Sean Gabb
Director, The Libertarian Alliance
(Carbon positive since 1979)
30 Years After: I reject Margaret Hilda Thatcher and Most of Her Works
Since everyone else is boring on about the 30th anniversary of her first
election victory in 1979, I was until ten minutes ago disinclined to say
anything of my own. However, I have now promised to put something on the
Libertarian Alliance Blog. Therefore, having nothing else to write, I will
say why Margaret Thatcher was a bad thing for the cause of liberty in
England.
Here goes:
She started the transformation of this country into a politically correct
police state. Her Government behaved with an almost gloating disregard for
constitutional norms. She brought in money laundering laws that have now
been extended to a general supervision over our financial dealings. She
relaxed the conditions for searches and seizure by the police. She increased
the numbers and powers of the police. She weakened trial by jury. She
weakened the due process protections of the accused. She gave executive
agencies the power to fine and punish without due process. She began the
first steps towards total criminalisation of gun possession.
She did not cut government spending. Instead, she allowed the conversion of
local government and the lower administration into a system of sinecures for
the Enemy Class. She allowed political correctness to take hold in local
government. When she did oppose this, it involved giving central government
powers of supervision and control useful to a future politically correct
government. She extended and tightened the laws constraining free speech
about race and immigration.
Her encouragement of enterprise never amounted to more than a liking for big
business corporatism. Genuine enterprise was progressively heaped with taxes
and regulations that made it hard to do business. Big business, on the other
hand, was showered with praise and legal indulgences. Indeed, her
privatisation policies were less about introducing competition and choice
into public services than in turning public monopolies into corporate
monsters pampered by the State with subsidies and favourable regulations -
corporate monsters that were expected in return to lavish financial rewards
on the political class.
She virtually began the war on freedom of choice where smoking is concerned.
She started the modern obsession with health and safety as an excuse for
controlling our lives. She vastly expended state powers of supervision and
control over parenting, and immensely expanded the numbers and powers of
social workers.
She made the environmental nonsense politically fashionable. She was the
first senion British politician to start wittering about climate change and
ozone holes. She doubtless thought she was further stuffing the coal miners.
In fact, she was a useful idiot for the ideology best suited to replace
socialism as an excuse for Enemy Class domination.
She hardly cut taxes. She ruthlessly pushed the speed of European
integration. Her militaristic foreign policy and slavish obedience to
Washington mostly worked against the interests of this country. The one war
she fought that might have some justification was only necessary because her
own colleagues had effectively told the Argentine Government to invade the
Falkland Islands.
Even her reforms of the trade union movement had malevolent effects. Before
her, trade unions were run by ordinary working class people who used the
strike and violence to achieve their ends. She ensured that the unions were
taken over by the usual Enemy Class graduates. These were the only people
capable of using the health and safety and workplace discrimination laws and
so forth that were brought in to replace the older methods of advancing
working class interests. The result has been the co-option of the trade
unions to purposes that have done nothing at all to advance working class
interests.
Forget Margaret Thatcher as some hero of our Movement. She was at best the
midwife of the New Labour Revolution. She did not just make the world safe
for New Labour - she created New Labour. Without her precedents and her
general transformation of our laws and institutions, Tony Blair would have
been impossible.
I am inclined to wish James Callaghan had won in 1979. If things had turned
nasty thereafter, it would at least have been an honest despotism. No
libertarians or genuine conservatives would have been making idiots of
themselves nearly a third of a century later trying to tell themselves and
everyone else that it was other than it was.
--
Sean Gabb (away from home computer)
Director, The Libertarian Alliance
(Carbon Positive since 1979)
sean@libertarian.
Tel: 07956 472 199
Skype Username: seangabb
http://www.libertar
http://www.seangabb
http://www.hampdenp
http://libertariana
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FREE download of my book - "Cultural Revolution, Culture War: How
Conservatives Lost England, and How to Get It Back" -
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