Thatcher's legacy revisited

Former Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher celebrates her 80th birthday tonight at a lavish party, with the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh among 650 guests. Friends and ex-foes alike have paid tribute - but Stumbling and Mumbling is clearly not one of them.

I'll not be celebrating. I’ll grant that she did do some good things – such as the abolition of much of the machinery of the corporate state and the deregulation of financial markets. But her influence upon the economy was, in many ways, disastrous.

In a typically pugnacious post, Chris gives six examples of her economic failures. He concludes:

There is a common theme uniting all these points. It’s that Thatcher was a class warrior, not an economic libertarian. Where market reforms benefited the rich (exchange controls) or bribed floating voters (council house sales), she supported them. Where market reforms could have helped the poor (school vouchers, macro markets), she did nothing...

And this is where her influence was wholly pernicious. She has given a generation of non-economists the impression that support for free markets is equivalent to support for the vested interests of the rich. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Blistering stuff! For some different perspectives on her economic legacy, see James Arnold's BBC piece from last year, What do we owe to Thatcherite economics? and transcripts from the Commanding Heights TV programme Up for Debate: Privatization and the Thatcher Legacy. Gillian Glover's article in today's Scotsman, The lady still lords it, is also worth reading.

UPDATE: Owen Barder has also posted on Mrs Thatcher’s economic legacy. He is critical too, but not completely:

We tend to take for granted some of the really good reforms and policy changes of that era, such as the abolition of exchange controls and the agreement to the Single Market Act.  Maybe they would have happened anyway; maybe not.

It is important to distinguish the period when Geoffrey Howe was Chancellor, which was largely disastrous, from Nigel Lawson, who was pretty good (at least from 1983 to 1987). ...Lawson should be commended for his simplification of the tax system (subsequently largely reversed, sadly).

The comments on Owen's and Chris's posts are also worth reading. For example, Phil Edwards over at Owen's blog makes this observation:

I don’t think Chris took his argument quite far enough: under Thatcher, economic liberalism didn’t just get associated with class war from above, it got associated with messianic ‘big bang’ visions of social change and unchallengeable authoritarian leaders whose position is supported by a rhetoric of charismatic populism. To that extent we are still living in Thatcherland.

Comments

[Edward Hugh]

"at a lavish party, with the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh among 650 guests"

Yes, although David Cameron and Kenneth Clarke were noticeably not among them. Her first and most obvious failing: a complete lack of compassion and generosity of spirit.

My 'charge list' would be a long one, but at the top would surely come the sinking of the Belgrano.

[Devil's Kitchen]

"My 'charge list' would be a long one, but at the top would surely come the sinking of the Belgrano."

What, the Argentinian warship? The most powerful ship in their Navy? The one that definitely wasn't going to come around the back of our fleet and attack us, no way Jose? The one that this article was talking about?

"Earlier this year the ship's captain, Hector Bonzo, admitted that the Belgrano's decision to sail away from the Task Force on the morning of 2 May was only a temporary manoeuvre.

"Our mission ... wasn't just to cruise around on patrol but to attack,'' Captain Bonzo said in a television interview in May. "When they gave us the authorisation to use our weapons, if necessary, we had to be prepared to attack. Our people were completely trained. I would say we were anxious to pull the trigger.''"

We were at war. The Argentinian Navy's most destructive cruiser is hopping out of the zone: where exactly was it going to go? Quick holiday in the Caribean whilst the country's at war? Yeah, right. The sinking of the Belgrano is about the only indisputably correct decision that she made.

DK

[TK2007]

To hell with relative trivialities like the Belgrano (Awful and criminal though it was)Thatcher and Reagan (As leaders of the Free World) were responsible for destroying any hope the human race had in social cohesion and cooperation. They preached selfishness and the proliferation of big business.

Now no one cares about anything anymore. There's no such thing as left and right, just a mish-mash of sloppy consensus because no-one cares about politics anymore.

Capitalism has won. And I think we'll see the crippling repercussions in the years to come.

Thanks Maggie.