl before he renounced his title in the last three all except Churchill had been to Eton Churchill did not go to Eton he went to Harrow now these four leaders were succeeded in the Conservative Party by Edward Heath who was the son of a builder and a ladies maid and then after market Thatcher John Major who was a son of a trapeze artist who in retirement sold garden furniture and those two and Margaret Thatcher did not go to public school they went to Grammar School first state Grammar School amar bukh Thatcher as is well known was born in Grantham she was a daughter of a grocer and she was one in her first gun which she was one of just three people who hadn't been to public school but by the end of her government the public school numbers were going down there was just one old Etonian left in the cabinet and she was succeeded by John Major but perhaps the pendulum swung back again with David Cameron we don't know but Margaret Thatcher often stressed her humble origins and said that her upbringing in difficult circumstances had given her many lessons in sound housekeeping living within a budget in particular and that was of great value in government but her backgrounds not quite as humble as she suggested her father in fact owned two grocery stores and employed several people and he was a local dignitary he was a counselor then I'm alderman and then mayor of Grantham and it was also chairman of the governors of the Girls Grammar School which Margaret Thatcher attended he the father had entered a local government in interesting enough not as a conservative but as a liberal he was a Methodist and like most nonconformist he became a liberal and then he became an independent which meant in effect a a conservative then in local government and when he spoke for Margaret Thatcher in her first electoral outing in Dartford in 1949 he said that by tradition his family were liberal but the Conservative Party stood for very much the same things now of the Liberal Party did in his young days and Margaret Thatcher later said if blastn was alive he'd be a paid member of the Conservative Party in modern times now Margaret Thatcher's father was well-off well-off enough to pay for her to go to grammar school because she went to Grammar School before the 1944 Education Act when getting in depended on paying a fee and she couldn't have gone without the fees being paid and her father also paid for her to go to Oxford so she wasn't as poor she sometimes Jesty but in any case although she spoke a lot about her roots in Grantham she left as soon as she could and she went to Oxford and after that she came back very rarely and she married who married a wealthy businessman lived in London and sought a safe constituency in the Home Counties she didn't want to represent anywhere in the north of England and I think the difficulties she faced in the Conservative Party wasn't so much due to her origins though it was a problem the Conservatives were then still dominated some extent by old money and connections but her gender now in the 1945 general election amongst Conservative MPs there were just one female it was a man's world then and most of her competitors in selection committees had very good war records and sold themselves to constituencies on that base it was extremely important then indeed think difficult to get a conservative seat for many as after the war unless you had a good war record but the emphasis on her origins though exaggerated was not entirely mythical it was of some importance because despite her relatively wealthy lifestyle art her marriage Margaret Thatcher did not identify with a very rich but what she called her people and these people were shopkeepers like her father the lower middle class and the self-employed and they formed the backbone of the Conservative Party now a great deal has been written about the working class and the Labour Party and it's certainly the case that if in the 20th century the working class had voted solidly for labor labor would have been in power all the time because the majority of people for the twentieth century were defined as working-class but in fact around 1/3 of the working class normally voted conservative under Margaret Thatcher a much greater percentage in the 1987 election a majority of the skilled working class seemed to have voted conservative so people exaggerate perhaps class consciousness amongst the working class but the middle class is Margaret Thatcher's people are much more class conscious of the small shopkeepers and the self-employed around 90 percent vote conservative much more solidly than members of the professional or managerial classes or the very rich these are the people whom the Conservative Party represents and you're more than the labour party represented the working class and Margaret Thatcher was often accused of representing middle-class values and of seeking to fight for outdated middle-class values and when she stood for the conservative leadership in 1975 she met that accusation head-on she said if middle-class values include the encouragement of variety and individual choice the provision of fair incentives and rewards for skill and hard work the maintenance of effective barriers against the excessive power of the state and a belief in the wide distribution of individual private property then they are certainly what I am trying defend she said they were the values of what she called our people but she also said that they were the values of many people who wanted to become middle-class that is the aspiring working class the SI toos in sociological jargon and these form the backbone of her electoral support some people call them rather slightingly Essex man Essex woman and there was in the 1980s there was a tremendous swing to the Conservatives not only in Essex but then the whole the Northeast pocket going out of London in Essex in Bedfordshire Huntington Cheryl took John Major's seat Cambridgeshire and so on many of those areas had overspill from East London and they were aspiring working-class people seated who wanted to join the middle class and who were attracted by the appeal to middle-class values now after leading office in 1996 she was rather disenchanted with John Major's government and she gave an interview in 1990 we were now hailing she said since we are unpopular about all because the middle classes and those who aspire to join the middle classes feel they no longer have the incentives and opportunities they expect from a Conservative government so this was a social grouping she represented and I had they were the backbone of the Conservative Party but they tended to be taken for granted and perhaps ignored by conservative leaders in the immediate post-war years because the main concern