Melanie Phillips writes an interesting article comparing Thatcherism with mainstream Leftism

**Tooting Carmen** · 07-15-2019, 01:00 AM

Melanie Phillips, a right-leaning journalist who I hardly agree with much of the time, nevertheless wrote an interesting article comparing Thatcherism with mainstream Leftism, showing how both share much of the same materialistic and utilitarian outlook.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/c...nity-5vvlz62sp

Margaret Thatcher blighted the spirit of community
Weakening the social bonds that held us together paved the way for left‑wing culture warriors

In our downstairs loo hangs a comical photograph of me in 1980 making a little speech while receiving a press award for my work at The Guardian. The person presenting the award was the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. She wears a priceless expression of amazement and outrage. For what I was doing was denouncing her immigration policy. A bunch of us award-winners had decided that, in order to preserve our moral purity after shaking the Thatcher hand, we should lambast her government. You might term this graceless display an early example of virtue-signalling.

Watching the current BBC2 series Thatcher: A Very British Revolution is an unsettling experience, not least for someone who has moved to a different spot on the political barricades. Some of it is shockingly familiar. The Iron Lady’s enthusiasts and enemies from that time pop up looking older but voicing adulation or spitting malice exactly as then.

What leaps out is both the passion of the woman, a “conviction politician” of the kind that is startling today, and her vulnerability. Isolated among colleagues who loathed or disdained her and sought to undermine her uncompromising project to rescue the nation’s prospects, she pressed on regardless with enormous courage. But there was also a narrowness of vision, an inability to grasp how anyone could possibly think differently from her — the same wide-eyed astonishment that’s on display in my photograph.

That tunnel vision was, however, mirrored by her foes. Our current era’s extreme intolerance of dissent was foreshadowed in the Eighties by the immediate pillorying of anyone who dared suggest that Thatcher might not be responsible for every British ill. A more balanced view is surely required. Some of the things she did were good, even great — ending the trade unions’ practice of taking the country hostage; trying (although failing) to stop the slide in educational standards; challenging Britain’s national story of decline.

Yet in other respects she did Britain harm and set her own party on a self-destructive ideological trajectory. This was because her vision was framed by the individual, who was good, and the state, which was bad. She ignored the stuff in between: the collective common good where the spirit of community and shared national purpose resides. As she famously remarked: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.”

Her outlook was constructed almost entirely around a utilitarian, economic model of human behaviour in which the individual was first and foremost a consumer. Market forces would determine which demands would be the fittest to survive. Choice was elevated to a sacred principle. Value was judged solely by measurable outcomes such as productivity, efficiency or cost-effectiveness. Public service was replaced by managerialism. Intangible community bonds that connect us to each other such as trust, duty or collective solidarity were ignored.

The result was not only the decimation of industries and dislocation of communities, with scant acknowledgement of the terrible and enduring personal or social cost. Institutions vital to civil society such as the professions or civil service were viewed as conspiracies against the consumer and were duly undermined or politicised. In the NHS, the internal market introduced in the 1980s transformed healthcare from a service to a series of rolling business contracts. Doctors lost their independence to a largely left-wing managerial class, which, while loudly denouncing this development, eagerly seized the power it was given to clip the doctors’ wings.

The Thatcherite revolutionaries failed to grasp that the bonds keeping the nation together, which they were weakening in the name of the free market, were also being deliberately eroded by culture warriors on the left who wanted to create an entirely different world.

The left wanted to slough off individuals’ responsibility for their deeds. The Thatcher government and its successor headed by John Major sloughed off government responsibility on to a vast quangocracy in which it became difficult to hold anyone to account for anything. The left wanted to deregulate personal behaviour in the interests of lifestyle choice. In 1994 the Tory deregulation minister, Neil Hamilton, made a speech to the Libertarian Alliance — which supported legalising sadomasochism and privatising the army — in which he called for the deregulation of all personal and social behaviour.

So it has continued. The left wants to erode the drug laws in the interests of hedonism; free marketeers support decriminalisation as freedom from state control. The left wants unrestricted immigration to eradicate prejudice; free marketeers want it to undercut indigenous workers and bring down wages. The left supports transnational institutions to create the brotherhood of man; free marketeers support multinational companies to create the brotherhood of millionaires.

While the left adopted hyper-individualism in the social sphere, Thatcher’s very British revolution enforced it in the economic sphere. Thatcher never understood that there even was a culture war, let alone that she had marched her troops on to the wrong side of the battleground. So it remains today, with the nation and its culture abandoned by many of its purportedly conservative defenders.

