In the name of the free market, she trashed the long established infrastructure of care and civility that held us together as a country. Not since the Dissolution of the Monasteries has a whole pattern of social care been so thoroughly and successfully wiped away. In particular, she eviscerated northern working class towns, held together by mining and heavy industry, that were the heart of this country.
Second, my philosophical point: Mrs Thatcher wasn’t really a Conservative at all. She was a turbo-charged classical liberal who believed that the freedom of the individual, and most especially the economic freedom of the individual, trumped all other moral considerations. Setting people free from the state, setting people free to pursue their individual economic interests, this was her guiding idea. And so she took a sledgehammer to all those patterns of community living that held the individual back. To express her mistake philosophically, she confused ‘freedom from’ (any external constrains) with ‘freedom to’ (something that requires a whole social architecture of discipline and solidarity to enable people to flourish and live out their fullest lives). [...]
There are those who will argue the Labour Party had no choice. Its traditional power bases had been so weakened by the Thatcher revolution that it had to find new ways of drawing upon a wider constituency of support. Others, like me, think he sold the pass. And so the Labour party became an uneasy coalition of professional metropolitan liberals, media professionals, techies, academics, journalists; and socialists who looked back to a political philosophy embedded in the factory and more traditional patterns of communal life. [...]
The problem for Labour is that it now looks in two directions and it cannot make up its mind. Liberals face in one direction and Clause 4 socialists in another. The transfer of votes from Labour to the Liberal Democrats during the European Elections – including that of Alastair Campbell – demonstrates the natural affinity of new Labour with liberalism. The story of 20th and 21st Century politics is usually written up as the death of the liberal party after WW1. In 1935, George Dangerfield wrote the highly influential The Strange Death of Liberal England. But he read the rites far too early. Liberalism has decisively shaped both the Conservative and Labour parties. It became the enabling philosophy of late capitalism. And it gradually hollowed-out and replaced the original philosophies of the two great parties of the 20th Century: the conservatism of Conservatives and the socialism of Labour.
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