of leaders like Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath was with the organized working class and in particular the unemployment of the interwar years they were very scarred but that experience of unemployment in the interwar years and they said this must not come back again do everything possible to ensure it doesn't come back and the way to do it was to get accommodation with the trade unions to work out policies with the trade unions to ensure full employment and improve working-class living standards don't make the mistake they said of the conservative of the 1920s of confrontation the general strike and all that division of the countries and two nations we want one nation and that may me making concession the unions in terms of wages and so on to avoid industrial strife now what about those who didn't belong to trade unions those on fixed incomes for self-employed or small shopkeepers pensions these people who could not protect themselves against inflation and had no organized group to represent them these people were often the backbone of conservative constituency associations but the leaders took no notice of them now that perhaps didn't matter too much in the 1950s and 60s period of high economic growth but when you had a truants there was enough for everyone and living stands all could improve but it did matter as inflation started to increase and growth started to fall and a Margaret Thatcher represented the people who were the victims of that economic process now a lot of the analysis of the 1960s in particular in 1970s perhaps you've been watching the television programs on the 1970s concentrated on the resentments from the left the threat from the left to the post-war settlement the student revolt in the late 1960s trade union militancy the right of the left in the Labor Party and under Tony Benn and that threatened it was thought the post-war settlement but the real threat because it was much more powerful sociologically was coming from the right and there was a much greater sense of alienation from the right than from the left and that point of view I think Margaret Thatcher can be seen as a much greater revolutionary figure than Tony then now together with that economic revolt that I just mentioned there was also what one might call a cultural revolt a revolt against the permissive society reforms of the 1960's that was most strongly represented by Mary Whitehouse now Margaret Thatcher pretended I think to support that in fact she was from up with liberal on her voting behavior she voted in favor of abortion law reform in the 1960s and or reform in the 1960s those who voted in favor of the retention of capital punishment and the only time in her career she ever broke a tour III lion whip was the vote in favor of retaining birching for young offenders but on homosexual abortion law reforms she was not on the side of Mary Whitehouse the countable revolt was also against new trends in education progressive teaching comprehensive schools rebels in the Universities also I think a revolt against the view that Britain was no longer a great power a denigration of patriotism revolt against Europe growth of euro scepticism the hostility to mass immigration but above all fear of inflation and fear of trade union power and you will remember that in February 1974 Edward Heath called an election on the issue of trade union power which he asked the question who governs and that led to that the answer not to you but it led to a hung parliament in which it wasn't clear who governed and the rise of nationalism and protest parties and people argued not pass new governs but can written be governed at all is Britain governor ball and in particular is Britain governor ball against the wishes of the trade union leaders in 1979 the Daily Telegraph had the election cartoon with James Callaghan the Prime Minister with a poster saying vote Labour behind him there was a trade unionist and the Tartan went on vote labour - or else in other words could the country be governed against the wishes of the trade union leaders so it wasn't only economic decline people were worried about but also political decline some people felt in the seventies per ticket the time the winter of discontent in 78 9 but also in 74 I think they were looking into an abyss that there was something very wrong with a country and Thatcher's was born out of that the kind of British equivalent if you like of gaullism in France born out of economic decline political decline and having mentioned France there were similar developments in other countries indeed in Britain it hadn't been noticed the vote was given to 18 year olds in 1970 in 969 a big pond they voted the first time in 1970 and it was assumed this was a vote for the permissive generation but people were thinking only of a small minority at universities studies of eighteen to twenty one-year-old showed for example they were much more in favor of capital punishment than their elders and in 1970 they voted disproportionately for Edward Heath against Wilson and in America when the vote was lowered they voted disproportionately for Richard Nixon in 1972 now Richard Nixon spoke of a silent majority and that was a similar phenomenon in Britain so it's a manifestation of a new social mood which was very different from that of traditional conservative because traditional conservatives wanted to preserve but the kind of mood we're talking about wanted to change if you like put the clock back but alter things that society had gone too far if you like down the road to perdition they wanted less inflation less power for the trade unions less emigration less counting to other countries back to basics in education and morality and a conservatism which had become an elite philosophy if you like was now becoming a popular philosophy whose aim was not to defend the status quo but to subvert it a radical form of conservative and Margaret Thatcher is very much in tune with that and much more in tune with her conservative predecessors Nigel Lawson who was Margaret Thatcher's Chancellor from 1983 to 1989 said Harold Macmillan had a contempt for the party anok Hume tolerated it Ted Heath's loved it Margaret genuinely liked it she felt at communion with it Harold Macmillan himself agreed with our estimate he said musing in the mid day of 1980s he said we used to sit listening to these extraordinary speeches and conservative conferences urging us to birch or hang them all or other such strange things we used to sit quietly nodding our heads and when we came to make our speeches we did not refer to what had been said at all but watching her I think she agrees with them now this lude I'm talking about may not have come to the surface it elites conservatism