not another piece on Thatcher... a philosophy of self-deluded expediency

For a Prime Minister whose name is synonymous with a "political philosophy", Thatcher said very little that could be pressed into intellectual service to justify her eponymous approach to politics. A rare exception is her speech at the St Lawrence Jewry in 1978 which is useful in bringing to the surface origins of the fierce anti-statism that continues to drive Conservative, and indeed, mainstream British politics. In that speech she said:

What I am working for is a free and responsible society. But freedom is not synonymous with an easy life. Indeed, my own faith in freedom does not rest in the last resort on utilitarian arguments at all. Perhaps it would be possible to achieve some low-grade form of happiness in a thoroughly regimented State; but in such a State men would not be treated as what they are and what Christianity wanted them to be—free and responsible human beings. There are many difficult things about freedom: it does not give you safety, it creates moral dilemmas for you; it requires self-discipline; it imposes great responsibilities; but such is the destiny of Man and in such consists his glory and salvation

What we know now is that we got instead, the freedom to be irresponsible, coupled by a diminution of basic civil liberties in the name of protecting the freedom she valued-namely the narrow freedom to get on economically and socially which for her constituted the standard of human value and character. If there was a positive side to her vision, this was it but it was left largely undeveloped. In her mind, the ideal was self-evident enough not to warrant further thought-the Grantham greengrocer needed nothing except freedom from the constraints of the state to flourish after all. But citing De Tocqueville she delegated to the church the task of moral education, and so, rather conveniently, could argue that the moral failings of today's society can be laid at the feet of the church and civil society.

The most interesting part of the speech lies in her insistence that her convictions were based not so much on moral ideas but on political judgements about the rightness of actions for a particular time...to quote the Lady, "many of the issues on which we are passionately divided are disputes about fact and expediency." Now this was no doubt a tactical move to fend off the socially progressive movement within Churches that took issue with the poverty-inducing nature of her policies but it was also, in hindsight an extraordinary claim about the non-ideological nature of her outlook. It is belied almost immediately by what she goes on to claim about the State (capital S) and the deleterious effects of assigning to it the functions of poverty relief on human character and charity. The State (sic) is not for her a particular historical or sociological institution, but an overarching ideological construct of collectivist Marxism, with the consequence that her crusade of rolling back its frontiers must necessarily be viewed anti-ideological.

A common mistake in politics is to base your convictions and policies on rectifying the past rather than looking to the future. Thatcher was no exception to this. Yet it is hard to excuse the current dominance of the anti-statist consensus on those grounds alone. The steam-roller of anti-statist ideology seems now to have gathered an unstoppable momentum, aided by the vested interests it created and it is  dismantling bit by bit the post war infrastructure that was the foundation of modern welfare state economies.  In the war of ideologies, Thatcherism has won hands down, and the price that we will have to pay for the self-satisfaction of the ideologues has yet to be reckoned.