Thatcher

Like many, I’ve spent the last few days reflecting on the death of Margaret Thatcher, reading that vast array of comment that has swamped the media and the internet and discussing it with friends and colleagues. It’s hard to say much that’s new, but here’s a collection of my still-garbled thoughts.

 

Thatcher’s final executive decision, to decline a full state funeral, pleasantly surprised me (I had previously, wrongly, assumed it was set in stone, given news reports going back several years on the subject). Among 20^th century PMs, Churchill alone was given the honour. Attlee and Lloyd George went without. In the previous century Palmerston and Gladstone received them, but Disraeli turned down the offer, just as Thatcher has done. In so doing, she has helped preserve a British tradition, and for that she deserves immense praise. State funerals should be preserved for unifying figures – monarchs, great military leaders and the rare prime ministers who have risen above politics and passed into statesmanship by the time of their deaths. Thatcher showed the graciousness to understand that as totemic as she was in our politics, she was not apolitical and was anything but unifying. While some have noted the cost of her planned ceremonial funeral, one step down from state, we should nevertheless remain grateful and remember that she vetoed an expensive fly-past, perhaps a final sign of her oft-claimed frugality.

Though there have been horrible outbursts and I wish more Labour MPs had attended the special parliamentary session today, I’m also proud that most of what I would call the serious left has remained respectful of her in death, even while expressing their democratic right (one which I believe she would have respected and celebrated) to voice their opposition to the aspects of her legacy they objected to. To take one example, “Thatcher is dead and Thatcherism is still live and kicking. I wish it were the other way round” is the simple way that journalist & councillor Rowenna Davis phrased her sentiments. When Michael Foot died in 2010, some on the right were not coy about their disagreements with his political legacy and when my present-day political heroes pass on (I’m thinking of Tony Blair in particular), I don’t expect their detractors to pull any punches about how they felt either, just as long as they remain respectful of the fact that they were human beings with families who did what they thought was best in the service of the country. As Dan Hodges pointed out in his article today, we should have nothing but condemnation for the isolated parties in Bristol and elsewhere, especially since Thatcher visited and cried at the funeral of Eric Heffer MP, of all people. Ed Miliband also carefully walked this line in his statement today, earning praise even from Hodges for his fairly statesmanlike tribute to her.

Ed Miliband praised her strength, the trials of getting where she did as a woman and her brand of conviction politics, although this last point is an aspect of Thatcher’s legacy I feel should be seen in a more nuanced light. She was headstrong by any measure and fought harder than many politicians in both her own day and in this one for what she believed, but it’s important to remember that even she knew when to back down and seek consensus where necessary. Her legacy did not in my opinion always show that conviction trumps consensus or calculation, but that the three can (uncomfortably, admittedly) sit side-by-side. As a person particularly interested in healthcare, I’d note her fascinatingly complex relationship with that oh-so important part of British political life, the NHS, as an example of this.

It has long been claimed that privately, Thatcher felt most people should pay for healthcare privately and felt the only true role for such a taxpayer-funded service like the NHS was as a residual institution for emergencies, chronic illness, the poor, the vulnerable, children and the elderly - something akin to the Medicare/Medicaid settlement in the US, perhaps. But in 1982, she faced uproar over a leaked document calling for a social insurance-based system and responded by pledging that the NHS was “safe with us”, leaving any further attempts at reform until 1988, in her third term. By this point, nine years of underfunding had left the NHS at crisis point. She and Health Secretary John Moore (subsequently replaced by Ken Clarke a year later) came up with a new set of reforms based on the ideas of American health economist Alain Enthoven, focusing on the separation of purchasing and provision within the NHS and the establishment of an internal market. It’s perhaps true to say that health policy thinking in both parties has not advanced much further than her and Enthoven’s idea of internal competition over the past twenty-five years, and so it indelibly remains a key part of her legacy. I myself am a passionate believer in the positive impact those innovations have had on patient care in the UK, as were Blair, Alan Milburn and many others in the Labour Party. However, it’s also been said that even that late on, she was weary of the political risk entailed by NHS reform and in her 1993 memoir The Downing Street Years, she had the following to say: “I believed that the NHS was a service of which we could genuinely be proud. It delivered a high quality of care — especially when in it came to acute illnesses — and at a reasonably modest unit cost, at least compared with some insurance-based systems.” While there is perhaps something begrudging and caveated in the phrasing of these words, it’s hard to make sense of them as mere political positioning by an incumbent, as we easily could with her 1982 remarks. Even Thatcher knew that in truly sensitive areas, such as healthcare, opinion had to be understood and change had to be sought in increments.

Thatcher’s shaping of the Labour Party also went far beyond the acceptance of the NHS internal market, of course. When asked in the 90s what her greatest achievement was, Thatcher famously replied “New Labour”. Ed Miliband referenced this today too, making clear his acceptance of her main achievements; an aspiration nation, denationalisation, a revitalised market economy and a strong foreign and defence policy (while also taking a moment to irk the right with a reference to her early stance on climate change, of course). Few in Labour, even those who speak most loudly against Thatcherism, would reject these ideas now. Ed also balanced this by criticising her lack of compassion for northern miners, her rejection of the concept of society, Section 28 and her stance on apartheid. He finished by saying “Whatever your view of her, Margaret Thatcher was a unique and towering figure. I disagree with much of what she did.” Few in Labour could differ. Another take on this I read elsewhere also interested me. Trawling through Twitter, some comments by a young LFIG researcher I am always happy to follow, James Gill, leapt out at me from among it all: “RIP Baroness Thatcher. Let’s raise our glasses to a truly iconic, radical force, who [transformed] the UK, for the most part, improving it”. Gill then elaborated by praising Thatcher’s embrace of market economics while noting her “severe shortcomings on social policy”. This tends to be my view too, in a nutshell. For example, it’s hard to say that many of the economic actions she took weren’t necessary to some extent, but it must also be asked why they could not be implemented more carefully and accompanied by compassion in the form of better economic adjustment assistance, or even simply in rhetoric - why did miners who were simply fighting not to be made unemployed need to be compared to the Argentines and denounced as the unpatriotic “enemy within”? This is as close as I can come to making sense of her basic ideological and political legacy. It defines my politics. I am one of Thatcher’s children, and so are all of you.