Mining, manufacturing and Mandelson: Geoffrey Goodman looks at the legacies of Thatcherism
In one of his most perceptive observations on the nature of political life, Aneurin Bevan famously declared: “You cannot bring forward the future – and then impose it”.
In many ways, that was the cardinal error of Soviet communism. Everything had to be imposed – the present along with the future.
Yet Bevan went further in also warning his contemporaries that they would remain an impotent force without a vision of the future and being prepared to argue and fight for that future. He recognised more than most that effective radical politics have always been concerned with bringing forward the future, without which all vision would wither into superficial posturing and platitudes.
What is obvious about modern political life – and not confined to Britain – is the absence of such vision across the entire political spectrum. Even where it exists, there has been little zeal to work for it. The left once prided itself in having the capacity and the will to take a commanding role in “the vision thing”. No longer. For too long, the left has shared a confusion and a moral limpness along with the rest of the political scene about how to bring forward the future.
It is true there are now some credible signs emerging from various quarters of the left – notably from the Compass think-tank and backbench Labour MPs such as Jon Cruddas, along with the remarkable revival of radicalism from the veteran Roy Hattersley who was the first significant senior Labour voice to effectively identify Tony Blair’s continuation with a Thatcherite agenda. That is where we are today, as we approach a crucial moment for British politics with a Labour Government in office struggling to escape the Blair heritage, although still limited by that inheritance, with a Prime Minister under siege facing an electorate deeply disillusioned with all politics and politicians.
A range of opinion polls – even if dubious – have repeatedly demonstrated an immense public confusion about what needs to be done or how to do it. Across the voting landscape is that debilitating, if inaccurate, mumble: “They’re all the same”. So the commanding question is this: can the modest revival in ‘“the vision thing” help to save Gordon Brown’s Government from a predicted disaster in May? I believe it could—provided he has the courage to warn the British people what a return to Tory rule would really involve and to expose David Cameron’s claims that the Conservative Party is now a reformed political animal. It isn’t. Let no one anywhere in Britain be under any illusions about the Conservative Party having discarded its historic political genes. It remains a creature of unregulated market priorities.
Never mind claims that the Tories are no longer the Thatcherites of the 1980s. The essential motivations of Thatcherism are endemic. The Conservative Party is locked by its history as the party of the privileged. To the real Conservative, inequality is not simply a phrase —it is the essential ingredient which drives a market-based competitive society. That was Margaret Thatcher’s unapologetic ethos. She had the courage and the honesty of those convictions. Contemporary Tories shelter behind an ideology of disguise.
Remember Thatcher’s decade? Remember the near irrevocable damage her agenda inflicted on the social fabric of Britain? Remember the destruction of industry after industry, with the reduction by at least 10 per cent in our manufacturing base? It was the construction, not of a new Britain, as she claimed, but of a nation torn apart by an obsession to plant fresh seeds of greed from which our society, like others, still suffer a deadly poison? Remember all that? If you are too young to remember, then let me point out that this was the birth of the financial crisis we have experienced in the past two years; the birth of de-regulation of the City banking slickers who have now been bailed out by the taxpayers – you and me.
Ah yes, the Thatcher period. My critics will argue that it is pointless peddling back to all that history; young people today aren’t interested. I don’t believe that. The calculated destruction of coal mining and the mining communities, the effective end of British steel making and shipbuilding, the gradual erosion of our industrial base as skilled along with semi skilled workers and their families were brushed aside and their environment left to rot – helping to create a generation of youngsters vulnerable to drugs and crime as social services were thinned down. Remember all that?
Today’s 20-somethings and even 30-somethings are part of that legacy, even if the myths now tend to cover the truth. Because so little modern history is taught in our state school system there is a huge aura of ignorance about all this heritage – about the destruction of Britain’s manufacturing base and the glorification of the financial expertise of the City of London with its arrogant commitment to the productivity of self-interest and inequality. All of this laid the basis for our recent financial collapse – a collapse, never forget, that could well have meant an economic disaster with mass unemployment if Gordon Brown’s Labour Government had not used taxpayers’ money to rescue the country. I do not accept that today’s young voters are unconcerned about all this; they are part of the heritage even if not as aware of it as they should be.
Yet the current Conservative Party under David Cameron still has the chutzpah to blame Labour for what they described as our “broken society”. Who broke it? Not the trade unions, not the Labour Party. It can all be traced back to that Thatcher decade of the 1980s. That was when Clement Attlee’s political settlement of 1945 was abandoned.
In reminding Tribune readers of that period, I do not excuse the policies of Tony Blair’s Government after Labour’s 1997 landslide triumph. Sadly, it was that Labour Government which continued the Thatcher policy of schmoozing the City financial and banking mafia while allowing our industrial and manufacturing base to slide still further downhill, leaving it open to foreign predators – notably in the car industry. This economic strategy – let’s be frank about this – has also contributed to the financial collapse of the past two years.
Now we are at the political crossroads. An immense opportunity exists to recognise the damage that has been done by this idolatry of the market, even by so-called social democrats. The vision for a re-elected Labour administration will be to re-construct a fair society. As Roy Hattersley wrote recently: “The more equal society will only be brought about by positive government action”. He went on: “The collision of freedoms in an unregulated society always ends with a victory for the rich over the poor. Social democratic governments intervene to alter the balance of power. If that is called class war, there can be no doubt who started it”.
Perhaps even more important than Hattersley’s comment is the policy and attitude reversal by Peter Mandelson, who now argues for a state-sponsored revival in Britain’s manufacturing base. It is an extraordinary commentary on the failure of the Blair years when Mandelson himself aligned with a “new” Labour Cabinet obsessed with City financial wealth. Mandelson now proclaims: “I’m unashamedly talking about the re-industrialisation of the British economy”.
He actually used the slogan “industrial activism” – precisely the same argument used by the trade union movement throughout the Blair years, but then ignored.
It is an argument, properly delivered across the nation with guarantees replacing idle promises, which can transform the coming election campaign and reduce the Tory case to impotent posturing. Beyond doubt, that is Gordon Brown’s great opportunity.
