Margaret Thatcher Bent Metal Lady

MARGARET THATCHER – BENT METAL LADY

Andrew McKillop

THE BENT METAL LADY

With the April 8th death of Baroness Margaret Thatcher of England a tidal wave of unmerited praise has washed over her still-warm body. This was Britain’s second Winston Churchill or first Ronald Reagan, not forgetting her friend and admirer Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose California Dreaming state finance and debt story would be a great theme for a cartoon film – or video gore game. But nothing at all to do with “balanced budgets”.

Whatever the angle of vision, the zombie bootlick media commentators paint ‘Maggy’ Thatcher as the Terminator of British Decline.

In reality, bolstered only by North Sea oil revenues and her own ultra-simple slogan pack, Thatcher was able to get away with her version of spend-and-spend for a long time, while her petit-bourgeois neoliberal policies destroyed the manufacturing base of the British economy, with unemployment rates pushed to their highest ever, more even than today. For that, and the social and cultural collateral damage she wrought, only the mentally handicapped can say “Thanks and Adieu”.

WHAT SHE SAID

Well over one hundred books, and thousands of articles have been written about Thatcher. In the last weeks before she became Prime Minster in 1979, her Conservative Party’s election manifesto in large part written by herself, set out Five Tasks, the first of which she introduced this way: “This election is about the future of Britain – a great country which seems to have lost its way. It is a country rich in natural resources, in coal, oil, gas and fertile farmlands”.

As we know and the British found out very fast, coal in her opinion equalled trade unions, which in turn equalled the need for Boot Treatment, and fast. Coal was therefore off the list – but since North Sea oil and gas was flowing bountifully, the “coal problem” was a side issue. As for the “fertile farmlands” this has to be set against England’s population density of 400 persons per square kilometre, the second-highest in Europe, in a muddy thin-soiled high-latitude country with chilly winters (despite the global warming that Thatcher “so sincerely” believed in). Food self-sufficiency was always impossible, even in wartime. Agriculture, in the UK employs less than 2% of the population.

Her first of Five Tasks soon got back to theme. She said “Yet today, this country is faced with its most serious problems since the Second World War. What has happened to our country, to the values we used to share, to the success and prosperity we once took for granted? During the industrial strife of last winter, confidence, self-respect, common sense, and even our sense of common humanity were shaken. At times this society seemed on the brink of disintegration”.

By this she meant a Red Marxist Threat, later filled to perfection in the shape of Arthur Scargill, head of the coal mineworkers’ union the NUM. The communist threat theme, hiding her basic petit-bourgeois urge to crush the working class was almost certainly her major pitch all through her political life, conjuring up the image of Red Guards stomping on “British values’, the same way the Punk Rock movement she directly sparked actually went out and did. Thatcher was the great moderniser – who brought Britons up to date, with Snuff Movies and killer football hooligan riots.

In Thatcher’s own words, in the same 1979 Manifesto, “First, by practising the politics of envy and by actively discouraging the creation of wealth, they (the British Labour Party) have set one group against another in an often bitter struggle to gain a larger share of a weak economy”.

She ladled the “workers envy” theme thick on her incitation to social class-based conflict in society, for example prefiguring Reagan with another part of her 1979 Manifesto, “By enlarging the role of the State and diminishing the role of the individual, they (working class labour unions) have crippled the enterprise and effort on which a prosperous country with improving social services depends. Third, by heaping privilege without responsibility on the trade unions, Labour have given a minority of extremists the power to abuse individual liberties and to thwart Britain’s chances of success”.

To be 100% sure and certain of course, Thatcher’s “supply side” governments, fattened by easy money flowing from North Sea oil and gas through production taxes she ran at near-punitive levels, were able to continually increase both the amount of government spending, and the number of civil servants employed – mostly “middle class” of course. Above all, being a lower middle class lady from “humble origins” she had a horror of productive labour. A vast “middle class” bureaucracy was natural, for her.

WHAT SHE DID

Downsizing Britain was surely what Thatcher claimed she stood againt. Downsized – and dumbed down – Britain is what the British got from her over-extended reign. Only thanks to North Sea oil and gas revenues, like any Gulf petromonarchy or Putin’s oligarchs, was this reality able to be hidden from the mindless voters – middle class of course – who turned out like toy glove puppets to vote for her, time after time. Now having an oil-backed currency, the normal result of policies as disastrous as Thatchers’, for example an ever growing trade deficit and double digit inflation, could be hidden to a certain extent from her precious middle class voters. In 1980, the pound sterling hit almost $2.50 which can be compared with its present value.

