We are all Thatcher’s Children…

“I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’ ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.”

Margaret Thatcher 1987

It takes a period of time to understand what happened. We all look at events and politics in the moment and look for he consequences, but they are never really revealed until we can look back with a clarity of time.

The Thatcher period is at the core of our modern-day society, to this day. Decisions made then still resonate on how we think, and none more than the quote above.

The growth of Libertarian thinking led to the introduction of the extreme ideological liberalism to government. That is not the liberalism of the Liberal Democrats, or of the belief in support for those less well off. No it is the liberty from all forms of government “interference” in people’s lives.

That seems to be a reasonable position to take, but not if you need government interference, you need help, you need health and wellbeing support, you need a better education or you need a better chance at a new job.

Libertarian ideology suits the wealthy, who can pay for all the needs in life, simply by having the cash. It suits their self-image of success and, strangely, wealth. They believe that they deserve freedom from government because they can pay for everything, and that freedom includes from taxation.

And this is where the Thatcher revolution changed all our lives. It broke the social contract. Before Thatcher there was a belief in all political parties that the government should support those that need it most. That, believe it or not, was core to the values of both Labour and the Conservatives. The debate was on how to achieve the goals of an improved society, what policies would get the country to a better place for all, not some.

Then Thatcher, following the teachings of Milton Friedman, lost interest in society and became interested in her definition of freedom in a democracy. Here are a few things that were changed, at the same time that Reagan was following the same Libertarian tablets in stone.

The attempted destruction of the Unions: People should make their own arrangements for pay and conditions. The outcome has been that the unions, until recently, disappeared from the political scene. Their views were swamped by the media coverage of the financial sector.

The de-regulation of many of the rules governing financial institutions: Share buy backs, bonuses, share options for remuneration, leveraged buy outs, shorting shares and more. Many of these had been illegal in both the UK and US. These changes let lose the power of money. The economy is no longer built on the simple elements of business, produce goods or services and sell them at a profit. The economy is built on share prices, and how they compare to market predictions of profits. Company performance is judged on growth, but the reality that continuous growth is a fallacy has been buried.

Can Apple sell more phones than there are people on Earth? Yes, if they keep updating them, reselling to people, make them feel that they are not worthy with an old phone, and to hell with the impact on the environment. And they have to, otherwise the “markets” will deem them to have failed. The victory of shareholding capitalism.

The privatisation of publicly owned services, letting the British public become shareholders. The outcome: most people who “Told Sid” and bought British Gas shares, or British Airways or British Rail, offered at very attractive prices, sold them as soon as they saw a profit, and stopped being shareholders within a year. We are not Americans, for whom owning shares is the norm. We are a pension society. The result? Who owns all those assets now? I refer you to the above, the financial institutes, playing the markets, falsely I might add, as the UK government will step in if there is any sign of them not being able to provide the services. What about that Maggie?

The biggest long-term damage has been to society itself. People have been persuaded that any attempt to put society ahead of the markets is inherently bad. The unions are still being bashed, even by their own party, Labour, because Starmer thinks he has to play to the Thatcher ideals. There is an acceptance that the markets are the power brokers in our democracy. The imbalance in pay has rocketed in comparison with all other countries in Europe. Paying higher taxes is seen as akin to communism, again by Labour too. The wealthy no longer see society, let alone believe in it. Their lives are led in homes in districts that are as divided as if by the Belfast peace walls. Homes in Europe, ironically, are the norm not the exception for the English middle class, who are uniformly wealthier than the other parts of the UK due simply to population size. (I have a friend in Manchester who has a mate who runs a locksmith business. He is a millionaire. Why? Because a new housing estate can have 600 houses, all needing doors, locks, handles, etc. The same estate in Northern Ireland might have 40 houses.)

Jobs in the financial sector are paid in hundreds of thousands with bonuses added on at the year-end. Why so much? Because they have made money from money. There are no bonuses for long term investment in innovation. There are no bonuses for better productivity in factories, there are only bonuses for taking advantage of an unregulated market to make money from money.

Wealth itself becomes self-developing because the notion of “greed is good” has become more than a quote from a film, Wall Street, it has become acceptable. And the problem with greed is that by its very nature it is endless, never fulfilled, more and more is the mantra. People for whom paying higher taxes would not make a jot of difference to their lives employ highly paid advisors to take their money out of Britain and hide it, so they pay less. Why so they can invest it? No, it is simply to accrue more, to keep it in banks doing nothing.

Attached to this breaking of the social contract is the removal of any sense of responsibility for society, despite the fact that improvements benefit all. All the evidence shows that there is less crime with improved prosperity and education. That the potential in the country is in the people, and more and more are being let loose to fester. Improved health reduces the cost of the NHS, again education being core. Innovation is driven by need and desire, but with the increasing divisions in the country, the haves are leaving the have-nots to live lives with no opportunities.

The system is self-perpetuating. The lower taxes give the already well-off more money to spend on education and private health, giving them advantages in the job market, and their children a head start that can last a lifetime. As they can afford to pay for more services they are less concerned with the performance of those provided for the rest of the community. Selfishness is heightened as it becomes more personal, when the benefits are for the family, over wider society. That self interest then becomes the norm for those that can afford it, and the notion of raising taxes, even though it will have little impact, is an anathema.

But the strangest phenomenon is that those not benefitting from these societal changes have also been convinced to support policies that are against their own interests. By attaching right-wing economics, the working class in the so-called Red Wall constituencies have voted for the Tories. Again the imagery was introduced by Thatcher, with the flying of the Union Jack, the Falklands War, and a constant stream of stories over many years that implied that not supporting this ideology was somehow unpatriotic. In an excellent book by Heather McGee, The Sum of Us, she gives example after example where in America the working class will do themselves actual harm to support tax cuts for the super-wealthy.

And so it is in the UK, where the gap between rich and poor has never been greater yet the worst-off vote to help the rich. Whereas the words left wing and socialism, representing putting people before profit, are decried by the very people they will help. Whereas the right has attached gender politics to economics to decry anything that challenges their simplified ideology of greed.

Economics is made complicated but is actually simple A country needs a certain amount of money from taxation to keep the public services going. At the moment the UK does not bring enough in, therefore those services declined. The people who can survive the decline are those that can afford to go private. Everyone else will have to wait.

And we all buy into this. We watch the news and shudder at the markets going up and down because they make a difference to our disposable income. We talk of things like investment and growth without asking for them to be explained. We join in with the rejection of social politics because we hear day after day that money is more important than people.

We are all Thatcher’s children, but it’s about time we left home and started new lives.