or one nation concerted whatever you call it or even the moderate social democracy Wilson and Callahan if all that had worked we wouldn't have heard so much of this mood and it wasn't there for her March off in the 50s and 60s but they weren't very successful and as I've tried to show in previous lectures around about 1960 politicians got worried about the low rate of growth of the British economy compared to other countries and so they must do something about it they weren't very successful what they were going to do about it was a much greater degree of government planning more state control government intervention in the economy government intervention in pay bargaining through incomes policies sometimes called corporatism and this went further and further and under Edward Heath are really a last desperate attempt if you like to preserve the post-war settlement through an income policy pushed to its limits perhaps it might have succeeded if it wasn't for bad luck again if you watch the programs on the nineteen seventies you'll remembered seeing about the arab-israeli war of 1973 and the four-fold increase in oil prices to which it led which put huge strains on every economy in the West a combination of high inflation and high unemployment and it really ruined the attempt to secure this corporate planning there simply wasn't enough money to pay off the trade unions to keep them happy so who came up against a brick wall and the power unions meantime seem to have grown to great particularly under the government's which succeeding he's the lay the governments of Wilson and Callen and while Margaret Thatcher's closest allies Joseph said in a paper he wrote for the shadow cabinet in May 1976 he said the negotiation of an income policy gives the trade unions political power extra power it leads to bargaining on a far wider basis than incomes policy or economic policies generally it becomes political and the resulting package invades the sphere many other interests and of parliament and he called a so-called social contract of the labor government with the unions a devil's bargain because it gave the union's tremendous power for all sorts of political decisions and it led the Conservatives believed for a kind of blockage a kind of iron cave where you couldn't do anything against the wishes of the unions now in 1974 he lost the who governs election in February and then he lost the second election in October 1974 the conservative approach appear to have hit the battles what should be done now the answer of Heath and the conservative leadership was that they noted the large liberal vote in these two elections six million votes in February and 5 million votes in October 1974 they said we have to win over the center vote don't rock the boat try and win the center no need for a fundamental rethink but make the Conservatives more attracted to the centrist vote now as you look predicted this was exactly the wrong approach Margaret Thatcher thought she thought concerns him speak loudly and clearly for genuine conservative policies and in particular to meet the danger of decline now the alternative argument was first presented by Margaret Thatcher's allies so Keith Joseph in a series of speeches in 1974 against Edward Heath and his argument was quite different from heats he said that the problem wasn't just labor governments but that conservative governments were equally guilty of serious policy errors and indeed the whole post-war settlement had run into the sand the framework was collapsing and it was a mistake to think it was just the fault of the Labour Party it was the Conservative Party as well they themselves had failed market Hatcher adopted that approach and in 1975 in an article she wrote The Daily Telegraph in standing the leadership she said people believe too many conservatives have become socialists already Britain's progress towards socialism has been an alternation of two steps forward with half a step back if every Labour government is prepared to reverse every Tory measure while Conservative government's accept nearly all socialist measures as being the will of the people the end result is only too plain and why should anyone support a party that seems to have the courage of known convictions now in the speech he made in September 1974 at Upminster Sir Keith Joseph's said this this is no time to be mealy-mouthed since the end of the Second World War we have had altogether too much socialism there is no point in my trying to evade what everybody knows for half of the 30 years Conservative government's for understandable reasons did not consider it practicable to reverse the vast bulk of the accumulating detritus of socialism which on each occasion they found when they returned to office so we tried to build on its uncertain foundations instead and characteristically because he was great one for self laceration he ended by saying I must take my share of the blame for following too many of the Hashem's then in our speech he made preston shortly afterwards he said that inflation is beginning to destroy our society and we weren't dealing with it because of the bogus fear of mass unemployment and he said our post-war boom began under the the 1930s we were haunted by the fear of long-term mass unemployment the grim hopeless dole queues and towns which died we talked ourselves into believing that these gold tight-lipped men in caps and mufflers were around the corner and tailored our policy to match these imaginary conditions for imaginary what they were and then in the third speech at Luton beginning of October 1974 very shortly before the second election of that year he linked the economic critique with a social critique he said the post-war consensus that not only impoverished Britain but it was also destroying the moral foundations of society he said it was not so long ago we thought we had utopia within reach what has happened to his optimism has it really crumbled under the weight of rising crime social decay and the decline of traditional values had we really become a nation of hooligans and vandals bullies and childs batterers criminals and inadequate our loud talk about the community over lies the fact that we have no community we talk about neighborhoods and all too often we have no neighbors we go on about the home when we only had dwelling places containing television sets it is he did actually ask an entrepreneur and visiting a factory later in the 1980s a sector industry whether the director thought the television had really come to stay he went on it is the absence of a frame of rules and community place and belonging responsibility and label honest but makes it possible for people to be more lonely than in any previous stage now history vast