Thatcher and Reagan are gone, but their legacy "lives" on

There was a Season 2 episode of Star Trek (the original series) entitled “Patterns of Force,” in which Kirk and company are reconnoitering the planet Ekos in search of a missing Starfleet Academy professor named John Gill. They discovered that a formerly backward society was suddenly patterned on Nazi Germany; in one of the more amusing scenes in Star Trek lore, one of the Nazis examines Spock’s head and points out features denoting “low intelligence.” It turns out that Gill tried to encourage the planet’s population to adopt the “positive” aspects of Nazi ideology, but as Kirk points out to Spock, it cost millions of innocent lives—and millions more to eliminate it.  

Sometimes “change” occurs with results not anticipated. The Obama administration has been accused of instituting “radical” change, but this is only the opinion of the extreme right, for whom any movement “left” of their own position is “radical.” If anything, the only “change” that has occurred was the radicalization of the Right; any “change” that has occurred in the Obama administration has been cosmetic or of tone. In the past century there has been two periods of “radical” change in public policy: The New Deal and the “Reagan Revolution”—the latter which was more reactionary than revolutionary, but its effects were just as pronounced. 

Reagan, of course, didn’t as much set policy as simply allowed like-minded people do as they wished. Thus anti-environmental fanatics like James Watt and his EPA underlings were allowed to gut environmental law while taking kickbacks from businesses. HUD, the Labor Department and the Civil Rights enforcement office were equally corrupt and ineffective in their obligations. At a time when domestic manufacturing was under heavy pressure from foreign competition, the Reagan administration ignored the consequences—instead engaging in massive military construction projects that masked the damage being done to the domestic economy and the middle class. Foreign policy seemed to be conducted by a rogue fringe who operated mostly outside the law. Yet many on the Right have sanctified Reagan, and upon his departure from this earth, most in the media did so as well. Voices which decried his “legacy” were mainly drowned out.

As much can be said about the “legacy” of the recently departed Margaret Thatcher, former extreme-right prime minister of the United Kingdom.  The UK broadcast and right-wing media predictably put a positive spin on the past, no doubt in large part because of the “novelty" of a female prime minister. Meryl Streep played Thatcher in a recent film, and was nothing if not bubbly about her “greatness.” Those who chose to be less “tactful” in their opinions of her reign were criticized by some as being “sexist.” Carole Malone of The Mirror harrumphed that “I didn’t much like my country last week because I saw a side to it that was ugly and coarse and cruel…Maggie Thatcher wasn’t even cold before the tsunami of hatred crashed through the plaudits like a poison riptide. 'The Witch is dead', 'Rot in Hell', 'Rejoice, Thatcher is dead' said the vile banners, even though many of those brandishing them weren’t even alive when Thatcher was in power….And how ironic that the people screaming she’d wrecked the country and wrecked their lives still had enough money to buy champagne to drink to her death, to shout that they hoped it was a painful and degrading one.” 

Malone doth protest too much, as one reader had to remind her; this represented barely a drop in the ocean compare to the tsunami of media coverage, which was crassly submissive to Thatcher’s “memory.” Much of the backlash can be explained by this. The problem was that Thatcher didn’t care about people—at least those who were not on the wealthy side of the fence. Thatcher was swept into power because a significant percentage of workers—both skilled and low-skilled—were seeking “change” in an economy that was on the skids. But by the time these same people understood the long-term consequences of this “change” Thatcher was long gone. 

Malone’s colleague—Paul Routledge—was rather less defensive about the memory of the “Iron Lady.” 

If anyone is inclined to remind me one should not speak ill of the dead, let me remind them she had nothing good to say about us while she was alive. She changed everything, and for millions it was change for the worse. There was nothing like her before, and there has been nothing like her since. Thank God…A Great Maggie Myth has grown up in the two decades since she was forced – in tears – out of Downing Street by her own Cabinet colleagues. Those pygmies were not worthy of her, goes the script. She bestrode politics like a Boadicean colossus. What a woman! What a ruler! What a Brit! What a warrior! And it has become fashionable to offer unthinking praise at the altar of this myth.

Behind the myth was that fact that

She decimated our basic industries of coal and steel. Shipbuilding virtually disappeared, along with much of heavy engineering. She tried to destroy our free trade unions through repressive legislation, and damn well near succeeded. She branded miners fighting for their jobs and communities as “the enemy within”, a foul slur on decent working people and their families for which she will never be forgiven. She made mass unemployment respectable, and used it as a tool of government. The dole queues were “a price worth paying” under her regime – once described as “an elected dictatorship” by one of her own ministers. She created a new underclass of jobless men, took away their status as breadwinner in the home and forced millions of women back into the workplace so that families could make ends meet. If she was a women’s champion, I am Meryl Streep...

