Ed Miliband: A New Hope?

With all the gloom happening in my life at present, another job rejection on Friday; further steps in disposing of my house before it is repossessed and simply having a cold, I actually got quite excited this weekend when it was announced that Ed Miliband has been elected leader of the Labour Party.  I have labelled myself a democratic Socialist and certainly adhered to Labour Party policies in the 1980s, but was very much turned off by New Labour and have not voted for the party since 1992.  Of course, to the 'mainstream' of British society with a centre ground in politics far to the right of anything I (like most people) would have considered acceptable in the 1970s, I must appear like some revolutionary.  Though I have lost my faith in the particular electoral system the UK uses I certainly support democracy and in fact feel in all its aspects it was damaged by both Thatcher and Blair.  Ed Miliband was an unexpected winner.  Since Tony Blair succeeded so well at the 1997 election it seems that no political party can accept a leader who does not look incredibly like him.  David Cameron, Nick Clegg and David Miliband look like clones created from cells of Blair with a little different input.  Ed Miliband, in contrast, reminds me of the US actor, Ray Romano, though more cheerful in demeanour.  David Miliband seemed to adhered to the politics of what Labour was in 1994-2008, the Blairite Party.  Blair and Mandelson are hovering in the wings trying to keep Labour as the Blairite Party and not go back to anything resembling the Labour Party before 1994 or, in fact, anything more modern.  Blair was very much a Thatcherite and was unwilling to at all address the immense power the wealthy were continuing to accrue through his terms of office.  This left a basis on which Cameron could come in with the smokescreen of the national debt, to implement a harsh New Right monetarist policy of a severity which would have even made Margaret Thatcher hesitate if it had been proposed in 1979 or even 1983.

The Conservatives believed that they could not have won against a Labour Party led by David Miliband and to some degree are probably a little relieved by the unexpected outcome of Ed coming to the role.  However, if David had been chosen, then the Labour Party would have received another nail in the coffin and the Blairite Party would have been reinvigorated after the brief interlude of Brown.  Of course, the Conservatives and their allies in the media will present Ed as a tool of the trade unions and as dangerously 'red'.  However, as he has noted very vigorously in his first interview as leader, wanting social justice and for the bulk of the population not being compelled to serve the interests of the ultra-wealthy is not left-wing policy.  So many commentators forget that the current Labour Party including Ed Miliband is far less Socialist in its outlook than the Conservative governments of Winston Churchill or Harold Macmillan; they oversaw and economy which was 20% nationalised, had a large, robust and growing welfare state and civil service, oversaw social house building and limited the removal of capital from the UK, all things that would seem radical if proposed these days.

What gave me some hope seeing Ed Miliband being interviewed yesterday is that he is willing to challenge the inequalities of British society.  Of course, he is going to emphasise that he is his own man, every party leader does that, but I think no matter what support he got, he can bring not only the Labour Party but its broader support in the country together.  He seemed far less unafraid than either his brother and certainly Blair, of saying things which sound hard.  We know he would take on the banks.  I thought it was utterly disgraceful of Baroness Warsi to come on the BBC and say that Ed Miliband had been disgraceful in not using his first speech to apologise to the nation for the economic mess that she believed Labour had got the country into when in office.  Would any political leader have started their career that way?  It shows how much contempt she holds for the Opposition that she patronises then that way as if they are not fit to be considered a proper political party.  The other thing, of course, is would the Conservatives have done anything different if they had been in office?  Would they have allowed banks to have collapsed?  No.  It would have caused immense hardship to millions of ordinary voters.  The fact is that Blair, adhering to the Thatcherite creed of deregulation, had allowed merchant banks and speculators to gamble with the UK's money.  They knew that if they lost the state would be compelled to bail them out or risk a wider crisis.  They take such aid for granted and have won triply: they had their banks saved, they now have a government following the monetarist line they love and they are back to paying obscene bonuses and salaries backed once more by the state.

Ed Miliband certainly seems to be a leader for which policy is more important than how it is represented in the media.  For Blair the portrayal of things was always more important than the policies themselves.  This is why so much of his time in office saw the government paralysed, not only concerned about how the policy would work, but even more focused on how it would appear; hence the terribly slow progress on constitutional reform.  Of course, he is shifting more to the 'centre' as to win the next election Labour must not only secure the votes of the unemployed, but also of the 'squeezed' middle class.  Reference to housing and tuition fees plays well to this set of society who thought, from the vague policy statements that Cameron put out before and during the election they were going to get another Blair, but have found instead someone who makes Sir Keith Joseph appear to have been caring.  Unlike the ultra-wealthy, the middle classes, however, they may struggle against it, are in fact dependent on a robust state, and, in fact, because they statistically engage more with things like higher education and will live longer than working class people, they often need its support in a wider variety of aspects in their lives.  Miliband is personable, but from the outset, what has won me over to him, is that he has presented simple messages that are about making the UK a more fair society, not classless, but reducing what we have seen in the past two years, people being rewarded for being reckless out of the pockets of hardworking people.  Even the daily headlines about 'dole cheats' will not convince most of us, that the bulk of the people around us, are like us, wanting to simply house themselves, feed their families and work in a reasonable job.

I suppose I like Ed Miliband because from the start he is talking about things that I get upset about on this blog, primarily the inequality, in terms of opportunity in particular, which is being sharpened in our society.  While I would probably still be considered middle class, as I lose my house and I return to the rental sector and the income in my house is now so low the child living in it is entitled to free school meals, I am sliding into not even the working class, but the bottom end of that.  Of course, I have thrown away the aspirations of a couple of years ago and know I will now never get promoted; never will own property again and, may be jobless for years to come, but, it would be nice if I could still believe the boy in my house does not face the same fate, and, perhaps, even go to university one day.  Naturally, if the destruction of the UK economy continues at the pace it is at the present, then he will not even get the opportunities currently available to teenagers and most likely will be in classes of 45+ pupils before he gets to leave school.  His only hope would be to emigrate, but given how education is to be slashed in the coming years, he would be so much less skilled than foreign rivals, assuming he has not died of some illness hospitals cannot afford to treat or through contracting a superbug in unhygenic health facilities.

One thing the Conservatives have won on is to get everyone obsessed over the deficit as if this was evil and has to be eliminated immediately.  Of course, any Conservative MP of the Churchill and Macmillan years would see it differently, knowing that in crisis the state borrows, this is basic Keynesianism, the economic policy followed from 1941/8-1972/6.  However, monetarism has been so engrained in UK thinking as the only, 'rational' way of viewing the economy that no-one yet can challenge it.  However, even in this context Miliband can refer to Alastair Darling's plan for halving it in four years with cuts in public spending but not to the severity the current government is adopting.  The illusion that Cameron has created is that his economic policies are necessary for tackling the debt.  In fact, he would have pursued them even if he had come to power before the banking crisis.  The debt is a smokescreen for the harsh monetarist policies it is clear he always dreamed of implementing.  The only use of the Liberal Democrats in the coalition is actually, finally, someone is making a fuss about tax avoidance by the wealthy, seventeen times more damaging to the economy than the estimated level of benefit fraud, but something Blair and even Brown did not tackle.

Commentators are right.  Labour is already as popular as the Conservatives and once the cuts really hit, they will become immensely popular.  At the time, I disagreed with Polly Toynbee that Brown should have stepped down before the election, but now hold the opposite opinion.  If a Miliband had come to lead the party, then the outcome would clearly have been different.  Sensibly he is drawing a line under the New Labour era, which he cleverly portrays as being old fashioned.  In fact it allows him to recapture good elements from the history of the Labour Party.  Doing this in 2009 could have spared the UK from the horrific experience it is now going into.  People talk of a 'double dip' recession.  This analogy is wrong.  To have a second dip, means you have to have had a peak of some recovery in the middle.  As yet we have had no such recovery. We are on the 'downward staircase' recession, depression in fact, with some plateaus of things not worsening, and then a further fall as the next batch of government cuts kick in.  Labour is the party of hope and I think it is ironic that Ed Balls referred recently to the Attlee Labour governments of 1945-51, because if Labour return to power in 2015 (hopefully it will be sooner), then they will be facing an economy dealing with many of the same difficulties as when the Second World War finished.  Hope will be like gold dust in those days and strong policies to revive the country will be necessary.

I know many years of hardship, for me personally, and the bulk of my friends and relations lie ahead, but this week at least I feel there might be someone who understands and is seeking to bring forward policies which will at least ameliorate the worst of it.  I know I am putting a lot of store by the new Leader of the Opposition, he may fail, he may be marginalised, but for a small moment, I do feel at least a little ember of hope.

The Dark Days Return

When Margaret Thatcher was kicked from office as prime minister by her own party in 1990, I really hoped that we would have seen the last of the nasty, selfish, hopeless days that we had seen when she came to power in 1979.  Throughout that period and as a direct result of her policies, Britain faced the highest unemployment it had ever seen, many industries disappeared and many people lived in poverty and others lost their homes.  Society became sharply divided and this was expressed by the numerous riots the UK experienced in the early 1980s.  Public service deteriorated as local authorities were compelled to take the lowest bidders for any service and they achieved this by paying poor wages; public bodies like utilities were broken off and sold off to the great benefit of speculators and already wealthy business people.  The rights of the individual were seriously eroded and it took almost another decade to even get some of these back.