factories huge schools sprawling estates skyscraping apartment blocks all these work against our community and our common involvement one with another now this is highly significant and I think made Margaret Thatcher possible because for the first time a senior conservative Minister said that both parties were responsible for Britain's decline relative neighbors both parties were responsible for the interventionist policies which had led to the crisis it was a fundamental attack on the post-war settlement which seemed until perhaps shortly before 2 a brought full employment and rising standards of welfare in steam after few as Asian in 1981 Keith Joseph met Tony Benn on a train and they both agreed the past 35 years have been a disaster they didn't take the view been a great improvement had been a disaster for different reasons of course but the better they agreed with that and they both want to break the consensus not a golden age as many would think but a disaster the left has said its disaster because the post-war economy was too capitalist and the right said it was a disaster because it was too socialist but for the moment it was the right that was in charge and Joseph was saying a different approach was needed relying on the market now they were given support because some of the Joseph's recipe was adopted by the Callaghan Labor government and in the autumn of 1976 shortly before Britain had to call on the IMF to deal with the budget deficit James Callaghan Prime Minister made a very important speech the Labour Party conference said have been written by son-in-law Peter J but in a very important speech he said this which was Joseph's agreement is that we used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending I tell you in all candor but that option no longer exists and that in soap bars ever did exist it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step higher inflation followed by higher unemployment that is the history of the last 20 years now first Joseph and Margaret Thatcher said what was needed was a new settlement a one based on the states from withdrawing from the management of the economy and the main tasks of the state was simply to provide the framework through achieving sound money ending inflation an environment in which businessmen can prosper and that the Aladdin's lamp as it was held not by government but by entrepreneurs and Joseph said the character who works the magic is the entrepreneur who the Aladdin who creates the jobs now what Keith Joseph did and I think it's fundamental to Margaret Thatcher's period of office he gave the conservative something they hadn't really had since the beginning of the century a degree of intellectual self-confidence for the first time there was if you like a counter ideology to socialism social democracy a conviction that the left could be defeated on the battleground of ideas when Margaret Thatcher said this she dedicated the autobiographical volume of her memoirs to keep Joseph and said he gave us back our intellectual self competence it was Keith she said who really began to turn the intellectual tide back against socialism if Keith hadn't been doing all that work with the intellectual all the rest of our work would probably never have resulted in success now when she stood against Edward Heath for leadership in 1975 she told her constituents in Finchley I'm trying to represent the deep feelings of the many thousands of rank-and-file Torre's in the country and potential conservative voters to who feel let down by our party and find themselves unrepresented in a political vacuum she said if a party stood up for conservative values we shall not have to convert people to our principles they will simply rally to those that are truly their own and when she stood for election she said I I meant a lot of prejudice and she says and how men was in the eyes of the wet Tory establishment I was not only a woman but that woman some are not just of a different sex but of a different class a person with an alarming conviction the values and virtues of middle England should be brought to bear on the problems which the establishment consensus is created and she was known as conservative central office for some time after election of that bloody woman the initials with TB Avenue and when Margaret Thatcher got papers with TB demonic first thought it but it was the title of a TV station and didn't realize it preferred actually through her now she came to power in 1979 after the winter of discontent after the decade of public sector strikes which the 1970s again if you've been watching the television programs you'll see what I mean seem to be a decade of confusion decline and economic failure taking the country to the brink of collapse but Margaret Thatcher's victory closes one capture of post-war British history which would included the Atlee government's social reforms the independence of the colonies one notion conservatism our entry into Europe ends that with the national leadership passing to a new post-war generation with new ideas and values and everyone surprised 1979 heralded a period of ten or more years of political stability after the instability of the seventies now what was that reason now perhaps the best way to answer that question is to go to the source herself Margaret Thatcher she was asked by Robin day in 1987 what it was she said this sound finance and government running the affairs of the nation in a sound financial way it stands for honest money not inflation it stands for living within our means it stands for incentives it stands for the wider and wider spread of ownership of property of houses of shares of savings it stands for being strong in defense a reliable ally and a trusted friend and I think one can divide the appeared long period of Margaret Thatcher in all into four different phases now in the first phase from 1979 rocket in 1983 she succeeded in clearing away two main obstacles to the achievement of her eggs the first was high inflation and the second was the power of the trade unions now she abandoned the idea of incomes policies which every governments in her Millan's in the 1960s had put forward and she said the government cannot help secure a level of employment that depends on decisions made by employers and by trade unionists all the government can do is to produce sound money through control of money supply the great mistake of post-war demand management was to react to rising unemployment by injecting more money into the system which as Callahan had said after all just caused inflation if you want to get high employment you must become more efficient encourage competition remove government control and make individuals more responsible for their choices so the