Over the last couple of weeks I've listened to/read Margaret Thatcher's and Tony Blair's memoirs, which has given me a greater appreciation of them as complex humans - limited by their backgrounds, beliefs, and the obvious limitations of human brains - making difficult decisions and trying to improve the country while being buffeted by global, national, and party political forces.
Thatcher comes across as fiercely intelligent and determined, but dogmatic and unimaginative. She articulates her views well, her prose is pleasant enough to read, her narration clear yet with emotion at appropriate points, but her views are constrained by her limited experiences. Her happy provincial Christian upbringing taught her the importance of "traditional values" - she says she has never had a problem defending Victorian values and morals, especially the idea that there is a 'deserving poor' and an 'undeserving poor'. Living and working in the family's grocer's shop taught her about the joys of small businesses, nodes in the great economic tapestry which guides goods and services across the world to where they are desired.
She became active in Conservative party politics at university, where she studied Chemistry. After graduating she briefly worked as a research chemist (it is a myth that she was involved in the creation of Mr Whippy ice cream), married Denis Thatcher, whose family business earned enough that she could leave her job to
retrain as a lawyer while becoming increasingly involved with Conservative politics - first running for MP in 1950, at the age of 24, and getting elected in 1959, at 33.
In 1945, just months after WW2 ended, the Labour party won a majority for the first time, a landslide majority of 145 seats. Churchill, the war hero prime minister, lost on a massive scale - he was nowhere near as popular in his day as British mythology would later suggest. During the war, the British state had taken over a lot of industries to make them better suited for the war effort. Rationing, an annoyance to the wealthy and middle class, had caused the living standards of poorer people to rise - their weekly rations were more food than they could normally afford. The social classes mixed more than usual during the war - soldiers of different classes became friends, shared their experiences, realised they had much in common. The women working in munitions factories came from different backgrounds, befriended each other, shared experiences.
The better off learned about the struggles of the poor, and everyone saw how state control of industry had been important in winning the war. In the '45 election, Churchill's Conservatives were like, "Cool, we won the war, now let's go back to how we were before the war," and Labour were like, "Cool, we beat the Nazis with a centrally planned economy, shall we do the same with poverty now?" And voters were like, "That sounds awesome, have a House of Commons majority."
Clement Attlee's 1945 government nationalized industries, created the NHS, and implemented other reforms (the "Post-War Consensus") that were retained and built on by subsequent Conservative and Labour governments.
Thatcher, and a small group of other conservative thinkers, did not like these changes: central planning was dangerous and led towards totalitarianism. Her takeaway from the war was not the need for central planning and nationalization, but the danger of trying to appease dictators - a view that would lead her to the Falkland's War. Neville Chamberlain's ghost haunts British politics to this day.
Various crises in the 70s allowed this conservative minority to get more confident and vocal, leading ultimately to her ascension to Prime Minister, where she set about transforming Britain into a deregulated paradise of small businesses, privatized industries, and small government.
Where she describes her reasons for various policies, her vision of where these policies will lead, you can understand where she's coming from, and sympathize with her, if - and this is a big IF - you limit yourself to her perception and her imagination. Her description of privatization leading to a country of small shareholders - thousands of families across the country owning a few shares each of the formerly nationalized industries, and being able to influence them and hold them to account - is a idealised fantasy of communal ownership through a rightwing lens.
She is completely detached from the ways her policies made a lot of people's lives worse, and with her limited experience and imagination, has no comprehension of what it's like for people living in poverty. In a particularly telling passage, she describes how, after the 1981 riots about police brutality towards ethnic minorities, she visited one of the deprived areas where riots occurred to meet with residents. While she is concerned by the allegations of racism towards the police, she is appalled by and cannot understand the level of anti-police feeling in the community. She cannot stretch her imagination to try to understand what it is like to live in constant fear of being targeted by the police and possibly brutalized. It is so alien to her experience. It does not compute.
While walking around the deprived neighbourhood, she reflects on being told that a factor in the riots was young unemployed men feeling like they had nothing to do, and yet here she is, walking round the area, and she can see plenty of weeds in gardens, plenty of lawns that need cutting. Clearly they have a lot they could be doing. She has never experienced anything like poverty and unemployment, has never thought about it except at a long theoretical distance, never tried to understand it from the perspective of those living in it - the relentless anxiety and stress about where food will come from, the hopelessness and desperation. Why haven't they weeded their garden?