She enthroned the profit motive, and unleashed the spivs and speculators in the City of London. She surrendered economic policy to the mysterious dark forces of “the market”, which led UK plc into one recession after another that led to the mess where we are today…She took us into war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands , when her popularity ratings were rock bottom, to save an isolated British colony - and her own political face. On the back of that operation, she won a cynical landslide in the “khaki election” of 1983. Her enthusiasm for war initiated a new era of British militarism that has yet to run its course...

She tied the nation’s international policy like a tin can to the tail of the attack dog in the White House, President Ronald Reagan, backing his outlandish “Star Wars” system, which came to nothing. She flirted obscenely with the racist apartheid regime in South Africa, opposing UN sanctions and dismissing Nelson Mandela as a commie terrorist. She opposed the reunification of Germany. In Northern Ireland, she sanctioned a dirty war against Republicans, faced down hunger strikers so that 10 of them died, and delayed the onset of the Peace Process that could have come earlier but had to await the arrival of her successor, John Major, who initiated secret talks with the IRA...

Now that she’s gone, it’s fashionable to say that “whatever you think of Maggie, at least you have to admire her for sticking to her guns” I repudiate this modish claptrap. Look where she pointed those guns – at those who couldn’t defend themselves, their jobs and their way of life.

Former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott was even less enthusiastic in his “praise”: 

I despised everything she stood for - she may have been a woman, but in her policies she showed no compassion to the sick, needy and the desperate…Thanks to her failed economic policies, Britain went through two recessions and unemployment was deliberately allowed to skyrocket above three million. Under her, crime went up 79 per cent. Her reign started with riots in Brixton and Toxteth and ended with civil disobedience and more riots against the Poll Tax, a regressive taxation that hit the poor the hardest…Thatcher never had faith in society. She claimed it didn’t exist. Her belief in the individual led to selling off council homes and refusing to build new ones, leading to record waiting lists for social housing and homelessness...

Under Thatcher, inequality increased and the number of people in poverty rose by nearly five million to 12.2million... nearly a quarter of the UK population. When she was elected, one in seven children lived in poverty. By the time she was sacked, by her own Cabinet, it was one in three…Thatcher’s “shareholder democracy” vision didn’t stop the privatised British Gas in 2012 making £606million profits and its five bosses sharing £16.4million in pay and bonuses…She left this country in a terrible state... bitter, selfish and­ ­divided. Her legacy is the out-of-touch Tory ­ministers hell-bent on replicating her nasty and twisted politics today. 

Prescott derided suggestions by some that Thatcher was the greatest post-war prime minister—much as some conservatives in this country claim that Reagan was the “greatest” post-war president this country has had. 

The antithesis of Thatcher was a prime minister who helped lead this country, with Churchill, against the scourge of fascism and then rebuilt this country. Clement Attlee, who served as Churchill’s deputy prime minister in the wartime cabinet, led Labour to victory in 1945, with policies to defeat the five evils of the pre-war Tory government:  “Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.” He introduced a national system of benefits to protect people “from the cradle to the grave”. He brought in free secondary education, employed 25,000 extra teachers and achieved near full employment with only 500,000 people out of work. He built more than one million new homes fit for heroes. And his crowning achievement, a National Health Service with free medical treatment for all, based on need, not your ability to pay.

Thatcher’s “crowning achievement,” on the other hand, was to “split this country, North and South, the haves and have nots, ‘one of us’ or ‘the enemy within.’” Prescott also noted that many people are outraged by the fact that even now Thatcher is costing the country dear; in regard to the $16 million tab the current Conservative government is forcing the country to pay for her funeral, “This country paid enough thanks to that woman. So why the hell should we continue to pay now she’s dead? So I’ve an idea. Get the 13,000 millionaires who’ve just received £100,000 each from this Government to each stump up £770. Privatise her funeral. It would be a fitting tribute…On Wednesday I’ll remember the wasted lives, the blighted childhoods and the lost industries that were the result of Margaret Thatcher’s policies.”

After almost 12 years in power, even Thatcher’s own party had enough of her, eventually forcing her out in 1990 after opinion polls showed her to be the second most unpopular post-war prime minister. Of course, time “heals” old memories, but not for all.