level of unemployment depends upon the free decisions of individuals in the industrial system employers but particularly trading this does not depend on don't the consequence of all that was a very rapid rise in unemployment which reached 3 million in 1983 and did not drop much until 1986 now previously mit has been thought governments couldn't win elections with that high level of unemployment and indeed there were riots on the streets in 1981 in many inner-city areas but people forgot that most of the unemployed at that time any rate lived in safe lane areas of safe labour seats in any case the unemployed often did not vote and that have also been true in interwar years when the mass unemployment was not incompatible with very large conservative majorities to some extent the result of that was the growth of two nations where the heirs were unemployed was high and the old industrial areas the north Scotland Wales South Wales and then the South of England which was comparatively prosperous and this is gave rise to the slogan if you like ethics man so from this point of view fascism was as much a symptom of changes as it was a cause now voters continually said throughout the 1980s and opinion polls that they thought unemployment was a more serious problem than inflation but when they are asked what threatens you and your family most they said rising prices so that was not really influenced them in voting so that was the first thing then with the trade unions there were a series of Acts limiting secondary picketing requiring ballots before strikes and also requiring unions to contract in if they wish to pay two political parties now more important than that perhaps there was an end to the process of consultation and negotiation with trade unions which been Ernest Bevins key theme from the time he became Minister labour national service in 1940 so two pillars of a post-war settlement were crumbling the first was the commitment to full employment the second was the commitment to negotiations and consultations with the trade unions which had given rise to the trade union veto and it could be argued had brought down three governments previous three governments the Callaghan government in the winter of discontent the heath government and the who governs election and the Wilson government in 1970 arted had failed to secure trade union reform and John Smith the Labour Shadow Chancellor in the mid-1980s told one of mrs. Thatcher's colleagues that the Labour Party oh the big debt to Margaret Thatcher for having tamed the unions and this colleague then went see Margaret Thatcher and said that she had shifted the center of politics about 200 miles to the right and Margaret Thatcher said yes but not far enough there were more dragons to slay and in the second phase of her Premiership she faced two challenges two challenges either which could have destroyed her friendship the first being the Falklands and the second the miners strike under Arthur Scargill from 1984 to five there's great paradox about the Falklands that her great success which first I think established her reputation as a leader of determination strength it came out of failure now the Argentina's is well known laid claim to the Falkland Islands which were 8,000 miles from Britain only 400 from Argentine and the Falklands depended on the Argentine for supplies and food and all the rest of it so British governments for some years had been trying to find a compromise solution which could resolve the difficulties now in the late 1970s there was some talk of an argentinian invasion at the time of the callahan government when David Owen was foreign secretary and the Labour government then reinforced the Falklands by sending a nuclear-powered ship HMS endurance to the Falklands and there was no invasion now it's not clear whether the Argentine knew about the dispatch of this ship so it's not clear whether it was deterred or not if they did it was a triumph for the government but of course it couldn't say so-and-so got no credit for it now Margaret Thatcher was cutting public expenditure and therefore decided to cut a naval expenditure and one of the ways machine becomes to withdraw HMS India from the Falklands which the Argentinians mistakenly took as a signal that Britain wouldn't defend them at the same time the British Nationality Act deprived the Argentinians of their citizenship of Britain and gave them just right of abode and that against taken is interpreted by the Argentinians Britain didn't care about about the Falkland and the Franks review of the Falklands after the bridge victory they said it was in advisable for the government to announce a decision to withdraw HMS endurance and in the light of a developing situation in the second half of 1981 they should have rescinded their decision that misjudgment now the Thatcher government inherited his hot potato and they decided after a while the best solution was a leaseback solution to the handed over to the Argentine who would then lease it back to Britain for a long period of years so in practice the British people there could remain no real alteration it would satisfy the Argentinian view that this would be okay and strongly Thatcherite Minister Nicholas Ridley a junior minister of farmers proposed that in the House of Commons in December 1980 s government policy but he met a huge wave of backbench opposition not just from conservative but also from Labour Party and he's Peter Shaw really almost devoted John of Gaunt in and saying how can you betray the set to dial this sort of sea and so on and how can you set out British people and the government had to back down I had to back down on the least met with the backbench also too great but the backbench has never asked themselves what the alternative was and whether it might not cause a war if no solution reached but after the leaseback proposal and defeated the government really had no policy has said to keep talking to the Argentinians and the hope the matter would go away ironically Lord Carrington the foreign secretary sent a number of notes to Margaret Thatcher warning her that this wouldn't work that the Argentine's would see through all this but Margaret X is not taking no stop it and Lord Carrington turns out to be the victim he resigned after these invasion but at any rate the as we know the invasion did not succeed and the great British success which as it were exercised to us partly because the Americans on our side which I hadn't been ensues and Ronald Reagan's wrote to Margaret Thatcher Aarthi invasion we have a policy of neutrality on a sovereignty issue but we cannot be neutral on the issue involving Argentine use of military force now the war victory in the war had fundamental effects I think