Of course, after Thatcher we had seven years of John Major.  Whilst also a Conservative he did not pursue the assiduous campaign to undermine the UK.  He did not deny that society existed in the way Thatcher had done and for much of the time he had too small a majority to introduce forceful policies, though railways were privatised much to the detriment of the British economy and society.  Some of us hoped that he would fall in 1992, the last time the UK ever had a chance for a Socialist government, but through scare tactics and electoral irregularities the Conservatives remained in power until replaced by the Christian Democrat, New Labour Party which came to power in 1997.  Of course, by then the 'centre' of British politics had moved far to the right of where it had been in 1975 and now privatised utilities, even an independent Bank of England were seen as acceptable.  New Labour did introduce the minimum wage and signed up to the Social Chapter provided by the European Union but its other policies such as electoral reform and removal of the unelected House of Lords were soon dropped.


Now we have a coalition government, but as William Hague, the new Foreign Secretary noted, the 'bulk' of the Conservative election manifesto will be put into effect.  Tactical voters like myself who voted for the local Liberal Democrat candidate they thought might keep the Conservatives out of a seat now feel utterly stupid.  Effectively anyone wanting progressive approaches has no voice in this country.  Of course, that is precisely what the wealthy like Lord Ashcroft and other corrupt ultra-rich want.  The election of New Labour in 1997 was no restoration of democracy, given the deals Tony Blair had to make to get into power, it, in fact marked a further step in the erosion of the influence of ordinary people on politics.  With David Cameron in charge control of politics and the economy is now more blatantly in the hands of the elites than it has probably been since Sir Alec Douglas-Home, a former lord, left office in 1964.  Cameron is far less 'ordinary' than even Margaret Thatcher.  Fortunately a number of his 'babes', young, glamorous, privileged candidates parachuted into constituencies did not get elected, but there are are tens of MPs who owe their position to Cameron and will follow him devotedly the way Blair was able to build a large coterie of devotee MPs around him when he came to power in 1997.

Even with my fear of the Cameron government I was startled at how fast he has moved to further damage democracy, by moving to 5-year fixed term parliaments and making the dissolution of parliament require a 55% majority rather than a 1 vote majority.  Yes, of course, this brings stability in the way that a dictatorship brings stability by doing away with those tiresome things called elections.  It is interesting that even Conservative MPs are opposing this step, barely days into Cameron's government.  I just pray they give him a hard time over this threat to our polity.  Cameron seems to combine all the worst of Tony Blair with the worst of Margaret Thatcher.  This means not only will he pursue policies that will put millions of us out of work and hundreds of thousands to lose their houses, but he will expect thanks for all the suffering he is putting us through and like Blair be surprised when we complain about what he has done. 

I hope that my expectations do not come true.  I hope the Liberal Democrats and even Conservative backbench MPs can rein in Cameron's Frankenstein's monster of New Labour media manipulation, Thatcherite economic policies and an elitist focus on carrying out policies that benefit the already highly privileged.  However, what I see at least is a return to the 1980s with mass unemployment and as a result social discontent leading to increased racism and rioting.  I hate to think of how many wasted years we have ahead of us in which the average person is going to have to battle week after week just to keep a job and somewhere to live.  People have analysed how much the people born just before and during the Thatcher period have suffered throughout their lives.  I really pity the children of today who from this week onward will have their lives blighted as education and health funding is slashed.  In the course of a day, the opportunities of millions were closed down.  From now it will be the privileged who get the job, who get that place at university, not the average young person who will be marched into whatever schemes Cameron and his lackeys think up, notably the military-style national service for 16-year olds that he has already promised on numerous posters.  Cameron seems to have been raiding Mussolini's handbook for policies.  I can only hope that the day will come when I am among the crowd cheering as Cameron is strung up by his feet in Westminster.  In the meantime we have to mourn yet another lost generation blighted by economic and social policies aimed at benefiting the very rich and in particular enabling them to deny opportunities and exploit the average person in the UK. 

Emigrate now.  How many people wished they had left Nazi Germany sooner? Leave now before the UK is turned into an utter wasteland populated by a bullied people struggling just to survive as the privileged literally lord it over them as we take step after step to an authoritarian regime.

2010 Election: Keynesianism vs. Deflation?

Many commentators have suggested that the recent recession is in the same league of the Depression of the 1930s which began to enter its direst phase in October 1929 with the collapse of the US stock market and came into full effect in 1931 with the folding of the Kreditanstalt bank in Austria and the subsequent weakening of the global banking sector.  The Depression affected different countries in different ways but generally led to mass unemployment, in some countries only peaking in 1936 and really only came to an end with rapid rearmament in many states in the period 1938-9.  The Second World War disrupted the global economy but also provided stimuli.  However, in 1945-7 it looked like many states would continue to suffer low production and consumption and so continue to face high unemployment.  The Marshall Plan in 1948 providing millions of dollars to states of western Europe helped to pick up demand which stimulated the US economy and in turn other economies across the world, not simply in Europe but late Japan and South Korea too.  Other factors such as the decline of colonial empires so freeing up markets to a wider range of states, organisations such as OECD and the EEC fostered trade, consumption and production.  This was aided by low oil prices sustained in part by neo-colonial relationships between the industrialised powers and the oil-producing states.

In the 1930s there was a clear lack of ideas about how to deal with the Depression.  For the dictatorships the drive for rearmament and related infrastructure, notably road building, did stimulate certain sectors of the economy but at the expense of light industry and consumption of domestic items.  Unemployment was ended by effectively drafting workers into state projects and in many cases throwing certain people out of jobs, for example, Jews, Socialists and Communists in Nazi Germany.  The Soviet Union underwent a massive programme of industrialisation combined with collectivisation of agriculture.  The country was starting from a lower industrial base and the consequences of the programme was the starvation of millions, though, by 1939 the USSR had become more industrialised than a decade before.  In the democracies the only real approach to combating the Depression was deflation and protectionism.  This involved particularly cutting back government expenditure, making more government employees unemployed and restricting welfare payments.  Currencies were freed from the gold standard and allowed to float but economies put up tariff barriers to protect their internal industries and those states with colonial empires developed trade with their colonies but firmly shut out other providers.  With the dictatorships also pursuing a policy of autarky, i.e. to make themselves self-sufficient for raw materials and markets whether through direct control or bilateral, often barter deals, trade was choked off.  This tendency was the one which Marshall Aid and initiatives such as the Bretton Woods process on currencies aimed to address after the Second World War.

There were some voices in the democratic states arguing for a different approach to the Depression.  Democratic forms of economic planning were advocated by centre, centre-left and centre-right groups, in the UK by the Liberal Party and people such as Harold Macmillan, later Conservative British prime minister.  Most notable was the work of economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946).  Keynes's principles developed following the First World War.  He opposed the harsh reparations imposed on Germany seeing a weak German economy as being damaging to the whole European economy and thus much of the global economy.  He opposed the rigidity of returning to the gold standard for setting currency exchange rates as happened in many capitalist countries in the 1920s.  With 'Treatise on Money' (1930), 'The Means to Prosperity' (1933) and 'The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money' (1936) he outlined his policies for counter-cyclical economic approaches.  Basically he felt that depression could only be combated by stimulating consumption rather than reducing it through deflation.  He believed in the 'multiplier effect' that if the state pumped money into the economy to create work, often through major infrastructure project, then unemployment would not rise and with more people in work they would continue to consume products which, in turn would keep consumer good production going so keeping even more people in work.  In contrast to the balanced budgets, i.e. government receipts and expenditure were generally equal, Keynes was happy for the state to borrow in the short-term to fund the projects to keep employment levels higher, believing in the long-term that the maintenance of the tax revenues which would rise as the economy revived, would pay off the money borrowed.

Though there is some dispute about how directly Keynes's ideas influenced US policy, the New Deal, started 1933-4, introduced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), president 1932-45, seems to be based on the kind of assumptions that Keynes's ideas used.  Roosevelt established a swathe of government agencies many of which produced public works projects to provide employment.  Examples include the Civilian Conservation Corps for agricultural workers, the Works Progress Administration, which included units for employing actors and writers and the vast Tennessee Valley Authority for public works building hydro-electric energy generation dams and facilities.

In Britain Keynes's approach was seen to be adopted in the 1941 budget, though of course, with the war in full force at the time, stimulus through arms spending and borrowing to fund the war, were likely steps anyway.  After the war the Labour Government initially pursued economic planning which was seen as a more Socialist approach to the economy compared to Keynes's Liberal (in the British sense of the word not the US meaning of it) economics.  However, by 1948 and certainly by 1950 they were moving more to Keynesian assumptions.  France pursued economic planning up to the 1980s but had things such as tax breaks to stimulate certain sectors of the economy and unlike British nationalised industries, large state-owned companies such as Electricite de France (now EDF Energy) strove to stimulate other sectors. Other states in Europe such as West Germany worked on Keynesian assumptions, keeping a predominantly capitalist economy but stimulating it with government regulations and funds, especially for regional development.  Partly Keynesianism, though forming the basis of economic assumptions after the Second World War was not really needed as there was an economic boom until the mid-1970s when the US economy became recessed in the early 1970s and then the sharp oil price rise in 1973-4 brought the boom to an end. Though there were some minor differences from 1950-1974 no-one in British politics really challenged Keynesian assumptions; they did not even challenge the mixed economy with a sizeable state-owned sector, which had been a Socialist rather than Keynesian policy.  Keynesianism was not used in a sophisticated way.  By the mid-1950s credit controls had generally been given up and the UK tax authorities eschewed tax breaks in the way they were used in many continental countries.  The basic tool was simply manipulating the base rate, the basis of the interest rates that banks charge.