For a downsized once-great nation, her move to drum rapidly fading voter support and renew her mandate after her first years of disastrous economic management was to declare war on the small-sized fascist Argentinian generals she had so warmly welcomed, when they seized power with Kissinger’s help. The generals had invaded the British Falkland Islands, offering her the main chance. Described by cynics as a war of “two bald men fighting over a comb”, this small-sized faraway war was a classic in downsized, small minded, vindictive and useless Thatcher politics.

Thatcher created the straw man of communist saboteurs dragging down a once-great nation and its once-great money. Taking on board then-fashionable Milton Friedman nostrums on “money velocity and inflation” she set out to tame inflation and restore sound money. Controlling the money supply proved a lot more difficult than theory predicted. Despite raising interest rates close to 20%, money supply growth remained stubbornly high. Thatcher’s famed stubborness or refusal to admit she was wrong and change tack – saying “The lady’s not for turning” – resulted in the “pain and strain” being drawn out for years, further mining out British industry and keeping unemployment at extreme highs.

General inflation finally fell by 1983, but the money supply did not, proving its link with inflation to be very tenuous. House price inflation – for Thatcher’s prized “nation of homeowners” – however surely did not fall. Thatcher policies favouring the “middle class” through infecting this class with a casino mindset became a constant of British society in the 33 years since she first rode into power.

For her social class-based politics “favouring the middle classes” Thatcher let inflation rip in home prices but cutting inflation elsewhere in the economy needed draconian effort. Taxes were raised, state assets were sold off (in fact given away to Thatcher-spouting smart alecs like Richard Branson), and government spending growth was temporarily cut. Interest rates were held at extreme highs, and with little surprise except possibly to Thatcher, this horse medecine finally cut inflation – by downsizing the entire economy and runnng “negative growth”, plunging it into full scale recession.

WHAT SHE LEFT BEHIND

As an export platform economy for low paid workers twirling nothing better than a screwdriver in foreign-owned final assembly plants, the downsized, de-industrialized British economy can be called Thatcher’s main legacy, outside her social policies seeking social conflict and the class envy she claimed was the mark of Communism. Following the first hit to UK industry in 1979, when she arrived in Whitehall and “shook things up”, it took 6 years to slowly claw back 1979 output levels – - thoughout the Thatcher years low and slow growth of industrial output was the rule.

For her, the word “industry” was basically a dirty word due to industry equalling workers, which equals Communism, but she made two notable exceptions. These were the finance “industry” and weapons manufacturing and sales. Shrinking UK industry to those two, according to several of her closest aids, would have suited her own conception of the “Thatcheromics” economic miracle – at least for as long as the North Sea oil and gas flowed, and filled government coffers, and allowed her to get away with her strocious economic management.

Banksters and traders, as well as arms dealers, certainly since the 1980s are better known for what they equal. Corruption. Nothing more and nothing less. Thatcher’s real project – to poison society, which she denied the existence of saying that “only families exist” – made it de rigeur to worship personal wealth and neglect the common good, with the inevitable result that during her 11-year tenure in power, greed and corruption became No Alternative political creeds.

With so many pockets to fill, only among the large numbers of the greedy, and already rich, Thatcher privatised public utilities at a frenzied rhythm – gas, electricity, telephones, schools, railways, city transport, health services always enabling private operators to use monopoly power to squeeze the people until the juices ran dry, and line their Fat Cat pockets. Thatcher’s own version of “decentralized democracy” was through half-destroying local government while also racking property and local taxes to new extremes, for example with her lasting legacy of the infamous “head tax” or capitation tax. If you are alive and stand up, you pay.

Thatcher’s corrupting influence is most surely the biggest real legacy of the Bent Metal Lady. Coming straight after her clone glove puppet ‘dauphin’ John Major, the so-called New Labour Tony Blair applied every single Thatcher trick – nothing forgotten, nothing learned – and was able to offer himself much bigger and more destructive phony wars than ‘Maggy’. After Thatcher, Downsized Britain was certainly that – small – but was also a lot more nasty than when the Bent Metal Lady started.

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