first and for the first time confirmed in the general public mind but Margaret Thatcher was a leader a determination absence if you like stick to her guns Patrick Patrick and so on and therefore it prevented conservative defections to the new part of the social democrat for the STP and Roy Jenkins in danger of a Tory split or revolt perhaps wet conservative defecting but they didn't but more importantly the generation that administered the post-war settlement was now going out of politics and a new generation was clearly taking over a generational administer the post-war settlement Roy Jenkins Shirley Williams Denis Healey Michael thought Lord Carrington Francis pin leaders of the past were now leaders of the past you had a new political generation with different moods and the left-wing historian Eric Hobsbawm said of the war he said this he said the war had mobilized a public sentiment which could actually be felt because any one of the left who was not aware of this grassroots feeling ought seriously to reconsider his or her capacity to assess politics before the Falklands War in 1981 Margaret Thatcher had the lowest rating of any prime minister since the war because of hiring after that she was the warrior queen and people said Britain had found herself and she said the same spirit could defeat Arthur Scargill and the mines and she said he in 1984 she told the conservative backbench Committee in 1922 that the Falklands were the enemy without but the miners were the enemy within more difficult to fight but just as dangerous to Liberty in their memoirs she calls Arthur Scargill and his colleagues of fascists left and the defeats of the miners strike confirmed the end of the trade union veto now she fought on very good ground because the miners were not supported by the other trade unions who did not care much for Arthur Scargill and indeed one trade union leader said to her the civil service of the sign that if the government did not destroy Scargill he would never forgive us and the leader of electricians said at the Labor Party conference of 1984 the miners were Lions led by donkeys so the other mines did not support them but also the strike showed that the working class solidarity that had sustained the labour party was much weaker than had been very different say from the general strike in 1920 when everyone went out strike scene in the early 70s much greater so let's follow damn booty was gradually weakly solid out it had sustained labour but not only labour but the older one nation conservatives had rather admired that solidarity how old Macmillan said in 1984 he made a speech in the House of Lords he said it breaks my heart to see what is happening to our country this terrible strike with the best men in the world who beat the Kaiser and who beat Hitler to who never gave in pointless endless we cannot afford that now contrast that with what Marvin Thatcher said in her memoirs too by the nineteen seventies the coal mining industry had come to symbolize everything that was wrong with Britain the strike led to the collapse of the National Union of Mineworkers their membership which have been to 53,000 in 1979 was only 53,000 in 1990 and now hardly any mines open at all no mines in 1978 before Margaret Thatcher came to office 78% felt the unions were too strong in 1990 just 17 percent thought that the massive change in popular opinion and it combined with a fall in the membership of the labor force in the older industries and I say this wasn't entirely due to market factor again partly a symptom because you have a decline in the proportion working in manufacturing industry from that point of view as so often in the history of the unions and the Labour Party the miners far from being a radical a radicalizing force or a conservative force with a small seat keeping the mines open keeping the traditions of the miners what Howard would rather admire looking back the past if you like but all that was definitely over the past now all this made for the third phase of fascism which you can call fascism transferred from roughly 1983 to 1987 and that's marked by the economic program of factor ISM privatisation the sale of council houses and deregulation of the city now before the Big Bang of the city in 1984 the deregulation the city was rather stuffy run by many own families and not prepped very bright people Lord Carrington said that his Eaton master told him that stock broking together with farming and the army was suitable for a really stupid boy and the number of restricted practice another old boy network did women would not admit it to the stock exchange until 1973 Edward Heath interesting enough when he was looking for a conservative seat he had two jobs in the late 1940s one was news editor of the church times and the second was a merchant banker the first was then paid more than the second the average income of directors of Morgan Grenfell in 1979 was 40,000 pounds a year by 1986 was 225 thousand pounds worth of things changing though heaven through the deregulation of the city privatization was not much referred to in the first conservative manifesto of 1979 but the 1983 manifesto said our goal is a capital owning democracy now that was only palpable when people didn't fear the return of labor because people weren't going to take shares in private industries if they thought they could be realized it's Labour Party won but the landslide victory in 1983 meant there was no fear of Labor coming back so you could do nationalize and some industries were under priced when they were sold to the public Nigel Lawson said that wasn't the wholly bad thing because it meant large profits for the shareholders and therefore convinced many people that privatization was good thing that they should buy shares and by 1988 1990 most of the public utilities nationalized by the Acne government had been denationalized the main major utilities remaining state-owned with the railways and the mines and the railways when they took themselves privatized now privatisation was not a merely increasing economic efficiency if that had been the only aim the thing to do would be to sell the state assets to existing companies and private operators but the idea was to spread share ownership now when the industries were nationalized the 1940s this was equated with public ownership and when the mines were nationalized there was opposed to put up these mines and now owned by the people but the people didn't feel I think they're in the minds of the nationalized industries and Margaret Thatcher said ownership of the state is not the same as ownership of the people it is a very opposite and what she wanted was what she called popular capitalism by the end of the 1980s there were more shareholders