In 1976 the pound was put under so much pressure that the British government went to the IMF (International Monetary Fund) for money to strengthen the currency (in those days the exchange rate with the dollar was reported on a daily basis and any move was seen as a source of concern, probably equivalent to falling house prices in the UK nowadays.  It is interesting how the British makes a fetish of particular economic indicators rather than looking at the broader economic picture; before the currency, the balance of payments had been the key focus).  The IMF demanded a deflationary approach to the economy, which had about 20% of industry under state control at the time.  From 1976 onwards there was consequently a move from Keynesian stimulus approaches in times of recession back to deflationary processes.  In the US there was the rise of monetarist economic approaches, which after 1974 gained ground in the British Conservative Party, though even after 1972 under Conservative prime minister Edward Heath there had been some minor steps in this direction until he fell in 1974.  Monetarism sought a strong control of the availability of money as a way to combat inflation, which was a key problem once oil prices had jumped, something they would do again following the Iranian Revolution of 1979.  Monetarism was wedded to 'free market' economics perceiving the end of state involvement in the economy through privatising state-run industry and reducing regulations on companies so allowing them to impose the pay rates and conditions that they wished.

Margaret Thatcher embraced monetarism and her regime 1979-90 saw it pursued increasingly vigorously with privatisation of the state sector, removal of regulations and reduction of the state, including dismissing a third of the civil service.  Private business was lauded and allowed to make as big profits as it liked and to move capital from the UK whenever it wanted.  The impact for the average person, however, was mass unemployment and an abrupt ending of established British industries.  In the move to a post-industrial economy after 1973 in the USA and 1974 in the UK, this was going to have happened anyway but monetarism made it more brutal and sudden.  Workers were encouraged to make themselves employable by taking lower pay and working longer hours, so reducing their ability to consume.  This seems to run counter to Keynesian approaches.  By the end of the Thatcher period, as I have noted on previous postings, the assumptions had shifted towards continued acceptance of monetarism.  In 1995 the Labour Party abandoned its objective of nationalising any industry.  When it came to power in 1997 it granted independence to the Bank of England to set the base rate so giving up the remaining Keynesian tool.  The Labour governments, bar in minor cases, before 2008, did not take back into state control industries that have been privatised.  This is apparently now called the Washington Consensus.

The financial crisis from 2007 onwards has led to what some have termed a Keynesian 'resurgence'.  It is fascinating how the faith in monetarist approaches dropped away so quickly.   In Germany and India both of which had retained a strong state role in the economy, but also the USA and the UK which had been at the forefront of monetarism, leading economists, bankers and politicians began talking about stimulus.  The President of the World Bank advocated developed countries pledging 0.7% of their GDPs to stimulus.  In January 2009 President Obama passed a US$787 billion (£512. billion: €589 billion) stimulus bill.  In November 2008, the British government launched a £20 billion (US$30.6 billion; €23 billion) package equivalent to 1% of the UK's GDP.  Much of this has gone into supporting banks rather than stimulating the economy through public works and there has been a challenge in that the supposed 'easing' of lending has not risen to the extent that the governments hoped.  This reflects that during the Thatcherite/Washington period financial institutions were given so much freedom that it is now impossible really to get them to do anything governments want, for example, even reducing bonuses.  Inadvertently the British have effectively nationalised two banks, but as was typical with British nationalisation of the past, they have not asserted much control over their behaviour and kept an 'arms length' approach.  In addition, in the face of claims of 'unfair competition' from other banks the government has not used its banks to drive certain behaviour by example or provide freer lending to stimulate business.  The state is not as strong as it was in Keynes's day and mulit-national companies and banks are often more powerful than governments as we have seen in resistance to various 'windfall' taxes and attempts to restrain bankers' behaviour.  However, stimulating (parts of) the economy through borrowing, now at £152 billion (US$232.6 billion; €175.1 billion).

Thus, it seems for the first time ever that Keynesianism is being implemented to combat what it was designed for, i.e. a depression.  In British politics because in the 1950s up to the mid-1970s there was consensus of the need for Keynesian economics and it was just over the details rather than the economic approach.  By 1979 even the Labour Party had stepped away from Keynesianism and whilst it did not embrace monetarism in the way the Conservatives did, it was no longer a strong advocate of an alternative economic path, partly because the economics then were focused on wage and price inflation which had not been a characteristic of the 1930s depression when there had often been over-supply depressing prices rather than excess demand or at least excess demand for income whether from sales or pay as was the case in the 1970s and overall was stimulated by the artificially raised oil price, oil being vital for freight of all kinds at that time and things like plastics at a time when plastic packaging was growing massively.

In 2010 we do have a difference between the continuation of Keynesian policies under Gordon Brown and with David Cameron, the revival of not even really monetarist but in fact deflationary policies as pursued by Conservative leaders such as Stanley Baldwin in the 1930s and overseen by the cross-party National Government set up in 1931.  Cameron's emphasis on the need to reduce public borrowing so reducing the available stimulus to the economy (though no-one would envisage a balanced budget these days) and swingeing cuts to public services is text-book deflation; it will cause unemployment not least amng public sector employees and raise unemployment, increasing social welfare payments and suppressing domestic consumption and through fear of job losses, domestic demand even from those still in work.  Keynesianism is not simply about stimulating consumption but with it the confidence to consume. Cameron is pretty old fashioned in his approach to the economy even in Conservative terms.  Perhaps this is because the Thatcherite approach of the free market now seems so debased with constant reports of vast profits for those in big business at the expense of jobs and homes for ordinary people.  This is the first time in British history that the two key economic approaches of the 20th century are being brought face-to-face and as a consequence Britain stands at more of a crossroads that this lacklustre campaign suggests.

The Post-War Consensuses in Britain

Whilst I might have lost some of my short stories in the shift between computers over the past few years, I am often surprised what other things I stumble across untouched for many years when looking in old files. This seems to be an essay I produced in about 2001. Since then I imagine many people have written on the issues it raises but interestingly some of it seems to be relevant again as we stand on the cusp of a general election. As I note, with reflection, it seems possible that the next government may try to shift things back to policies of the Baldwinian consensus of the 1930s and it is interesting to look at the current policies of David Cameron's Conservative Party in this context. So, this essay is dated, but I think some of the themes remain relevant and anyway interesting.

The Post-war Consensuses

The word consensus is often used in particular to describe the British political scene after 1945 when it is argued that the assumptions of both the Conservative and Labour parties were the same on many issues. As Dennis Kavanagh and Peter Morris state in ‘Consensus Politics From Attlee To Major’ (1994) consensus refers to “a set of ideas and conventions about the nature of the scope of political - and particularly governmental - activity. ... in other words, a set of governing assumptions and expectations.”

Britain seems to have gone through phases in its political histories when there have been such assumptions unchallenged by the two main parties. More broadly it is argued that consensus is always apparent in the British political system as there are few challenges to the way the system of civil society works or even to the basic institutions in Britain. It is rare that any revolutionary alternatives from the left or right have come forwards. Partly this continuity has been provided by the continuity of civil servants especially those who rose from junior positions in wartime to senior ones by the 1970s. In addition, there are long-term assumptions fostered by Treasury culture which any minister finds hard to resist, for example, defence of the pound and a need to restrain expenditure. Kavanagh and Morris point to the perpetuation of the grammar school system certainly to the 1970s and even today, and to restrictions on immigration introduced by both Labour and Conservative governments as showing a commonality of assumptions by the two parties. Other examples would be the enduring membership of NATO, the continuing close relationship with the USA, ambivalence towards the European communities and a desire to maintain nuclear weapons. Whilst other policies have been voiced, especially when in opposition, once in power, both the main parties have adhered to these established approaches.

The periods of the clearest consensus have, however, been occasionally interspersed with much sharper adversarial politics, most notably between 1979-94 when a new consensus was being established. It could be argued that a consensus only really comes out of upheaval and it solidifies when the party in opposition realises it stands no chance of being elected unless it adopts the policies of the other main party. With this in mind we will look first at the key phases of consensus in the 20th century.

1) Consensus in the 20th Century
In the 20th century it can be argued that Britain saw three consensuses. The first, in the 1930s, extending from the ideas of Stanley Baldwin (Prime Minister 1923-4, 1924-9 and 1935-7) argued for a laissez-faire approach, without large-scale governmental intervention in the economy even in times of depression. It was summed up by reference to deflation and an attempt to maintain the role of sterling as a world currency and yet work within the closed bloc of the Sterling Area. [Whilst in 2001, I would have not imagined this consensus returning, in 2009, it seems very much like the approach that the Conservative Party under David Cameron favours.]

