\t\t\t\tRemember that her own party got rid of her in the end because she even became a liability to them. She was always a liability to the prosperity of the British people and despite her obsession with incentives and individual action, she undermined both by wrecking the macroeconomy in Britain. The news today is all about the death of the former British PM. There will be a lot of revisionism going on. I don’t plan on a chapter and verse discussion of the legacy of the shopkeeper’s daughter. Apart from the cruelty that was imposed on individuals, particularly the poor, her policies hollowed out the British economy and opened up the door for the parasitic financial sector to take centre stage, with the disastrous consequences that are now for all to see. I could talk about all of that. But to me the biggest impact of her period in office was that it marked the beginning of the end of the social democratic parties. Labour and the Tories became neo-liberal lookalikes. Sure enough, the Tories spoke better and had better table manners. But when the economic policy positions were distilled to their essence, the Labour Party, like so-called progressive parties everywhere, started to sound more right-winged than the Tories themselves. That is what I think is her grim legacy for the weak and the poor of the world.
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\nI lived in England for part of her period in office and was there during the coal miners’ strike, at the height of the union bashing and the attacks on workers. I lived just around the corner from Eddie Shah’s Stockport Messenger factory, which Thatcher used as the stalking horse to destroy the print unions.<\/p>\n
Thatcher’s new anti-union laws were first unveiled at this little local paper in the North of England (Warrington). The National Graphical Association (the union) were fined \u00a350,000 for defending their workers.<\/p>\n
There were mass pickets of the Warrington plant and the police were brutal in the way they dealt with the workers.<\/p>\n
The laws allowed for the full sequestration of its assets. By the end of the dispute the NGA had been fined around \u00a3650,000 (which was the largest fine in British legal history to that date) and the publishers had claims for millions of pounds of writs outstanding against them. <\/p>\n
The print unions sought support from the peak body, the TUC which by then was dominated by right-wing leaders from the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation (Bill Sirs) and the AUEW (Terry Duffy). The TUC was compliant with the pernicious new laws and kept a distance. Eddie Shah had a phalanx of conservative and monied interests behind him and the police muscle to physically intimidate the workers.<\/p>\n
The union lost. Thatcher had the first victory in her campaign to divide and conquer the representatives of labour and to drive down working conditions. The NGA struggle was the first of many in that sector, which eventually led to Murdoch’s News Limited’s decampment from Fleet Street to Wapping, with all the ramifications that followed for workers and their job security.<\/p>\n
I lived there in England when unemployment soared and public infrastructure was run down. I lived there when privatised bus services cut “unprofitable” routes into the Pennines and an old lady died because she could not get to her clinic anymore. It was an awful time in Britain.<\/p>\n
I lived there when she attacked a small island off Argentina at a time she was about to lose office. The little two-up-two-down working class terraces in the grimy streets that I lived in up in Manchester were adorned with British flags and the working class tories impoverished by Thatcher’s Monetarist assault on them multiplied and she won the next election. An amazing sense of denial of reality was in the streets – similar I think to the tea party morons who will suffer the most materially from the policies they are supporting.<\/p>\n
Mass delusion is very hard to explain when drugs are not present. At least in the late 1990s etc, the neo liberals were able to run amok and cut this and that and transfer massive amounts of real income to the top-end-of-town because they opened up the credit tap and we all happily sedated ourselves bingeing on consumption goods bought on the never never.<\/p>\n
However, despite all that personal hurt and loss of public dignity, one of the most significant consequences of this era was that it was marked the beginning of the end for the social democratic parties – such as British Labour, Australian Labor Party, etc.<\/p>\n
It was during this period – under the onslaught of Monetarism – that these parties all abandoned the ideals of social democracy and public purpose that had shaped their policy platforms since their inception.<\/p>\n
Instead, they adopted neo-liberal narratives about individual incentives and private endeavour and today represent a pathetic version of the great ideals they used to profess.<\/p>\n
While the politicians railed against Madam Thatcher’s claims about there being no such thing as society, they embraced her message wholeheartedly and stopped understanding or refused to listen to those who did understand that systemic constraints overwhelm individual choice in a macroeconomy.<\/p>\n
The lessons of the Great Depression were forgotten. The 1930s were redefined by compliant conservative historians. Even today that is going on. I was talking with someone last night and we laughed in that tragic sort of way when we reflected on the claims by conservatives that the CCC and WPA programs in the US during the Great Depression did nothing to reduce unemployment. Sure enough that is true if you count the millions of workers who toiled for pay under those programs as being still unemployed!<\/p>\n