in Britain and there were trade unionists there were 10 million shareholders and about 9 million trade unionists and also owner occupiers now exceeded council tenants by around 2 to 1 in the working class because combined with privatization you had the policy of selling council houses to existing tenants thereby creating a capital owning country and this was the idea to diffuse ownership of property in Canada in the 1920s the Conservatives have put forward the ideal of property-owning democracy and added to that now was an ideal of a capital owning democracy so you had a new conservative electorate self-employed the small shopkeepers of skilled workers who wants to better themselves could become middle-class gradually by owning houses by owning capital and the argument was if you want to get on in life the Conservatives are on your side people who never expected to do so were now owning houses and shares and the Labour Party opposed these policies and this identified labour until the time of Tony Blair as a block on popular aspirations and people thought if you want to try and get on in life the Labour Party or the trade unions will block you a labor council will not allow you to buy your council house the labor council will not give you a choice of school your child will have to go to a neighbourhood comprehensive it may not be any good if you want to work longer hours to improve your position the trade unions will block you and the Labour government would taxi to limits on any extra can you and now the fourth phase of a tourism was a downfall and it came out of the trance because to encourage all this ownership interest rates were lowered and remained low for too long they were paid for by borrowing and in late 1988 property prices started falling and many people who owned houses found themselves in negative equity their houses worth less and they'd paid for them and they were suffering the consequences if you like of easy money perhaps we still face these consequences today easy borrowing was unsustainable and that was one prime factor in the downfall of Thatcherism a second was a Europe where Margaret Thatcher seemed to many conservatives on enough at that time to be too hostile to Europe and that led to the resignation of her foreign secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe in 1990 and to Michael Heseltine leadership challenge and the third was the poll tax which proved grossly unpopular but she was probably not overthrown because of her policies because most conservative certainly in the country was skeptical as she was about a federal Europe but probably she'd been there too long she was a victim of her success there were no more dragons to slay in a shadow cabinet discussion about trade union reform in the late 1970s Lord Hailsham made the note Margaret wants to fight but about what there's nothing left to fight time perhaps rural relaxation and John Major's slogan was a Britain at ease with itself something quite different and perhaps she'd created a new consensus a new settlement and was no longer needed that it was for others to administer settlements now how did we conclude with a verdict on that even the left said it was an accident that Margaret Thatcher was lucky and her enemies in Galtieri the dictator of Argentina Arthur Scargill and the split in the left Michael thought becoming leader the Labour Party and struggles with Tony Benn division in left-wing vote when the SDP was formed but all that is misleading because without the split in the left a lot of SDP voters but I think voted conservative rather than the Labour Party of sorts and been and Kinnick and so on but Thatcherism as I tried to show was not just the product of one woman brain in one of her closest advisor sir Alfred Sherman said in the eight years we work closely together I have never heard her expression original idea or even ask an insightful question and certain conditions gave rise to fatalism and probably any Conservative leader would have had to express it to some extent perhaps even a Labour leader no Labour leader elected in 1979 could continue with incomes policies any Labour leader would have had to resist Arthur Scargill and fight in the Falklands and a lot of the things done by Margaret Thatcher were done by governments of the late in other countries like Australia and New Zealand New Zealand in particular done by Labor Government's and to some extent her policies were inevitable in a period of globalization they were dictated by the markets but no less their effects were considerable one important consequence was the creation of new labor the abolition of Clause 4 and Labour Party's Constitution by Tony Blair in 1995 priority to control the inflation stressing the role of competition a smaller state sector lower taxation lesser the role for the trade unions the Blair governs in fact took a smaller share of of national income in tax and Margaret Thatcher at any time even including borrowing Margaret Thatcher took forty five point four percent in national income in tax Tony Blair 39 points percent 1997 was a first general election since the Labour Party was formed when nationalization was not on the agenda indeed the question for most people was not which industries will labor nationalize but which industries will labor privatized and Douglas Hurd said in 1997 the Conservatives lost the election having won the arguments no one any longer thought Britain's unguardable as they had in the 1970s the only question was which party should govern and no one on the left now think seriously of sayings inflation is not important that a government can on its own achieve full employment that government should adopt incomes policies the state sector should be expanded trade unions should have a larger role taxation should be raised closed for restored nationalization the main aim of the Labour Party no one says that but even more than this Labour recognize the importance of the role of the entrepreneur you may ruin the Peter Peter Mandelson saying he didn't mind people becoming filthy rich as long as they paid their taxes insisting the lay part of raising school standards welfare-to-work programs prudence monetary continent's Gordon Brown's first turn the Chancellor in 1997 he was nicknamed prudence a very careful pulses so she may possible the economic success of new labour she broke through the constraints of the post-war at least settlement she broke the mold and the commitment to full employment the commitment of mixed economy the commitment to trade unions being in a state of the realm she helped create a new economic order but she did not spectacularly increase the growth rate the growth rate was actually lower not only in the fifties and sixties but even