1a) The Attleean Consensus
The best known consensus came in 1945. The concept of the post-war consensus was effectively developed by Paul Addison in his 1975 book, “The Road to 1945”. Kavanagh & Morris define the consensus as based on two elements. The first was agreement on the style of government involving institutionalised consultation between the government and those important in the economy, i.e. employers and unions, something which developed during the Second World War. Keith Middlemas in ‘Power. Competition and the State, 1, Britain in Search of Balance, 1940-61’ (1986): calls this the ‘continuous contract’. The second was the range of policies which persisted from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s in handling social and economic needs, broadly termed the Welfare State and Keynesianism.

To some extent, consensus after 1945 can be seen as reflecting the new political reality of the post-war world. In the inter-war period though the Liberals faded away Labour had not yet really staked its place firmly in the British political structure, and the majority of Labour MPs joined the National Government coalition alongside Conservatives and Liberals in 1931. In this inter-war period then, the consensus was still the one between Conservatives and Liberals as the main parties. Post-1945, Labour was the clear rival to the Conservatives and thus the consensus was between these two, slightly further apart.

The unexpected victory in 1945 of the Labour Party in 1945 committed to nationalisation of the ‘commanding heights’ of British industry combined with the liberal attitude to developing a welfare state, reflected a shift in popular opinion towards favouring a more interventionist approach by government. This stemmed from the failure of laissez-faire economics in Britain in the 1930s in contrast to the USA’s New Deal and the evidence of government intervention in the Second World War which was seen as effective in ensuring sufficient war production. Labour’s objectives were generally realised in its term in power 1945-51 - 20% of industry was nationalised and a welfare state embracing the NHS, social security and education, was created. Importantly, in terms of the widespread support these policies received, aside from nationalisation, many of the ideas had come from two Liberals - William Beveridge and John Maynard Keynes.

William Beveridge’s report during the Second World War laid the ground work for the welfare state. It was Liberal rather than Socialist in design, building on the reforms by the Liberal governments of the pre-First World War period. It relied on full employment but also on the fact that people would be happy to contribute to insure themselves against future need such as ill-health, unemployment and old age. The fact that the system was funded through national insurance contributions, rather than taxes as would be the case in a Socialist system, reflected this. In addition, it was the Labour government which introduced charges on dentures and spectacles in 1951 as a way to better fund the system.

John Maynard Keynes was another Liberal, an economist. His writings in the inter-war years had aimed to reduce the bitterly high levels of unemployment. He saw this problem as caused by insufficient demand in the economy. Simply put, his argument was that the government should stimulate demand in the economy through manipulating the interest rate system to encourage investment. Though he saw a role for direct government intervention he certainly did not back large-scale nationalisation or direction of the economy in peace-time. Keynes’s ideas were first adopted in the 1941 budget to act against excessive rather than a lack of demand. Despite a brief flirtation with economic planning after 1945, by 1948 Labour was committed to using Keynesian methods to manipulate the economy. The commitment to full employment inherent in Keynesianism was a key part of the Attleean consensus until it became untenable in the 1970s.

Added to these two key elements was a willingness to work with trade unions. The tripartite approach of wartime of government working with both employers and unions was followed throughout the post-war years and received a boost from the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan in 1961 with the creation of the NEDC which brought together employers, unions and government in an attempt to effectively plan the economy and promote growth. This was an approach built on, though not successfully, when Labour came back to power in 1964. This really continued until the strikes of the early 1970s and the election in 1979 of Margaret Thatcher, a strong opponent of unions.

A further element of the post-war consensus was foreign policy. The first post-war Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, previously a leading trade unionist and an ardent Labour member, was in fact conservative and almost Conservative in his outlook. He was a committed anti-Communist and welcomed assistance from the USA. He favoured the development of NATO to secure US involvement rather than the creation of a European Army. In addition, the 1945-51 Labour governments, like all British governments subsequently, continued developing or buying nuclear weapons. This attitude was only challenged by Labour in the early 1980s when in their most radical phase. All of these policies, adopted 1945-51, were continued by the Conservatives when in office.

The relationship to the Europe communities has always proved a more complex issue, but there were supporters and opponents of European integration in both leading parties, and Conservative prime ministers Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath applied to join the EEC as much as Labour prime minister Harold Wilson. There was also an ongoing consensus on the need to peacefully disengage from empire, despite the discomfort of some of those in the Conservative Party.

Though Conservative support for the use of Keynesianism and no attempt to scrap the Welfare State in the period before 1975, are often taken as showing that the consensus had shifted the political ‘centre’ towards the ‘left’, there are a number of factors to recognise. As mentioned above, these basis of they key consensus policies had been developed by Liberals rather than Socialists. Winston Churchill, prime minister 1940-5 and 1951-5 had himself been a Liberal 1906-22 and involved in a reforming government that had laid the foundations of the later welfare state. Thus, there was less distance for Conservatives to go to accept these centrist concepts than if they had been truly Socialist. Indeed, Churchill and the Conservatives stood more firmly against policies they saw as Socialist, and opposed economic controls and some elements of nationalisation, for example steel and road transport which they denationalised when the returned to power. It was seen as acceptable to Conservatives on efficiency grounds, however, that other elements of the UK economy such as coal mining and the railways were nationalised. State control had been adopted right across the economy in the wartime and was seen to be pretty efficient long after the war had ended; the final wartime economic controls were not scrapped until 1956, five years into the Conservative period in office. The Conservatives accepted if not celebrated the mixed economy which was in part state-run but still predominantly capitalist. This was summed up in the phrase ‘Bustkellism’ to characterise economic policy of the 1950s, combining the names of the Conservative Chancellor after 1951, R.A. Butler with the Labour Chancellor 1950-1 Hugh Gaitskell.

Being out of power for 13 years, 1951-64, encouraged the Labour Party to reflect on its policies. Though not envisaging a large shift of the kind carried out in the 1990s, there were attempts at adjustment in its outlook especially to address the growing prosperity of 1950s and early 1960s Britain. In 1956, influential Labour thinker Anthony Crosland questioned whether the commitment to state ownership of industry, which Labour had held since 1918, was relevant in the era of prosperity which Britain was then experiencing. In 1960, the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell tried to scrap this commitment by abolishing Clause 4 of the party’s constitution. He was defeated and following Gaitskell’s death in 1963 and his replacement by Harold Wilson who favoured a more Socialist and technocratic approach, this brief concern for Labour came to an end until it was revived in the 1990s to face a new consensus.. In addition, ironically with British competitiveness seeming to flag in, by the 1960s the Conservatives were moving towards planning the economy. To some degree this was influenced by Harold Macmillan (Prime Minister 1957-63), who in the 1930s like many across the British political spectrum had seen some degree of economic planning as the only way to lift the country out of the Depression.

1b) The Myth of Consensus?
In the mid-1990s, most notably from Harriet Jones and Michael Kandiah eds., ‘The Myth of Consensus: New Views on British History, 1945-64’ (1996), there was a challenge to the accepted views of the post-war consensus. Partly they and other historians argued that the Cold War, as much the Second World War, shaped the post-war policies, for example, in encouraging co-operation with unions and a mixed economy. In addition, they feel that factors such as the speed with which Britain decolonised prevented greater diversity of opinion arising.

Historians such as Kandiah and Nick Ellison, in ‘Egalitarian Thought and Labour Politics: Retreating Visions’ (1994), show that within the Conservative and Labour parties there was a wider range of opinions on a whole range of issues than is often discussed. For example, they point to the 1958 resignation of the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, Peter Thorneycroft, who sought a more monetarist approach as opposed to Macmillan, the prime minister who much more favoured an economic planning even interventionist approach. Similarly, within the Labour Party there were always those who favoured nuclear disarmament and aimed to push on nationalisation to embrace a far larger section of industry. This is taken to suggest that support for Butskellism was in no way comprehensive even within each of the parties let between them.

Other historians such as Jones and John Ramsden in ‘An Appetite for Power: A New History of the Conservative Party’ (1999) show that the Conservatives had a different view of the welfare state. They favoured private rather than council construction of houses; targeted rather than universal benefits; private rather than state-backed earnings related pensions, all policies which were the reverse of the Labour approach. Ben Pimlott, as in ‘Harold Wilson’ (1992), claims that by the late 1960s and certainly in the 1970s, there was difference between the two main parties on even fundamental issues. Andrew Gamble and S.A. Walkland in ‘The British Party System and. Economic Policy 1945-1983’ (1984) in fact portray the 1970s as a period in which the adversarial nature of politics was so harsh that it was disruptive to the economy. Overall, one must be careful not to just take the concept of consensus as applying to all policies or as being unchanging over time. This is too simplistic and, whilst consensus remains a useful tool, it should not just be taken unchallenged.

2) The Thatcherite Consensus
It seems difficult to see how the Labour Party could even approach Margaret Thatcher’s policies which emphasised monetarism. Her approach to the economy and by extension society shook the assumptions of the Conservative Party itself. The shift away from the old-fashioned paternalistic One-Nation Conservatism came in a number of steps. First was Edward Heath’s 1970 victory based on the so-called ‘Selsdon Programme’. This aimed to break with the Keynesian approach to the economy, or what was perceived as the Keynesian approach, though in the post-war era in popular usage the term had extended a lot to cover far more state intervention than Keynes would have approved of. The programme aimed to reduce state involvement in the economy, to privatise industries, curb union power, free market forces and encourage greater industrial efficiency.

