Thirty Years On

It is now exactly thirty years to the day since Margaret Thatcher became the first female British Prime Minister after her Conservative Party swept to victory in the UK General Election of 1979.

During the past few days there has been much discussion of her legacy in the media and on the internet, with Boris Johnson in the Telegraph, the Conservative History website, and even the BBC getting in on the act.

However, with all the fawning praise and, conversely, criticism from the Left, very little in the way of analysis has been given to Thatcher’s Governments from a conservative perspective. How about the traditionally conservative argument that Thatcher’s governments did nothing to stop the social and cultural revolution that has been taking place in this country since the late 1950s?

Firstly, we have to establish the solid fact that Mrs Thatcher was certainly not a conservative – she was a liberal. Her free market ideology was influenced by the economist Milton Friedman and the author Friedrich Hayek, both of whom described themselves as liberals and explicitly said they were not conservatives.

Furthermore, conservatism has not traditionally supported the ideas of any particular type of economic system, free market or not. Traditional conservatism has sought to maintain social stability through maintenance and gradual progression, rather than rapid transition, of the current social order.

The market system which Thatcher imposed upon Britain radically altered our society in a very short period of time – some of the effects of which we are only just beginning to feel now. It was an economic revolution rather than a slow and gradual process.

Thatcher was responsible for among the greatest surrenders of British sovereignty to the European Union. She signed the Single European Act in 1986 which was particularly unconservative, because wisdom suggests that although the nation state is not the only possible solution as a form of political order, it is a tried and tested solution that largely works and the only environment in which democracy seems permitted.

The EU, whose aim it is to sweep away the old order of nation states, democratic traditions, and accumulated knowledge, and replace it with a new, untested supranational construct in which sovereignty is passed to a higher level than the nation, is fundamentally alien to conservatism. While she did, in the end, perhaps wake up to the undemocratic and destructive nature of European integration – it was by then too late.

Margaret Thatcher was uninterested in the defence of selective education and Grammar schools, despite the fact that she had attended one. Instead her Governments submitted to the equality agenda and destruction of these schools.

During the sixties the Labour party began to pursue their Comprehensive school agenda with much more vigour, despite it being acknowledged that the pursuit of equality of outcome would lead to a decline in educational rigour and standards. Yet, it was in her capacity as Education Secretary under Edward Heath that she approved more applications for Grammar schools to be turned into Comprehensives than any previous period.

Further, this surrender to the Left and the educational revolution taking place in Britain extended into her own Governments where she refused to reopen or build a single new Grammar school.

It must be made absolutely clear that if you do not have selection by ability, which is by far the fairest method of selection, then you do not remove it altogether but simply replace it with another means by which schools choose their pupils. Academic selection now takes place in Comprehensive schools by wealth (by means of catchment areas where only the richest can afford the properties prices of houses near the best schools and poorer families are forced out), by religion and by the use of ‘interviews’ where the middle classes benefit at the expense of the poor.

Thatcher’s Governments failed to reverse the creeping levels of political correctness entering our society, or to protect marriage or prevent an enormous growth in the size and power of the public sector. She failed to reform the National Health Service when she had the opportunity, or the BBC whose progressive influence on British society has been so damaging since.

Her Governments did not seek to challenge the liberal-Left on its social and moral agenda, and her decade long rule helped to undermine personal responsibility and British liberties. In so many ways Margaret Thatcher continued the liberalisation of our society that begun in the late fifties, through her economic reforms and her indifference to the cultural agenda of the Left.

The strange, reverent cult that has built up around her image and legacy certainly needs to be examined more closely, because I do not necessarily believe that Margaret Thatcher is deserving of some of the praise she seems to have won.

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