That is why the left are running amok with their ideological inquisitions, the Conservative Party is in meltdown and we are all paying the price.

**billErobreren** · 07-15-2019, 02:17 AM

I rather like Melanie, a gifted writer. In odd ways, I reckon her a bit of a revisionist but she's pretty spot on about Thatcher, she seemed devoted to this being called the market, which she expected to sort everything out. She seemed to often look to America for inspiration. We kind of set the standard for what Britain was to become and showed signs as to what she would turn to, around the time the Profumo scandal began and many tried to fight with the election of Wilson.

**Tooting Carmen** · 07-15-2019, 01:41 PM

Originally Posted by billErobreren

I rather like Melanie, a gifted writer. In odd ways, I reckon her a bit of a revisionist but she's pretty spot on about Thatcher, she seemed devoted to this being called the market, which she expected to sort everything out. She seemed to often look to America for inspiration. We kind of set the standard for what Britain was to become and showed signs as to what she would turn to, around the time the Profumo scandal began and many tried to fight with the election of Wilson.

Yes it is a silly myth that everyone in the Anglo-American Right adores Thatcher. Many of the more socially conservative, traditionalist types have long argued that her free-market reforms were excessive and destructive. However much she may have from to time used the rhetoric of tradition, patriotism and nationhood, ultimately those weren't the main thrust of her policies and beliefs (or Reagan's, for that matter).

**Tooting Carmen** · 07-15-2019, 04:23 PM

More generally, it has to be said that many libertarians and Rightists talk of 'economic freedom'. Well, what does that mean? If it means the right to set up a business without undue delay and interference, then fine. If it means that everything must be privatised and marketised, including even health, education, public transport, utilities etc., then no, we must resist it.

**billErobreren** · 07-16-2019, 03:48 AM

Originally Posted by Tooting Carmen

Yes it is a silly myth that everyone in the Anglo-American Right adores Thatcher. Many of the more socially conservative, traditionalist types have long argued that her free-market reforms were excessive and destructive. However much she may have from to time used the rhetoric of tradition, patriotism and nationhood, ultimately those weren't the main thrust of her policies and beliefs (or Reagan's, for that matter).

Oh. We know that in hindsight, by 1988, it became baltant to many of us that we didn't have a functional border. Still, she was exceptional for a woman in her field never seemed to use her sex as a shield. I reckon that's why so many that vote for her party are quick to overlook her most caustic measures.

Originally Posted by Tooting Carmen

More generally, it has to be said that many libertarians and Rightists talk of 'economic freedom'. Well, what does that mean? If it means the right to set up a business without undue delay and interference, then fine. If it means that everything must be privatised and marketised, including even health, education, public transport, utilities etc., then no, we must resist it.

Nor would I begrudge you any shape of reluctance to such changes, we're a little far gone to lay the works for any shape universal healthcare here given the state of trust here. Public transport's another thing that takes a backseat given how long this country has been in love with the automobile. Libertarians aren't worth anyone's time. One of the main reasons, their party has never garnered ground in the states; they're socially hindered and can't seem to relate to people. What's defined as right here is completely divorced from anything in the old World. The right here is Austrian school vs Keynes at the most moderate on the left. Neither are particularly folkish to be frank.

**Tooting Carmen** · 07-16-2019, 02:34 PM

Originally Posted by billErobreren

Oh. We know that in hindsight, by 1988, it became baltant to many of us that we didn't have a functional border. Still, she was exceptional for a woman in her field never seemed to use her sex as a shield. I reckon that's why so many that vote for her party are quick to overlook her most caustic measures.

Nor would I begrudge you any shape of reluctance to such changes, we're a little far gone to lay the works for any shape universal healthcare here given the state of trust here. Public transport's another thing that takes a backseat given how long this country has been in love with the automobile. Libertarians aren't worth anyone's time. One of the main reasons, their party has never garnered ground in the states; they're socially hindered and can't seem to relate to people. What's defined as right here is completely divorced from anything in the old World. The right here is Austrian school vs Keynes at the most moderate on the left. Neither are particularly folkish to be frank.

Having said what I said, one of the ironies about more socially conservative-minded writers from the UK and US like Phillips, Peter Hitchens and Pat Buchanan is that, although they claim to be very patriotic and anti-EU, their economic beliefs are in many ways closer to the corporatist, "Third Position" policies typical of the Continental European Right, than the more neoliberal policies of the (contemporary) Anglo-American Right.