This approach was short-lived and by 1972 had been abandoned in favour of greater state intervention to bale out failing industries. For the first time in the British economy high inflation was combined with rising unemployment. This was partly sparked by the end of the post-war boom provoked by the quadrupling of fuel prices. Cheap fuel had enabled the boom to continue from around 1950 onwards. The problems worsened for Labour when they returned to power in 1974. To cover its debts the government had to borrow from the IMF (International Monetary Fund) which forced deflation on the British economy.

In 1976 the prime minister James Callaghan abandoned the commitment to full employment which both parties had backed since the war. He also said ‘[w]e cannot now, if we ever could, spend our way out of a recession.’ This effectively marked the abandonment of the core element of Keynesianism, that the state should stimulate demand through expenditure. In addition, this step was paving the way for the harsh monetarist approach adopted when Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979. Jim Tomlinson has argued in ‘Public Policy and the Economy since 1900’ (1990) that the economy in the later 1970s shows that Keynesianism does not work. Effectively it was not tested through the post-war boom when it was not needed to counter unemployment. When it was needed, in the 1970s to tackle that problem, it failed. However, it must be recognised there were other factors such as external inflationary pressures that prevented a Keynesian solution.

Thatcher was won over to monetarism in 1975 and through it gave a new, apparently more dynamic direction to the Conservatives. Once in office 1979-91, for Thatcher, monetarism was just the foundation of a broader economic and social policy. This involved ‘rolling back’ the state by privatising almost all of the nationalised sector combined with continued tax cuts proved popular with the public which was seen as stimulating the economy. The approach, however, also included centralising powers from local authorities, imposing expenditure cuts and in theory giving greater choice in terms of welfare services, though this was all achieved through greater central state intervention.

Kavanagh in ‘The Reordering of British Politics: Politics After Thatcher’ (1997) sums up the essence of Thatcherism which we can see forms the foundation of the Thatcherite consensus. Of course, how these ideas were translated into policy was not always accepted even across her own government or party. However, as with all enduring attitudes it is their presence over time and, thus, them becoming assumptions that people no longer challenge, which forms the foundations for a consensus. The assumptions were that: delivery of services comes better from the private rather than public sector; government can do little good but can do great harm and so its involvement and expenditure must be restrained and allow free enterprise to boom. Thatcherism emphasised self-help but also responsibility for one’s actions and thus taking the blame for one’s own situation, rather than expecting the state to alleviate this. Of course, the state was seen as having an important role in both defence and law and order; expenditure on these was not to be curtailed. In foreign policy Britain had to establish its continued importance through military intervention, nuclear weapons and its close relationship with the USA. Though the harsh social attitudes moderated somewhat under John Major (Prime Minister 1991-7), the foreign policy line is still visible today.

Though the years of Thatcher in power saw some of the greatest antagonism between the two main political parties, by the mid-1990s things were changing. Neil Kinnock, Labour leader after 1983 had proven successful in purging the extreme left from the Labour Party but the fourth defeat in a row in the 1992 general election indicated that if they wanted to return to office, Labour had to do more than simply moderate their own party. Tony Blair became leader following the sudden death of John Smith in 1994. He had a clear objective of moving Labour towards, what, after 15 years of Conservative rule, was becoming established as the new consensus. This approach was embodied in New Labour. Unlike Gaitskell, Tony Blair in 1995 he was able to scrap Clause 4 and the Labour Party’s commitment to nationalisation.

Once in power Labour showed how far it had adopted the Thatcherite consensus. It kept to the Conservative expenditure planes bequeathed by John Major. It went further and made the Bank of England independent, so giving up an essential element of Keynesianism: the ability of government to manipulate interest rates. The changes to the welfare state particularly in education and health, brought in under Thatcher were only slowly altered or were not reversed. The government aimed to privatise the London Underground and air traffic control and repeatedly discussed privatising the Post Office. The only real break from Thatcherism has been devolution to Scotland, Wales and London and it is clear that in these locations the Thatcherite consensus is less popular than centrally. The fact that since 1997 the Conservatives have struggled to develop distinct policies shows how much Labour has captured the consensus ground of Thatcherism for itself.

3) Conclusions
In ‘The Civic Culture’ (1963) and ‘The Civic Culture Revisited’ (1980) two US political scientists, Gabriel Almond and Dan Sidney Verba argued that British society was stable and did not face violent political challenge because of three trends: continuity, deference and consensus. Consensus in Britain is seen to embrace not only individual policies but also assumptions about the political system as a whole. It is difficult to argue that British institutions have been challenged to any great extent and thus can be stated convincingly that there is a consensus on how the British political system runs and what issues it should address. However, as this essay has shown, the consensus on policy is more complex.

It does appear that assumptions can penetrate into the British political scene which then make up the thinking of both the main parties. However, it is wrong to assume that consensus is a blanket attitude. Within it there is room for diversity between and within the political parties. In addition, at certain periods especially the 1970s and 1980s the differences between the main parties have been very sharp, and have encouraged the reverse view that Britain was plagued by the severity of its adversarial politics. Thus, consensus remains a valid concept for interpretation of British politics and society in the 20th century but one which must be used sensitively and with care.

Are Thatcherite Attitudes Beginning to Fade?

I am not a regular reader of right-wing or tabloid newspapers, in fact I have little time for newspapers anyway as I drive around so much. When I lived in London I used to make a point of picking up newspapers of a different political slant to my own so that I was in touch with how other people saw the World. Travelling on the underground for two hours every day as I did, there were always abandoned newspapers around. Of course the bulk of the British population has always been conservative, and at times even Conservative, though even Margaret Thatcher only ever won a minority of the percentage of the votes, but because of the weird electoral system the UK has this often gave her a large majority of the seats in parliament. The bulk of the UK population is apolitical, often actually anti-political. However, this does not stop most people 'knowing what is right' and often having a far more right-wing list of policies (especially on capital punishment and immigration) than anyone in the Conservative Party would ever dare voice. As a campaign to encourage people to vote a couple of years ago, these people say 'I don't do politics', but in fact spend a lot of time ramming their political message down people's throats, yet because they see it as 'common sense' or 'simply what is right', they do not want it tarred with the brush of 'politics'. I always cringe when someone starts a sentence with 'I'm not a racist but ...' because you know a whole list of racist attitudes will follow.

The right-wing tabloid press, notably 'The Sun' and 'Daily Star' as well as the middle-ranking right-wing newspapers particularly 'Daily Mail' and 'Daily Express' have had an important role in shifting electoral behaviour especially in the 1980s-90s. When Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party he visited Rupert Murdoch who owns 'The Sun' and the higher-ranking right-wing newspaper, 'The Times' to win his backing before trying to win public support. He knew that Murdoch's scare campaigns especially about the level of taxation that Labour would introduce had severely undermined the party's electoral chances and most certainly lost them the 1992 election which it had, up to the end, appeared that they would win.

We are now in a different world, though politically not that different. The Blair Party, which effectively was what New Labour was, stuck carefully to the Thatcher Consensus, not altering the economic pattern of little public social housing and privatised utilities and transport. The only alteration in this was the minimum wage which was set at a pretty low level, so that even those bosses who whined about it, actually found their pay bill rise minimally and because of the stimulus to consumption in so many households in the UK, domestic demand rose for certain low cost items, notably food, cheap clothing and cheap electrical goods, especially mobile phones. Gordon Brown who built his economic reputation on economic prudence did not move radically from the Thatcherite/Blairite policy, but the economic crisis of late 2008 shook the whole system up. Thatcher would have just let unemployment rocket. As I noted last year, various employers were eager to see the return of the 'whip of unemployment' and their wishes have been granted. Ironically, however, the collapse of banks notably Northern Rock and HBOS led the state to nationalise banks on a scale that would have even startled Clement Attlee the Labour prime minister 1945-51 who oversaw nationalisation of about 20% of the UK economy following the Second World War.

Through the 1990s and 2000s there were complaints about the huge bonuses and large salaries that many bosses were awarding themselves but these tended to be short-lived complaints that led to nothing. The bulk of the UK population clung to the Thatcher illusion that 'everyone can be a millionaire, so everyone's got to try' even though the bulk of the wealthy were a very narrow slice from privileged backgrounds to start off with. The assumption that long persisted was that any constraint on money making was a bad thing. Such an attitude was still around until last year. Fortunately things have changed. People realise that if the state had not stepped in then their mortgage lender in many cases would have simply folded. We have not experienced the recall of debts in the UK in the way we know from the Depression era of the UK, but widespread repossession and forced sales because the bank had collapsed rather than because the borrower had defaulted, would have been an immense trauma in the UK, a country with a society that believes its whole economic stability is based on housing. The arrogant, persistent greed of leading bankers even when they have had to be baled out by the state has slowly penetrated the strong adherence to Thatcherite values.

With house repossessions reaching 40,000 in 2008 and expected to exceed 75,000 in 2009 people have a sense, in contrast to the 1980s, that this was not 'necessary' and actually that with less greed from leading bankers and companies, they could be retaining their houses. For once the blame is being aportioned properly. I think this is due, in part, to this shock coming after years of stability since the end of the last UK economic problems ending in about 1994. When mass unemployment hit in the early 1980s, people had already had a decade of seeing heavy industry finding it hard to adapt to the move to a service economy, which became the dominant form of industry in Britain from 1974 onwards. Combined with that they had seen the impact of rising oil prices and saw an easy scapegoat in the Arab oil-producing countries. The 'War on Terror' including the invasion of Iraq had no impact on the average UK citizen and certainly nothing even approaching the scale of the collapse of the US subprime mortgage market has done.

