Thatcher – A Retrospective

The spectre of Margaret Thatcher has risen like a cadaverous apparition in the British blogosphere of late. It all started innocuously enough with a comment about her authoritarian tendencies. I stand by my original statement; Thatcher had an authoritarian streak running through her a mile wide. However, as the Pedant General pointed out:

…she was thoroughly autocratic with her own party but NOT WITH THE COUNTRY.

I wouldn’t go so far as to agree that she was libertarian, though. Her management style was that of an autocratic bully. A libertarian manager would have adopted an enabling style of management whereby rather than aggressively ridiculing dissenters, would have embraced the dissent and used it creatively to sense check her decisions. Believe me, it helps one avoid catastrophic mistakes, just as it can confirm that one was right in the first place. I avoided a few mistakes by listening to dissenters in my team; had Thatcher done so, she might have avoided the Poll Tax debacle.

It all started to get interesting when others became involved in the discussion. For the record, I do not need a history lesson as Mr Harding asserts.

…YOU need a history lesson mate!

I recall those years clearly and I am capable of looking back dispassionately and recognising what Thatcher was and what she wasn’t.

Margaret Thatcher was the reason I joined the Labour party. I despised her hectoring, bullying style. Also, during the early years of her premiership I found myself adrift in her economic reforms. I never want to see the inside of an unemployment benefits office again; soulless, life-sapping places filled with the bureaucratic and the despairing. Indeed, the two occasions that I was forced to sign-on were such deeply depressing experiences that I took anything rather than have to go back. In the latter years of the Thatcher tenure, high interest rates; peaking at around 15%; and the poll tax combined to kill my embryonic driving school. My main clientele were either young people who suddenly found themselves facing a £1000 poll tax bill or people who came late to driving and were facing massive hikes in their mortgage payments, not to mention that £1000 poll tax bill.

You can presume that I was not a fan. I remain so. For Mr Harding to presume that I am suggesting otherwise:

Oh yeah, Mr Longrider, Thatcher was nice really, just a bit authoritarian with her party no-one else, YOU need a history lesson mate! Thatcher made our lives hell, taking away our freedoms left, right and centre! She made Blair look like a pussy!

is, frankly, bollocks. It is a classic strawman argument and one I’ve come to expect. “Nice” is not a term I would use. However; as the Pedant General and Pete in Dunbar said during the discussion, she may have been authoritarian in nature, but her policies weren’t. The problem here is that Neil is using the term “authoritarian” to describe Thatcher policies because he didn’t like them.

It is difficult to conduct a discussion where the two parties cannot agree common terms of reference. I understand what is meant by authoritarianism – so too, do most of the people involved in this discussion – bar one. Let me explain; polices that you don’t like are not necessarily authoritarian. Blair’s policies are. They are, because they involve state interference in peoples’ personal affairs. They are, because they transfer further power to the executive and away from the people. They are, because they put into place the components of a totalitarian regime. Or as the wikipedia entry puts it:

Authoritarianism describes a form of government characterized by strict obedience to the authority of the state, which often maintains and enforces social control through the use of oppressive measures.

Thatcher, for all her faults, did not do this. Her personal management style could, indeed, be characterised as:

…the personality or management style of an individual or organization which seeks to dominate those within its sphere of influence and has little regard for building consensus.

Therefore, by commonly understood terms of reference, she was an authoritarian manager within her party but not an authoritarian prime minister. What she sought to do within the team, she did not seek to do in the nation.

While we are on common understanding there are a couple of other terms that clearly need explaining:

Civil Liberties

Civil liberties are protections from the power of governments. Examples include the right to life, the right to self defense, the right to a fair trial, the right to own property, the right to privacy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of assembly.

All of these are under attack by the current Blair administration. Doing this, makes him an authoritarian – but as it’s for our own good, that’s all okay… 🙄

Fascism:

…totalitarian attempts to impose state control over all aspects of life: political, social, cultural, and economic. The fascist state regulates and controls (as opposed to nationalizing) the means of production.

By this definition, it is not the Devil’s Kitchen that qualifies for this slur; rather someone else…

I notice that the ghost of Thatcher past has manifested itself over at notes from a small bedroom while I was writing this. Does this mean great minds think alike or that fools seldom differ?