Margaret Hilda Thatcher (1925-2013) once famously said, in an interview
to Woman’s Own of 31 October 1987, that "There is no such a
thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families”.
Naturally she was often reviled for such a proposition, including by me as I
repeatedly quoted her and criticised her vigorously for it in lectures and
seminars.
Taken literally such a proposition is patently false. Clearly the
collection of individuals and their families are interconnected in a vast and
thick mesh of relationships – through economic, political and social
institutions – known as “the fabric of society”. The total is infinitely larger
than the sum of its individual parts.
But what Thatcher actually meant is that society is all of us,
and is not an external entity distinct from the collection of all individuals
and their families, so much so that she went on to say: "And no government can do anything except
through people, and people must look after themselves first.” A perfectly simple and innocent call for
self-help, and for restraint in the reliance on government transfers from a
budget to which in the end we all have to contribute. Sure, she was neglecting
the fact that welfare transfers are not necessarily always a disincentive to
create income and wealth, that they also represent a stimulation of demand and
therefore may generate employment and income, and that a more equal and
cohesive society may be worth attaining - at least up to a point - even if
re-distribution had a net cost in terms of efficiency. But even these omissions
and reservations are legitimate though possibly misguided opinions, for which
Thatcher did not deserve to be reviled. Therefore belated but sincere apologies
are due and are here unreservedly made.
Nevertheless, there are still many exceedingly serious reasons to revile
her. The general principle, that one "not speak ill of the dead",
does not apply to influential public figures (as we are reminded by Glenn Greenvald,
Guardian 8 April): noblesse oblige. I lived in England
throughout most of her political career, from 1962-1982, and intermittently
until after her downfall in 1990, and disliked her passionately. Mrs Thatcher -
for I could never bring myself to call her a Lady - to me was forever Thatcher-the-milk-snatcher
(as in 1971, while Minister for Education in the Heath government, she
abolished free milk for school children aged 7-11 years). Never mind the
destruction of the British coalmining industry: coalmining is an attractive
occupation and culture only in the morbid, romantic literary sickness à la
D.H. Lawrence, and miners should have been retired gradually by Labour
governments over the previous thirty years, instead of being kept employed
artificially as a reserve army of Labour voters. But there was no reason to confront
them as Thatcher did and unleash riot police on horseback assaulting them: she
could have easily bribed them instead with the proceeds of North Sea Gas.
Nor was there any need to start a class war using a regressive and
odious poll tax, or to deny Irish hunger strikers in the Maze prison their
political status thus leading to their death. She lowered taxes and cut welfare
expenditure and industrial subsidies, promoting de-industrialization and
unemployment (that rose to a record of nearly 13 per cent under her watch); she
privatized council houses without building new ones, and sold off all kinds of
public assets, including public infrastructure (steel, airways, etc.) and
utilities such as water, telecoms, gas and electricity, transferring massive
public wealth to the private sector. She de-regulated economic activities,
especially finance, and shrunk the size of the state. In doing this she
somewhat revived competition - which she could have done if she had wanted to
even without privatization - but did not promote economic growth in the UK, as
she is widely credited to have done.
Thatcher never understood any macroeconomics - or she would not have
written (in her Path To Power, 1995): "There is no better
course for understanding free-market economics than life in a corner
shop." With infinitely greater confidence than that applicable to her
assertion about society, we could say that "There is no such a
thing as a market system". For in order to substantiate the naïf,
oversimplified market vision of her mentors (Milton Friedmann and Friederich
von Hayek, Alan Walters and Keith Joseph and the whole of the Mount Pelerin
Society) as a system of self regulating equilibria we would need a system
of complete markets, i.e. of exclusive, spot and inter-temporal, instantaneous
and non-sequential markets, for all dated and contingent goods and services.
Instead of which we only have a relatively small number of spot markets, a
handful of forward markets except for labour and mostly for homogeneous primary
commodities as well as money, all sequential and rarely contingent on the
states of the world. In the market system as we know it economic agents act on
the basis of expectations as well as prices in a typical, incontrovertibly
Keynesian world of inadequate and unstable effective demand and involuntary
unemployment.
Policies based on such hyper-liberal (then
labelled monetarist) approach, which she shared with Ronald Reagan who gained
power in 1980, had massive adverse consequences over time and space. They
contaminated and corrupted the New Labour approach of Tony Blair and Gordon
Brown, they deeply affected the transition path of the Soviet Bloc from central
planning to market economies and caused its immense unnecessary costs, and
they paved the way for the global Great Recession of 2008 which is still
causing our misery to date.
Internationally, she strengthened her failing domestic support by
declaring war on Argentina over Britain colonial possession of the Malvinas,
instead of conducting political negotiations; her tears over the accompanying
loss of lives, revealed by recently published War Cabinet papers, are only
evidence of hypocrisy. She played a key role in bringing about the first Gulf
War, and advocated the 2003 attack on Iraq. She denounced Nelson Mandela and
the ANC as "terrorist", while she befriended dictators like Augusto
Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and General Sukharto ("One of our very best and
most valuable friends"). She opposed German re-unification and the
euro but fortunately she was defeated by Germany and France trading one for the other.
For somebody so opposed to the state taking care of its citizens
"from cradle to grave", it is ironical that she should be given a
lavish “ceremonial funeral with military honours” yesterday in St. Paul’s
Cathedral at an estimated cost of £10-12mn. It is only fair that Ken Loach
should have suggested that her funeral should have been "privatized":
"Put it out to competitive tender and accept the cheapest bid. It's what
she would have wanted".
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