Perhaps it is unsurprising, as 'The Guardian' highlighted this week that the British public is slowly beginning to shake off the Thatcherite mindset, or at least question some of its easy assumptions. In the budget a new top rate of 50% tax was announced for people earning over £150,000 (€166,500; US$217,500). Currently we have 40% if you earn over £37,400 and 20% for income below that with a varying amount depending on your circumstances but around £6,300 which you can earn tax free. In Sir Geoffrey Howe's first budget in 1979 the standard level of tax was reduced from 33% to 30% and the upper rate from 83% to 60% but he raised VAT (Value Added Tax, tax on purchases) from between 8-12.5% to 15% and petrol duty from 45% to 60% to compensate. Of course the monetarists believed lower taxes would stimulate the economy, though by raising indirect taxes Howe probably helped to accelerate the onset of the 1980s recession by further reducing consumption, though he would have seen such steps as anti-inflationary and one thing monetarists loathe is inflation. So, the introduction of the 50% band is hardly 'a 70s-style raid' as the 'Daily Express' portrayed it nor 'a return to the politics of envy' as the 'Daily Mail' said.

Gordon Brown did try a 'windfall' tax last year on power companies, who as I noted at the time, were making ever larger profits simply by raising prices and blaming the rise in oil prices. The reduction in their charges were very slow and piecemeal when the oil price came down. However, Brown, possibly thinking back to the windfall tax of 1949 introduced by Sir Stafford Cripps. He was unable to pull it off. Cripps and the rest of the Attlee government found they were unable to shift British industry the extent to which the country needed it moved, but they certainly had greater power in altering the economy than Brown has. He was told bluntly that any such tax would simply be passed on to the consumers he was trying to help. Thatcher delivered all power over our energy and its price into the hands of wealthy business people most of whom are from outside the UK, and of course, the French government who own most of EDF.

What is interesting is that surveys show that the right-wing press have got it wrong. You have to be well over 40 to even have a dim memory of the 1970s and a lot has happened in the economy since then. Of course business people always complain tax is too high having no memory for when it was much higher and yet businesses still prospered. There have always been very rich people in the UK even when taxes were far higher than now. Greed persists. However, the public tolerance of it seems to be waning and even readers of the right-wing newspapers that have condemned this move, are actually behind it. To some degree people see it as a fair punitive measure. The economic historian E.P. Thompson (1924-93) despite being a Marxist noted that through history the British people have not sought revolution, but the 'moral economy', i.e. what they see as 'fairness' in terms of prices and pay. He shows examples of bread riots in which the people did not take the bread home and eat it, but set up stalls to sell the looted bread at a fair price. Despite Thatcherism, this basic attitude continues even though it is hidden among all the extreme right-wing complaints about immigrants being to blame for everything. The other thing is how far away the wealthy and ultra-wealthy are from the general public.

Back in 2003, 'The Times' defined a 'Middle Englander' also known as the British yeomanry, and other such phrases as someone earning £60,000 (€66,600; US$87,000 at current exchange rates) per year. Interestingly, 80% of the UK population earns less than the average annual salary which is now around £26,000 (€28,800; US$37,700) the average in London is about £31,000 and that is the highest paid area of the UK. For single people (many of whom are retired), the average is only £16,000 (10.6% of the salary that will get this new level of tax). So this suggests that the 'middle' ranked person of 'The Times' is actually in an elite of around a sixth or seventh of the population. I earn £39,000 now, so I am in the elite of a fifth of the population, but I end the month with £100 in my bank account, minimal savings, a 12-year old car and will probably have my 3-bedroomed semi-detached house repossessed when I am made redundant this Summer. So, even among the broader elite, economic times are hard. There are 350,000 people in the UK earning over £150,000, so it is unsurprising that the 'Daily Mail' has been told despite all its whining that there is not going to be a strong Conservative Party response to the new tax band, though that does not stop buffoons like Boris Johnson, Conservative mayor of London being indignant about it.

For all the assumptions that the Conservatives are easily going to win the next election, they ought to be careful no to be seen as too associated with big business and greedy bankers and opposing the 'fair' penalties imposed on them. I think the assumption of Labour's fall is very lazy and has been being talked up since Brown became prime minister, based on very little. Brown has worked hard to minimise the impact of the recession on ordinary people and it seems they are beginning to notice that. In addition, despite me commenting on this for the past year or so, the Conservatives still have not come forward with any clear policies and certainly no clear way of doing anything about the impact of the recession. Many people are likely to fear they will simply repeat Thatcher's attitude of holding up their hands, saying they can do nothing about it, and even worse, that it is 'good' for the population to go through this. As we have seen since 1873 and 1931 the Conservatives always struggle with any ideas when hard economic times come and ironically, as later Conservative prime minister, Harold Macmillan did in the 1930s start flirting with state-backed initiatives of greater control over the economy.

I am heartened that the British public, in part, is beginning to shake off the easy, nasty assumptions from Thatcherism. Of course, the right-wing elements remain. Driving through rural Dorset recently I heard how antagonism to migrant labourers is rising as unemployment increases. We can expect that alongside the desite for a moral economy will be the less moral attitudes of hunting out scapegoats too.

Just to wrap up, I am always stunned when I start doing research for a posting the extent of madly extreme views I come across, for example someone arguing that the British tax system is far too complex with its different bands and that there should be a single flat percentage of tax for income tax! This is illogical as all of us have to spend a large chunk of our money on the basics like housing and food, so if we become very wealthy we may have a larger house or more houses and more cars, etc., but all of us only actually need one house, so the wealthier have a great deal more 'slack' in their income that morally they should give back to the society they are draining from in order to make their wealth. However, ideas such as a single band of tax show that clearly there are some corners where Thatcherism continues to thrive.

The Bitter Legacy of Margaret Thatcher

As the economy is moving rapidly into the kind of situation we experienced in the 1980s with mass unemployment, the disappearance of numerous businesses and repossessions of houses, it is unsurprising that people's thoughts turn back to that era. Many, including myself hoped we would never experience anything like it again in my lifetime and until the middle of 2008 it seemed that possibly we never would. It is terrible that the greed of bankers has brought back this situation that causes so much misery to millions of people. Fortunately this time we seem to have governments in power who rather than saying that there is nothing they can do, or even worse, as was said in the UK by its government in the 1980s, this kind of suffering is somehow 'good' for us, they are now trying to rein in the reckless bankers and keep the economy stimulate rather than facing huge contraction.

Okay, so this is old news now. However, what brought it back to mind this weekend was the references to the anniversary of Margaret Thatcher coming to power 4th May 1979. She held office until 28th November 1990 so bracketing the 1980s and the evils of that decade will always be associated with her. I saw an article in 'The Guardian' about the anniversary and worried that it would begin to rehabilitate Thatcher (who unfortunately still lives, she was born 1925). I was heartened to see that it was written by Germaine Greer and that she has charged at Thatcher's record with full force. There are very accurate descriptions: she '... had scant regard for democracy and no scruples whatsoever.' Greer is right that Thatcher did not have a systematic plan to smash British society (though she had a very clear plan to smash trades unions especially the coalminers' NUM), but like Hitler she was an opportunist who took advantage of things like the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands Islands to advance her wrecking of UK society and industry. Unlike George W. Bush, she did not do this because she particularly favoured the very wealthy, though they clearly benefited from her policies, but because of the twisted ideology that she subscribed to, part based in a misunderstanding of Hayekian attitudes mixed in with New Right economic and social thinking from the USA and above all an incredible arrogance that what she did was right. Perhaps people can only become politicians if they have that focus, but Thatcher's was untempered by anything like reference to God or democracy and in fact was simply reinforced by her clear contempt for almost everyone she dealt with.

Though we did not know it at the time, increasing evidence has come to light about how corrupt she was, especially in arms deals which in particular benefited her son, the buffoon and attempted coup creator, Sir Mark Thatcher, Bart. He made £20 million from the arms deal his mother did with the Saudis in 1985. Thatcher tried to overthrow the government of Equiatorial Guinea in 2004 but as with many of this incompetent's projects it failed. Back to his mother. Like the US President with which she shared most affinity, Ronald Reagan (president 1981-9) she believed in supporting right-wing dictatorships across the world notably President Suharto of Indonesia (dictator 1967-98) and especially General Pinochet dictator of Chile 1974-90. With Reagan she adopted a harsh line towards the USSR and helped bring the world closer to nuclear war 1979-83 than it had been for almost two decades. I remember the terror of waking up to loud bangs in the early Eighties, thinking that the nuclear war that Thatcher so clearly wanted had come. Thatcher was harsh in personality and terribly patronising (and her use of the pronoun 'we' when referring to herself, something usually reserved for royalty), but worse than that, as many people observed to me at the time, she seem to revel in blood letting. This is most obvious when you saw coverage of her at the time of the Falklands Conflict, though she referred to the loss of British forces, it appears in her face as if she was energised by the recognition of those deaths. Perhaps she could not suppress the impact of the knowledge of how it would benefit her election campaign, perhaps she did simply enjoy conflicts; she seemed happiest atop a tank.

