http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/c...evolution.html
You had to be there to grasp the scale of Margaret Thatcher's revolution
As a first-time voter in 1979, Simon Heffer recalls the euphoria that greeted a new dawn for Britain.
We are victims of our upbringing. Anyone coming to political consciousness as I did in the 1970s will understand why Mrs Thatcher happened, whether we support what she did or not. I have always struggled to see what there was not to support. The country in which I spent my teens was a catastrophe. Socialists of all stamps – and I mean Heath as well as Callaghan and Wilson – had impoverished it and stunted the ambition of our people. When I hear those in their 20s or early 30s trot out the received line on the person they call "Thatcher", I think: if you were not there, and you have not taken the trouble to explore in depth what life was like for those of us who were, you cannot properly understand.
The six or seven years before she won her revolutionary victory in May 1979 formed a litany of failure and embarrassment. Once Heath lost control of the economy, after he allowed the money supply to grow at 30 per cent in 1972-73 (with the predictable 27 per cent inflation by 1975), only a revolution was going to solve the problem. Heath went out in March 1974 sounding the note that would resound through Britain for the following five years: that elected government, having forced a confrontation with the largely undemocratic forces of trades unionism, would (pending further developments) always take second place to it. It was that even more than the inflation that brought Britain to its knees two-and-a-half years into Labour's rule.
Instead of taking the sensible course of restraining spending, Labour chose instead to keep its foot on the accelerator. It was determined not to make an enemy of the unions as Heath had done. In an era with a huge public sector (for the nationalised industries were omnipresent, overmanned, unproductive and expensive) the unions with members on the state payroll had huge clout. Acronyms like NUPE, Aslef, Cohse, the GMB and of course the NUM came to dominate the consciousness of the nation. It was not so much what Mr Wilson or Mr Callaghan said that went: it was what the likes of Jack Jones, Hugh Scanlon, Joe Gormley and other unreconstructed heroes of the working-class movement wanted that really mattered. Britain was not part of the Soviet Bloc; but when one watched television pictures of these tobacco-stained old men with their bad teeth and their ill-fitting suits walking in and out of Downing Street like they had season tickets – they had – one felt quite often that one was.
Remember the country they made. If you moved house and wanted a telephone installed you could wait for up to six months for the honour. The great nationalised car industry into which they poured epic amounts of public money made poorly designed, thirsty rust-buckets. I know there will be some of you reading this who paid good money for an Austin Maxi or a Morris Marina; God will forgive you. British Rail in the 1970s was a synonym for decline, low standards and inefficiency. And then there were two groups of workers who would be the ruin first of the Labour government, and then of the union movement itself. There were the local government workers who brought about the Winter of Discontent, which put Labour out of power for 18 years, and, most sinister of all, the National Union of Mineworkers, which offered itself in 1984-85 as the model that proved the days of Britain being run by unelected syndicalists were over.
I had the vote for the first time in 1979. The cover of Private Eye the week after Mrs Thatcher won carried a picture of her taken during the election campaign, leaning over an old man in a hospital bed; the balloon coming out of her mouth said: "Wake up! It's a new dawn for Britain!" It echoed a feeling I had at five in the morning on May 4, as I drove back in a cool misty dawn through the countryside after an election party. The collectivist nightmare was over. A Britain of endless strikes, food subsidies, third-rate products and jobbery was, suddenly, consigned to history. If there has been a better time to be 19 than in 1979, I wait to be told.