in the despised 1970s and that was in part due to mass unemployment now it's fair to say the growth rate everywhere in the 80s lower than it had been in almost all countries so perhaps you can't blame her for that but we mustn't forget we had the benefit of North Sea oil we were self-sufficient in fuel supply in the early 80s and you may say this gave us a unique chance to outperform other countries which we didn't achieve so that may so the long-term failure but you may say there's a long-term success in more flexible labour markets with the weakening of the trade unions and that was important for the future and TaxACT one reason now why unemployment is not as high as it was in previous lumps because the labor market is more flexible and this shows that some of the consequences are long-term or fascism now she creates a new economic order also a new social order in which the whole corporate structure was dismantled in which politics seemed to be sticky and not fluid and it's now become fluid you've had changes in in behavior we live in a much more individualistic age David Cameron was called a post bureaucratic age and the essence of the society now is much greater fluidity much greater scope for the individual a new individualism if you like but there is also a downside to a coelom and the main weakness of this that traditionally conservatives been deeply concerned with the nature of society communities solidarity that how would look Melun spoke of but capitalism as it were certainly capped ISM unleashed by Margaret Thatcher on undermine that stability so Keith Joseph rather body called the mulberry trust to provide housing for deprived people and he noticed promised and in the divorce rate was higher amongst people who lived in the mulberry trust houses for the monks those on the waiting lists in other words a long-desired secured to the home gave couples the chance to reappraise their relationships so prosperity does not necessarily lead to a more stable society can lead to a more volatile one now army entrepreneurs created by the city by the yuppie culture that was creating the ages are they really the heroes of right ideology or did they themselves help to undermine the sense of social responsibility now the Conservatives accepted that a moral framework was needed if markets were to work in keep Joseph himself said that in 1975 he said it is characteristic of the past two decades that almost exclusive obsession with the economics by governments and competitive claims to usher in utopia have coincided with economic failure a healthy economy is possible only a healthy body politic with self-reliance thrift respect for laws and confidence in a system of rewards and sanctions but did the get-rich-quick ethic really encourage those virtues was not Thatcherism originally meant to be about living within one's means the grand phonetic saving individual responsibility rewards to scale and hard work Margaret Thatcher said her father had seen buying shares as a form of gambling market liberalism a field in a way to the 1960s free choice the consumers King do your own thing do what you want but if the market order relies on thrift and prudence they're not very easily compatible and perhaps we're now seeing the consequences the long drawn-out social consequences in all the arguments about bankers bonuses sense of responsibility and societies on but at another long-term consequence of fatalism and this is a dilemma that if you want successful capitalism you have to engineer a certain sort of society in which these virtues have thrift and self-reliance and all the rest of it our problem how do you do it it's a problem the Conservatives didn't resolve it's fair to say it's a problem that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown also did not resolve and that Margaret Carter didn't therefore alter our values as much as she thought and Michael foot rather caricatured for what they were after when he compared Keith Joseph to a conjurer at the fair and he said he takes your watch he wrapped it in a handkerchief and he smashes it with a hammer and then he says Oh I forgot on the second half of the trick but let me not end on a negative note Keith Joseph was fond of quoting these lines from a now forgotten poet Alfred o Shaughnessy he said one man with a dream at pleasure shall go forth and conquer a crown and three will a new song measure can trample a kingdom down and you can argue that Margaret Thatcher trampled the kingdom down the kingdom of statism inherited from a war years and conquered a crown by helping to create a society based on the tenets of economic liberalism she helped create a youth consensus which the rise of new labor validated a new common ground based on the market economy and so her heirs are not only John Major and David Cameron but also Tony Blair and Gordon Brown because New Labour sought as Joseph had done and Margaret Thatcher done to Mary economic efficiency with social compassion though I say they didn't resolve the conundrum and perhaps there's no solution we just have to live with social dislocation and let me end on this note it relates to something Tony Benn once said he said when Margaret Thatcher was defeated in her fell he produced a bill in Parliament on the purpose bill which would have the effect of aggregating immediately every piece of legislation passed by Margaret Thatcher they say even of a pass which of course it wouldn't he said it couldn't have had much effect because Margaret Thatcher was a great teacher and he said that was her infant not on her specific legislation and he then said the left hasn't had a great teacher since sonoran Bevan hasn't had a similar teacher so I think that was the effect of Margaret Thatcher summed up by one of her great bones who perhaps had more in common with her than either would be willing to admit but I think what can't be disputed is that we inhabit a world largely created by Margaret Thatcher and will probably continue to do so for a long time to come thank you for all information please visit www.gfi.com/webmonitor

Channel: Gresham College

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Keywords: Thatcher, Thatcherism, Margaret Thatcher, Conservative, Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher (Politician), British Politics, Political History, British Political History, Prime Minister, Politics, Britain, Westminster, History, Vernon Bogdanor, Vernon, Bogdanor, Gresham, Gresham College, Politics Lecture, Politics Talk, Political History Talk, Political History Lecture, British Politics Talk, British Politics Lecture, Modern Britain, Thatcher Talk, Thatcher Lecture, History Talk

Id: lOiJnNN8bmc

Length: 63min 53sec (3833 seconds)

Published: Fri May 18 2012