In the international sphere, Thatcher directly contributed to the deaths of thousands of people through permitting arms sales to dictators. However, a lot of this was oblivious to the British public. The more immediate suffering was how she wrecked the economy and thrust unemployment above 4 million (though never admitted this through using skewed statistics). Industry was changing in the UK as across the world. As early as 1974 service industry had outstripped manufacturing in terms of contribution to the economy and of course this was going to continue. However, there were many different ways to handle this change. Thatcher adopted the one which was to cause most misery to the most people in the UK (and I will throttle the next person who tells me 'well, of course we knew it was necessary', I wish I could send them back to 1983 and make them someone with a family, thrown out of their jobs, humiliated by being told they were a 'dole scrounger' and to 'get on their bike' to search for the work that was not there). She adhered to a strongly monetarist policies and shut down the coal industry and sold off the nationalised sector to greedy exploiters who have made millions in profits (and personal income) and left us with a fragmented far worse set of utility and transport companies (I will also punch the next person who tells me that the railway system, which they never use, must be better than it was when first privatised [I know that was under John Major but it was part of the flow of Thatcherite policy]), whose greed simply fuel the inflation Thatcher was so supposedly against. Of course, none of this mattered to Thatcher, she did not really believe society existed, she just saw 'families and individuals'. Thus, schools and hospitals were forced to make cut-backs from which many have still not really recovered. The privatisation of hospital cleaning under Thatcher has directly led to the various 'super-bugs' infections which infect thousands of people across the UK and kill many. Poor literacy and numeracy levels and still too high levels of people leaving school without qualifications goes back to Thatcher.

The worst legacy of Thatcher's regime is the myth of getting rich quick. 'Everyone can be a millionaire so everyone has to try' was how the The sung it in 1986. The implication was that it was only the lazy who were unemployed and if you worked hard you would always succeed in Thatcher's Britain and yet it was a lie right from the start. Those people who were seen being successful, notably the City of London financiers and stockbrokers were in most cases privileged to start with. People bought into the myth, partly as a way to escape the gloom and yet in fact they just got into debt through over consumption to try to buy the glamorous 1980s lifestyle and in particular to try to buy their council house many of which were to be repossessed 1990-3 as the bubble burst and people had to count the cost. As unemployment figures of the 1960s showed, there are some people who cannot work, probably 50,000 in the UK population. However, the bulk of the population is keen to have a job. No-one should feel guilty at being thrown out by an employer who sees cutting labour costs as the easy option and less personally painful that cutting their salary or bonuses. It is this culture established and lauded under Thatcher that has led us into a repeat of the unpleasant days of the 1980s once again.

Thatcher fuelled an attitude that divided British society against itself. British communities have probably never been as strong or amenable as people have believed, but they certainly were not as hostile and vigilante focused as they became following Thatcher's policies. The division of the 'deserving' and 'undeserving' is one we are still haunted by and so many people can be dumped into the 'undeserving' category notably asylum seekers, immigrants, students, people from other regions. There has always been North-South tension in the UK, but it was sharpened by the Thatcher years and it seems only now that it has began to reduce, but perhaps the recession will make it worse. Thatcher spoke of the 'enemy within' referring to anyone with left-wing or trade union connections and she gave a free rein to the police and security service in a way that has never been recaptured. She established a sound foundation for the steps we continue to take towards authoritarianism in the UK even today. That 'enemy within' mentality of course extends into communities especially since it received the jolt of anti-Islamic propaganda in the 2000s. However, without Thatcher's legacy such tendencies would not have fallen on such fertile ground.

The perverse attitude of Thatcher which has done so much harm to the UK (and its spread was her greatest success) was the 'community charge', better known as the poll tax, which was charged at the same rate on people no matter what their income was. Some of the poorest got reductions, but a millionaire would pay the same as someone earning less than the average wage (and of course in those pre-minimum wage days, low wages were ridiculously low, the figures mean nothing now but on the eve of the introduction of the minimum wage in 1999 at £3.60 per hour for people over 21, I knew people working at £1.90-2.00 per hour, which shows how much the jump was). This was Thatcherite 'equality' and how perverse this was led to the poll tax riots of 1990. Of course, you can tell the severity of the regime by how often there was rioting under Thatcher. The UK is not a country particularly known for forceful political protest, but the 1980s saw a lot of it. Even riots sparked by local tensions such as the St. Paul's (Bristol) Riot of 1980 and the Brixton Riot of 1981 were in part caused by the police feeling they had Thatcher's backing to using harsh and often racist measures. If you think of the Handsworth riots (1981 and 1985), riots in Leeds, Liverpool (Toxteth), Broadwater Farm in 1985 (at which a policeman was beheaded) and riots connected with the Miners' Strike 1984-5 only apartheid South Africa and Sri Lanka experiencing a civil war faced anything similar at the time. The level of fury at what was being done to the people of Britain was immense. This in a country in which such protest has always been less common than elsewhere in Europe, except during the Thatcher years.

Thatcher was anti-intellectual. Again, education needed reform, but she thrust universities back into the elitist system and fostered the hostility to students that I see very visibly in my own neighbourhood even today. No other country in Europe has such hostility to learning as the UK. Somehow it is seen as a 'luxury' and again students are condemned as 'lazy'. In other countries people are proud not only to see their own children go to university, but proud to see other children in the same street, district, town go. Through the 1980s studying was dismissed as taking you away from the getting rich quick which was your duty; all successful entrepreneurs bragged that they 'went to the university of life' not noticing how the UK was slipping further and further behind rivals where even waiters are trained. The UK has only kept its head above water by importing intelligent, skilled, qualified people from across the world, notably Asia. If every doctor of Asian background (and I mean immediate background, not children of Asians who had settled in the UK in previous decades) was suddenly removed from the UK then the health service would collapse immediately. Look at successful businesses in the UK and you will find a huge number are led by 'outsiders' because too few indigenous British people, no matter what their race, has been encouraged to study or had the funding to continue to the levels needed to make a successful business and intellectual country.

Some people will regret that Margaret Thatcher was not killed in the bombing of the Grand Hotel where she was staying in October 1984. I will look at the implications of that incident in a counter-factual soon. However much I wish Margaret Thatcher had been eliminated from the UK I know that the response would have effectively made the UK a police state immediately and democracy (which Thatcher was no fan of, she disliked even working with ministerial colleagues, she was Gaullist, almost dictatorial, in wanting to dominate all aspects of politics) would have been suspended. I wish her corrupt arms dealings could have brought her and the Thatcherites of the time down and humiliated them for a generation in the way Nixon was removed from office and shunned because of his corrupt actions. Margaret Thatcher damaged the UK in so many different ways, some that were immediately obvious, some that we are only now seeing the consequences of. There are very few politicians that you cannot find one good thing that they have done for the country they dominated, but Thatcher is certainly one of them and the UK would have been a far better place if she had never been born.

'Alien to British Culture': A Myopic View of Britain's History and Society

I have just started reading 'The Strange Death of Socialist Britain' (1992) by Patrick Cosgrave (1941-2001). I read the book that inspired the title of 'The Strange Death of Liberal Britain' (1935) by George Dangerfield which I read about eight years ago. Both books look at how and why what seemed to be the political and even social consensus of an era faded away. Dangerfield was looking back to the period of 1906-14 in which the Liberal Party was in power and brought about social welfare reforms. In addition, there seemed to be a consensus about a liberal society and democracy which following the First World War and the dictatorships of the 1920s and 1930s, people were nostalgic for. However, as Dangerfield shows that despite the popular image, in fact Britain of the early 1910s was facing immense social upheaval with pressure from organised labour, female suffrage supporters and those seeking an independent Ireland, that some feared the country was verging on civil war or a revolution.

Cosgrave looks at a different period, stretching from 1945 victory the Labour Party and the mixed economy and welfare state that was created and seemed to be accepted right across the political spectrum up to the end of the period of Thatcher in power and the unexpected defeat of the Labour Party in the 1992 election. That period is seen as the last gasp of Socialism in Britain and Labour was only able to come back to power in 1997 by turning into a post-Thatcherist party focused on an individual. I have long argued that the Labour Party, not even New Labour, came to power in 1997, rather, the Blairite Party came into office along the lines of a Gaullist or Peronist party seen in other countries. Of course the current economic crisis with the governments of the UK and other countries taking over banks and companies suggests that maybe Socialism in practice is not entirely dead.

Given that Cosgrave is a biographer of Margaret Thatcher, Lord Carrington, Enoch Powell, R.A. Butler and Sir Winston Churchill, I was not expecting a liberal or left-wing appreciation of the period under scrutiny. However, even given that it was written at the time when Thatcherism seemed to be scattering all rivals to the winds it seems an astoundingly narrow, almost deluded approach. Cosgrave goes beyond anything the Thatcher regime voiced. It soon becomes apparent that he feels that the loss of the British Empire 1947-80 or there abouts as being a huge error and that in some way Britain should have clung to its colonies, not least, because independence only led to dictatorship and wars, of course neglecting the reasonably peaceful development of India, the most populous of Britain's former colonies after the 1940s. Cosgrave wants all or nothing. He did not want the colonies to go and yet he sees the Commonwealth, the looser connection between elements of the former British Empire as a huge error too, but more on that in a minute.