For all her many faults, and the many ways I think she was wrong, she is a fascinating character. She was intelligent and fiercely determined - I expect she would have been an intimidating presence in any room. Her intelligence was used to think of ways to maintain her existing dogmas, rather than refine and challenge them (there are people like this all over the political spectrum - indeed, I think this is seen as strength in politics).
The idea of her as a strong female role model is a complicated one, because she is such a divisive figure, a villain in many political narratives. She fought against the sexism of her time and her party (she recalls being scared to go into many pubs while campaigning, and that MPs yelled "Give us a kiss, Maggie!" in the House of Commons when she first became Prime Minister), but she was also hostile to the feminist movement and in favour of traditional/Victorian morals.
She became the first woman to be Prime Minister (I initially typed 'worst' instead of 'first' - what a Freudian slip!), a position she held for 13 years, the longest tenure since 1902. She never lost an election, though she was extremely lucky here that Labour was going through a long self-destructive meltdown. She transformed the country in her own image, transforming some lives for the good and many for the bad, leaving a divisive legacy which inflames passions to this day and still shapes our politics.
Tony Blair doesn't write as well as Thatcher - his book comes across as a first draft which could've done with some serious neatening. This ultimately makes him sound less intelligent than Thatcher, more childish, especially when he's bitching about how much of a little shit Gordon Brown is.
Direct quote:
'"Hmm," I said.
"Hmm." He looked back at me and smiled in that Peterish way.'
Like Thatcher, Blair comes across as well-intentioned but limited by experience and imagination. His father was a former communist from a poor area of Glasgow who ended up a middle class Conservative who sent his son to a private school. Blair's politics were inspired by his father's social climb: he believed that traditional Labour was out of touch with the aspirational working class, those striving towards being middle class, who were benefiting from some of the Thatcher reforms. He believed that many of the Thatcher reforms were good and necessary, but didn't approve of how aggressively and callously they had been implemented. To win elections, Labour must embrace aspects of Thatcherism, but make the system fairer and more redistributive, to give the 'aspirational working class' their best chances to climb the social ladder.
The 'aspirational working class' thus becomes the new name for the 'deserving poor', and the 'underclass' - a term Blair dislikes but agrees with - becomes the new 'undeserving poor'.
Blair mentions that colleagues joked about him having a Messiah Complex, but it very much comes through in his own words. He felt a sense of destiny about getting involved in politics, leading and transforming the country, and saving the world from Terror in the wake of 9/11. He is deeply religious - mentioning it only occasionally, but very emotively when he does so.
Blair is confident, sometimes arrogantly so, when describing his domestic agenda, but regrets that they didn't go far enough in their early years. It was his first job in government, Labour had been out of power since the 70s, so they were slow at utilizing the government machine to implement policy. He feels like he only got into the swing of it by his second term and was in his prime ministerial prime near the end of his tenure.
It is hard to judge New Labour's record now. The living standards of many rose during their time in office, NHS waiting times improved and its winter crises were not so extreme, but many of their reforms were either quickly undone by the 2010 Coalition government, or laid the groundwork for the Coalition's austerity program. Blair complains that too many people are on incapacity benefit, and put in reforms to make these benefits harder to get, precursing the aggressive targeting of disabled people by more recent governments.
In its acceptance and expansion of many aspects of Thatcherism, New Labour forced themselves into the position by the 2010s that they couldn't effectively oppose the government on many policies, because they had legitimized those policies while in office themselves. The Coalition government was following up on New Labour, but without the redistributive aspects. The Coalition was like 'New Labour without the Nice Bits' as New Labour had been like 'Thatcherism with Benefits'.
While New Labour's domestic policies have largely been undone or subsumed, Blair's international policies - support for America's War On Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq - are his most enduring legacy.
Blair recalls reading Neville Chamberlain's diaries while PM, and discovering that Chamberlain the Appeaser, in popular imagination an idiot who fell for Hitler's tricks, was an intelligent, sensitive man who saw that Hitler was dangerous and insane, but had lost friends and family in the First World War, and was loath to start a war himself when there was a chance the Germans would oust Hitler themselves. He grappled with this issue and chose wrong, and now history remembers him as an idiot. No Prime Minister wants to be the next Neville Chamberlain - his ghost haunts politics to this day.
This ramble has become rather long so I'm going to end here. Being Prime Minister sounds incredibly stressful and complicated - the need to make big decisions quickly, affecting the lives of millions of people, while having limited information, limited experience, and a limited understanding of the issues would make me an anxious wreck. The people who are capable of doing it have to have strong beliefs and extreme, nay monstrous, confidence.