Had Callaghan won, or had a Conservative Party led by a Heathite such as Whitelaw come to power, the old film would have been replayed again and our decline would have become steeper. Britain on the eve of the 1980s was dominated by industries unrestructured since the war, unresponsive to markets, and as a consequence of that and their management by bureaucrats starved of investment. Maintaining these commercial fictions would have propitiated the unions; it would have driven us closer to bankruptcy and crushed any opportunity people here might have had of a better standard of living. Thatcherism is caricatured as the rich getting richer and the devil taking the hindmost. The rich did get richer. The unrich often became rich, thanks to deregulation. People whose families had for generations done blue-collar jobs now did white-collar ones. And the huge additional tax revenues produced by this prosperity, born of reform, tax-cutting and deregulation, meant that a generous welfare state – probably too generous – took the hindmost instead of the devil. Anyone who looked at Britain in 1990 when Mrs Thatcher left office and compared it with when she came to power would have found a largely unrecognisable country. That was the triumph of ideology.
It was not purely about the spread of wealth, nor the creation of great social mobility that comes with a true meritocracy; it was about the spread of freedom. Just think how few people owned shares in the 1970s, and indeed how large a minority still did not own their homes. The extension of ownership, whether of people buying their council houses and improving them, or of buying shares and taking responsibility for their own futures, took the state out of the lives of millions and provided a liberation. Of course Leftists hated it, and still hate it: they hate anything that removes their opportunities for control. The greatest liberation of all was from high rates of tax. Mr Cameron should recall that on coming to power the Conservatives cut the top rate of income tax from 83 to 60 per cent and the rate on unearned income from 98 to 60 per cent. People not only had more scope to choose how to spend the money they earned; they had the incentive to work harder and earn yet more. It was a virtuous circle that, in the interests of all our futures, we must hope has been abandoned only temporarily.
It is not Mrs Thatcher's fault that her successors have squandered her legacy, and have done so by ignorance of economics. No economist herself, she was never afraid to surround herself with the most brilliant of thinkers – Fritz Hayek, Alan Walters, Ralph Harris and others of that school – and take their advice. What is less appreciated is that she made sure she understood exactly what they were saying, and why the policies of the free market would have the outcome they did, before she implemented them.
Her arrival as prime minister, 30 years ago next Monday, and the breaking of the discredited consensus that it effected, remain the most positive and important events in our post-war history. If anyone tells you otherwise, then (either literally or metaphorically) they weren't really there.
You had to be there to grasp the scale of Margaret Thatcher's revolution
As a first-time voter in 1979, Simon Heffer recalls the euphoria that greeted a new dawn for Britain.
We are victims of our upbringing. Anyone coming to political consciousness as I did in the 1970s will understand why Mrs Thatcher happened, whether we support what she did or not. I have always struggled to see what there was not to support. The country in which I spent my teens was a catastrophe. Socialists of all stamps – and I mean Heath as well as Callaghan and Wilson – had impoverished it and stunted the ambition of our people. When I hear those in their 20s or early 30s trot out the received line on the person they call "Thatcher", I think: if you were not there, and you have not taken the trouble to explore in depth what life was like for those of us who were, you cannot properly understand.
The six or seven years before she won her revolutionary victory in May 1979 formed a litany of failure and embarrassment. Once Heath lost control of the economy, after he allowed the money supply to grow at 30 per cent in 1972-73 (with the predictable 27 per cent inflation by 1975), only a revolution was going to solve the problem. Heath went out in March 1974 sounding the note that would resound through Britain for the following five years: that elected government, having forced a confrontation with the largely undemocratic forces of trades unionism, would (pending further developments) always take second place to it. It was that even more than the inflation that brought Britain to its knees two-and-a-half years into Labour's rule.
Instead of taking the sensible course of restraining spending, Labour chose instead to keep its foot on the accelerator. It was determined not to make an enemy of the unions as Heath had done. In an era with a huge public sector (for the nationalised industries were omnipresent, overmanned, unproductive and expensive) the unions with members on the state payroll had huge clout. Acronyms like NUPE, Aslef, Cohse, the GMB and of course the NUM came to dominate the consciousness of the nation. It was not so much what Mr Wilson or Mr Callaghan said that went: it was what the likes of Jack Jones, Hugh Scanlon, Joe Gormley and other unreconstructed heroes of the working-class movement wanted that really mattered. Britain was not part of the Soviet Bloc; but when one watched television pictures of these tobacco-stained old men with their bad teeth and their ill-fitting suits walking in and out of Downing Street like they had season tickets – they had – one felt quite often that one was.