Now anyone who believes that Britain (or any European state) could have clung to its empire in Africa and Asia has absolutely no idea of history. If the American War of Independence 1776-83 and Spain's loss of its American colonies in the 19th century show nothing about trying to keep hold of colonies as they mature, then Cosgrave and others should simply look to the experiences of those countries who did try to retain their colonies beyond the due time. Not only does it ignore the ongoing conflicts in many colonies in the 1880s-1910s but also what happened after 1945. France fought in Indochina effectively 1945-54 and in Algeria 1954-62. These conflicts led to over 178,000 locals and French dying and another 225,000 being wounded; torture was used and there were massacres in Paris in 1961 and in Oran in 1962. It also came close to plunging France into a civil war 1958-60. Is this the kind of experience Cosgrave wanted for Britain? Another example is the Portuguese Colonial War 1961-74 between the colonial power of Portugal which had held colonies in Africa for over 400 years, far longer than Britain, and the states of Mozambique and Angola fighting for independence. This killed untold thousands of locals, over 8000 Portuguese troops and led to the displacement of over a million people. Even closer to home, it can be argued that Britain's continued occupation of Northern Ireland (and I know this is a controversial argument as many argue that that state is entirely a part of the UK) but that conflict from the start of the 'Troubles' in 1969 to 1998 led to the death of over 3000 people and brought the conflict to mainland Britain in bombing campaigns. Does not Cosgrave understand that if Britain had tried to cling to every colony it would have suffered such an experience many times over. Perhaps he wants a police state under martial law, because that is the kind of UK you would have ended up with if Britain had not let its colonies go, not some kind of paternalist dream he seems to subscribe to.

Then Cosgrave has a problem with the Commonwealth, well as he puts it, not the entire Commonwealth but the ''new' or coloured Commonwealth'. He feels it was wrongly constructed because it permitted free immigration of people from those countries to the UK and so leading to 'large pockets of immigrants alien to British culture'. Now that is poor analysis and basic bigotry on so many levels. For a start he seems to think that immigration to the UK started with the arrival of the ship the 'Empire Windrush' in 1948, whereas of course people have been moving into the UK for many centuries. People came from Africa and the Middle East with the Romans and right throughout Britain's involvement with the slave trade. Refugees from France came in the 16th century and refugees from China and Russia were coming through the 19th century. Too many people look in askance when a television series does not show an all white population in Victorian Britain especially in the cities, but of course an all-white population is simply a myth it was never like that as you can see easily from paintings of the time. The Commonwealth did not create immigration, in fact it made it harder to immigrate into the UK. Under the British Empire at its height, an era when passports were restricted to those autocracies like Russia and the Ottoman Empire, people moved freely around the empire. They might face prejudice but at that stage there were not legal restrictions.

Like many people Cosgrave makes the mistake that the British Nationality Act of 1948 somehow opened doors that had been closed. In fact it simply regulated relations between countries that were now not part of an empire but had a different, increasingly independent relationship with Britain. Decades after the Republic of Ireland was formed, Irish people still have rights to stand as candidates in the UK and vote, and a whole raft of rights as if we were still connected and not two sovereign states. What would have been Cosgrave's alternative to the evolving Commonwealth, to say 'well, yes, I know we conquered you, exploited you, messed up your economy and got you to fight in our wars for us, but I am sorry, we owe you nothing, you have no right to come to the UK'. To have closed access in that way would have seemed incredibly mean-spirited and Cosgrave forgets that even Conservatives of that era did not see the world in the harsh terms that he does. Those countries such as France and Portugal who fought bitter wars of decolonisation, even they formed communities with their former colonies, so Britain would have appeared peculiar not to have done the same. Of course Cosgrave's 'me first' attitude to the states of the Commonwealth is the same as his attitude to workers too.

Cosgrave forgets that economic migration works like a lot of economics through supply and demand. Immigrants would not have been brought to the UK (Enoch Powell himself despite his racism, brought West Indian nurses to work in the health service) if there were not jobs for them. Cosgrave forgets that until the economic crises of the 1970s, Britain like most of western Europe had 'full' employment (usually reckoned to be 92-97% of the working population in employment, there is deemed to be a need for 'transitional' unemployment as people move between jobs) and that was with the immigrants he loathes. Britain without immigration would (as it had done in the late 1940s when it experienced labour shortages in many key industries) have faced difficulties in its transport, health and retail sectors in the 1950s and 1960s. There were insufficient white UK people to do the jobs needed by the booming economy, especially at the wage rates employers were willing to pay. Cosgrave forgets this too, that despite of his love of the Thatcherite principle of a flexible labour force willing (or compelled) to work at the lowest cost to an employer possible, that low wages promote immigration. Cosgrave is clearly wrapped up in the attitude that the white British population shop accept its 'station' and do poor jobs at low wages and certainly not complain (he loathes trade unions as much as he does immigrants). It is noticeable how many Polish workers have returned to Poland now the British economy is suffering. Of course writers like Cosgrave believe there is something inherently attractive about Britain that we need to repel those unlucky not to have been born here from languishing in the wonders of Britain. This is, of course, why immigration into Britain in recent years has almost been matched by emigration of Britons especially to France, Spain, the USA and Australia.

Cosgrave also makes an error when he portrays the culture of immigrants to Britain as 'alien' to British culture. For a start, what is British culture? I have debated this before, but it is certain that it is not something static. Even if people have a nostalgia for a Britain of the past, it is an edited past (for example with the black faces and malnourished removed from the picture). British culture is diverse and constantly evolves. Immigrants have always been part of that and have been assimilated in the UK faster than in some other countries, Germany being a notable example. Of course immigrants by definition are people with 'get-up-and-go' as they have travelled hundreds or thousands of kilometres to get here. The passive people who accept their place in the world are those still back in India or Jamaica. By definition immigrants want to get on and want their children to become doctors and not work the long hours they worked. Of course this eagerness to shake up society and to pull your family up social levels upsets Cosgrave no matter what ethnicity the individual trying to achieve it. Here he again marks himself out from a strong strand of Conservative tradition which encourages the individual and their family (even Margaret Thatcher lauded families) to prosper and get on and sees the Conservative way as a better way to promote such advancement rather than the 'Nanny state' controls they associate with Labour. Cosgrave is a pre-Disraelian Tory and seems to favour a feudal hierarchy with no chance of advancement. Of course with his bigoted, racialist (as opposed to racist) approach he could not accept 'coloured' immigrants gettting off the bottom rung. In addition, many immigrant families whether they felt they should or because they genuinely believed in it, were stronger advocates of elements seen as being at the heart of British culture such as church attendance and sports like cricket than most white British families. Of course this stemmed from how such things were transmitted across the Empire and remain even now in the Commonwealth. In particular to speak of Commonwealth immigrants as being 'alien' to British culture is most misguided as their arrival here often speaks of their faith and adherence to that culture in a way that people arriving from other countries would find impossible.

I suppose I am not surprised that I picked up this copy of Cosgrave's book for £1 (reduced from £16.95). I was hoping for something that came close to Dangerfield's account and analysis and instead found a book which is even out-of-step with the contemporary Conservative view of society and recent history and tends towards being an attempt at a respectable history from the BNP (British National Party) perspective. Of course you can argue that the whole basis of his book is on a faulty foundation and that there never was a Socialist Britain. The welfare state built on the Liberal social welfare policies of the 1910s; Keynes was a Liberal and certainly not a Socialist and what we saw by the end of the 1940s was not Socialist economics with a directed economy, it was kind of Keynesian approach though prosperity meant many elements of Keynesianism were not needed until the mid-1970s. Nationalisation is seen as being Socialist economics, but again the approach adopted to nationalised industries was one of being at arm's length which was part of the problem and so the form was little different to the rationalisation of the railways carried out by the Conservatives in the 1920s or the muncipal gas boards of the 19th century. British foreign policy was not Socialist. Decolonisation was pressed most strongly by Franklin D. Roosevelt, US President and the Conservative governments oversaw far more decolonisation than Labour ever did. Labour was anti-Soviet and brought Britain into NATO and kept it out of the ECSC which formed the basis of the EEC and thus the EU. It was the Conservatives who moved Britain to participating in Europe. So, one can look hard for a Socialist Britain and not find one.

It would be more accurate to have titled Cosgrave's book, 'The Strange Death of Tory Democracy Britain' as what we saw from 1975/9 onwards was actually the overthrowing of the Disraelian tradition of the Conservative Party (which spent 48 years of the 20th century in power and another 20 years in coalition governments, usually in a dominant position) by the New Right and how far that marks a jump from the kind of society the party that tends to be in power most often in the UK wants to try to foster. Given that I would argue that we need another Attleean revolution now (i.e. a Liberal one) to deal with the financial crisis and its human consequences, it is important to blow away the false divide that authors like Cosgrave have put up and see in fact that we have experienced first the Conservatives then Labour be shorn of their social conscience so dumping us into a situation where greed dominated. As to rising bigotry, well that fills the headlines today and needs to be challenged by us all. Given that Cosgrave has irritated me so quickly I can imagine I am going to be stimulated to write more about this doyen of Thatcherism.