These social democratic parties fell prey to the basic fallacy of composition that Keynes and others had pointed out during the Great Depression – that what might work at the individual level may well have the opposite (negative) impact if the same strategy is employed at the aggregate level.<\/p>\n
They thought it was smart politics to adopt the economic policies of the right – mostly without really understanding that the basic propositions of neo-liberal macroeconomics are myths. They also didn’t realise that by adopting these policy positions they would change the public debate so much that the substantive policy issues that defined their existence – recognition and care for the collective – would become unpalatable to an increasingly indoctrinated public.<\/p>\n
The so-called progressive politicians started mindlessly mouthing off about the need for budget surpluses as if they are an end in themselves. They started to quote public debt ratios as if they had some independent relevance to anything. They started to tell us that the markets had to be calmed and obeyed without realising that the bond markets are just another public welfare recipient and will go cap in hand to government on whatever terms the latter offers should it have the economic gumption to realise who is in charge.<\/p>\n
I suspect hardly any of the Labour-type politicians had a clue about anything they were talking about. But the damage they caused to society has been immense.<\/p>\n
In the 1980s, we began to live in economies rather than societies or communities. It was also the period that unemployment persisted at high levels in most OECD countries. The two points are not unrelated. Unemployment arises because there is a lack of collective will. We have been indoctrinated to believe that government is somehow an impost on us rather than being the essential facilitator for economic well-being.<\/p>\n
We support governments, which deliberately constrain aggregate demand below the level necessary to maintain jobs for all. Then we turn our scorn on the victims of that shortfall as if they are all to blame. We have been schooled to think individual and ignore the collective.<\/p>\n
We have been dumbed down to ignore systemic constraints. The lack of collective will in the public setting has been the principal casualty of the influence of neo-liberalism.<\/p>\n
The solidaristic or collective approach to problems is sometimes called the All Saints<\/em> approach. Collective will is important when a nation goes into recession because it provides the political justification for sharing the costs and benefits of economic activity more generally.<\/p>\n More generally, collective will is a state where the citizens empower the sovereign government to use net spending (deficits) to ensure there are enough jobs available for all those who want to work. We used to think that governments had an obligation to create work if the private market fails to create enough. That was one of the lynchpins of a progressive social democratic agenda.<\/p>\n It reflected a sophisticated understanding that when system constraints are imposed individuals become powerless. If there are not enough jobs then 5 or 10 into 1 wont go (in integer units).<\/p>\n That sophisticated understanding led us to demand that the Government use its fiscal capacity to generate enough jobs!<\/p>\n The neo-liberals hate collective will. Remember Margaret Thatcher’s famous epithet while being interviewed by Women’s Own Magazine (published October 31, 1987) was:<\/p>\n \nI 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. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation and it is, I think, one of the tragedies in which many of the benefits we give, which were meant to reassure people that if they were sick or ill there was a safety net and there was help, that many of the benefits which were meant to help people who were unfortunate-“It is all right. We joined together and we have these insurance schemes to look after it”. That was the objective, but somehow there are some people who have been manipulating the system and so some of those help and benefits that were meant to say to people: “All right, if you cannot get a job, you shall have a basic standard of living!” but when people come and say: “But what is the point of working? I can get as much on the dole!” You say: “Look” It is not from the dole. It is your neighbour who is supplying it and if you can earn your own living then really you have a duty to do it and you will feel very much better!”<\/p>\n There is also something else I should say to them: “If that does not give you a basic standard, you know, there are ways in which we top up the standard. You can get your housing benefit.”<\/p>\n But it went too far. If children have a problem, it is society that is at fault. There is no such thing as society … There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n You can read more about this interview and its context at – Interview for Woman’s Own<\/a>.<\/p>\n I think that mentality infested the progressive parties who were starting to struggle because they failed to make the transition from the fixed exchange rate, gold standard system to the fiat currency system. The ridiculous requests from the Callaghan government in the 1970s to the IMF for funds, which paved the way for Thatcher, exemplified this confusion.<\/p>\n Things went downhill after that.<\/p>\n