Her contribution to a changing set of policies, evolving under the pressure of circumstances rather than planned, was a simple faith in the values of Alderman Thatcher, an iron will, and an almost Bolshevik conviction that political adversaries (both ‘socialism’ and the old ruling class) were public enemies. Old Stalin-watchers will also be familiar with the conviction that central state power must be increased as a preliminary to the withering away of the state – in this instance, through the universal triumph of the market.
This was a new note in British politics, which is why Thatcher’s fall in those dramatic November days of 1990 was, and was felt to be, more like a British mini-version of the Ninth Thermidor than a mere prime ministerial resignation. But what difference did Thatcher make? Negatively, probably quite a lot, even if some of the more dangerous and irresponsible changes of the Eighties can be reversed – notably the excessive centralisation of state power and state direction, and the downgrading or destruction of lesser collective autonomies. The atmosphere of Thatcherism, that conglomerate of egoism, political servility and moral blindness, will not be so easily eliminated. Perhaps she only accelerated the emergence of tendencies latent in our country, once a model of civic and civil society, but accelerate it she did.
Positively, she made little difference. The British economy and British power are much as before internationally, and their unsolved problems remain the same. Even without Thatcher, Britain in the Eighties would almost certainly have followed the general European trend to economic liberalism, though in a less frankly anti-social form and with less self-delusion. Even electorally, Thatcher’s achievement was, at most, to stabilise Conservative support at a level far below pre-1979 Tory expectations. Her power rested not on winning supporters but on a divided opposition and the peculiarities of our electoral system.
Eric Hobsbawm London Review of Books 23rd May 1991
Review of A Question of Leadership: Gladstone to Thatcher
by Peter Clarke.
Hamish Hamilton, 334 pp., £17.99, April 1991, 0 241 13005 0
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