by Jonathan Todd
Toby Helm and Daniel Boffey wrote in the Observer, the day before Margaret Thatcher’s death was announced, under a headline of “Labour plans radical shift over welfare state payouts”. But did their article tell us anything about the party’s commitment to the contributory principle that Liam Byrne didn’t tell us in his speech on William Beveridge over a year ago? And did their article tell us anything about our jobs guarantee that had not already been announced?
In short, the Observer splashed on a story devoid of new content at the end of the week in which George Osborne audaciously – but predictably – used the conviction of Mick Philpott to attack again on welfare. We must presume that Labour felt this attack strong enough to wish to respond to but lacked any new policy with which to do so.
Then Thatcher died and decisively moved the news agenda on. Perhaps we should be grateful to her for obscuring Labour’s lack of substance on this central and contentious issue. But is there anything else that Labour should be grateful to Thatcher for?
We should all, according to the words spoken by David Cameron on Downing street on Monday, be grateful to her for saving the UK. Her alienation of Scotland may yet, though, come to be seen as having contributed significantly to the breakup of the union.
While the decline of some industries may have been inevitable, her dearth of industrial policy stripped whole regions of alternative futures. Local government was gutted of capacity to respond to these changes, as power was concentrated in Whitehall by a government that claimed it did not believe in the role of the state. Ballooning welfare payments also meant that this state was hardly minimal.
All of these baleful legacies remain to be dealt with. Yet Martin Amis spoke for many on Monday when he told Newsnight that she was “a necessary prime minister”. Thus, the real question for Labour is not whether we have anything to be grateful to Thatcher for but why, even after all the suffering endured by areas within which our movement is woven most deeply, this view is widely held.
Is it because the rest of the country lacks the compassion to care for these communities? Has Thatcherism or capitalism itself made our fellow citizens spiteful and capricious? The truth is closer to home than that.
The British public turned to Thatcher and stuck with her through three general election victories because they concluded that the Labour party was incapable of doing what was needed. They may have had some sympathy for Labour and misgivings about Thatcher in their hearts but the dysfunctional 1970s and Labour’s failure to anticipate or adapt to these capitulations made up their minds decisively.
It is not Thatcher that Labour should lament but every party leader from 1959 who forgot that the right to buy council houses was in Labour’s manifesto at this general election, Harold Wilson for failing to reform trade unions when given the chance by Barbara Castle’s “In Place of Strife” white paper, James Callaghan for not averting the winter of discontent, and Arthur Scargill for strong arming the working class into a civil war in which both sides were wrong.
There was an alternative to Thatcher. It just did not come from Labour. We acquiesced with the abuse of trade union power. We spoke of “the white heat of technology” but failed to deliver a growth model that would have given a viable future to those worst served by Thatcher. We conflated public ownership with public service and were relaxed about their manifest inefficiency and abysmal performance. We accepted all of this as unavoidable and came to be synonymous with an acceptance of British decline.
In contrast, Thatcher had the strength to stand up the trade unions, defined a future of aspiration and betterment, and refused to believe that we could not be great again. And, bizarrely, as if it wasn’t obvious, we wondered why she kept winning elections.
We blamed the media. We drove many of those in our party with the surest grip of where the country was going wrong to form another party, splitting the anti-Conservative vote. Then we blamed them. And still the electorate voted against us. We offered no compromise. “What has happened today will make no difference whatever to the work I do for the Labour movement”, said Tony Benn as he lost his seat in 1983.
It was not the public that was wrong. It was Labour. The public would have been fools to entrust their government to a party incapable of confronting reality. They didn’t and nor shall they in future, which is why Labour’s lack of anything substantial to say on welfare matters. We are in danger of seeming to be the defenders of a status quo that the country cannot afford and which the public reject.
There is an alternative to Osborne. But we are not offering it. The suffering inflicted by Thatcher was the bitter fruit of a past generation of failed Labour politicians. It is for this generation to do better.
Jonathan Todd is Labour Uncut’s economic columnist