Remember the country they made. If you moved house and wanted a telephone installed you could wait for up to six months for the honour. The great nationalised car industry into which they poured epic amounts of public money made poorly designed, thirsty rust-buckets. I know there will be some of you reading this who paid good money for an Austin Maxi or a Morris Marina; God will forgive you. British Rail in the 1970s was a synonym for decline, low standards and inefficiency. And then there were two groups of workers who would be the ruin first of the Labour government, and then of the union movement itself. There were the local government workers who brought about the Winter of Discontent, which put Labour out of power for 18 years, and, most sinister of all, the National Union of Mineworkers, which offered itself in 1984-85 as the model that proved the days of Britain being run by unelected syndicalists were over.
I had the vote for the first time in 1979. The cover of Private Eye the week after Mrs Thatcher won carried a picture of her taken during the election campaign, leaning over an old man in a hospital bed; the balloon coming out of her mouth said: "Wake up! It's a new dawn for Britain!" It echoed a feeling I had at five in the morning on May 4, as I drove back in a cool misty dawn through the countryside after an election party. The collectivist nightmare was over. A Britain of endless strikes, food subsidies, third-rate products and jobbery was, suddenly, consigned to history. If there has been a better time to be 19 than in 1979, I wait to be told.
Had Callaghan won, or had a Conservative Party led by a Heathite such as Whitelaw come to power, the old film would have been replayed again and our decline would have become steeper. Britain on the eve of the 1980s was dominated by industries unrestructured since the war, unresponsive to markets, and as a consequence of that and their management by bureaucrats starved of investment. Maintaining these commercial fictions would have propitiated the unions; it would have driven us closer to bankruptcy and crushed any opportunity people here might have had of a better standard of living. Thatcherism is caricatured as the rich getting richer and the devil taking the hindmost. The rich did get richer. The unrich often became rich, thanks to deregulation. People whose families had for generations done blue-collar jobs now did white-collar ones. And the huge additional tax revenues produced by this prosperity, born of reform, tax-cutting and deregulation, meant that a generous welfare state – probably too generous – took the hindmost instead of the devil. Anyone who looked at Britain in 1990 when Mrs Thatcher left office and compared it with when she came to power would have found a largely unrecognisable country. That was the triumph of ideology.
It was not purely about the spread of wealth, nor the creation of great social mobility that comes with a true meritocracy; it was about the spread of freedom. Just think how few people owned shares in the 1970s, and indeed how large a minority still did not own their homes. The extension of ownership, whether of people buying their council houses and improving them, or of buying shares and taking responsibility for their own futures, took the state out of the lives of millions and provided a liberation. Of course Leftists hated it, and still hate it: they hate anything that removes their opportunities for control. The greatest liberation of all was from high rates of tax. Mr Cameron should recall that on coming to power the Conservatives cut the top rate of income tax from 83 to 60 per cent and the rate on unearned income from 98 to 60 per cent. People not only had more scope to choose how to spend the money they earned; they had the incentive to work harder and earn yet more. It was a virtuous circle that, in the interests of all our futures, we must hope has been abandoned only temporarily.
It is not Mrs Thatcher's fault that her successors have squandered her legacy, and have done so by ignorance of economics. No economist herself, she was never afraid to surround herself with the most brilliant of thinkers – Fritz Hayek, Alan Walters, Ralph Harris and others of that school – and take their advice. What is less appreciated is that she made sure she understood exactly what they were saying, and why the policies of the free market would have the outcome they did, before she implemented them.
Her arrival as prime minister, 30 years ago next Monday, and the breaking of the discredited consensus that it effected, remain the most positive and important events in our post-war history. If anyone tells you otherwise, then (either literally or metaphorically) they weren't really there.
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