THATCHERISM AND ITS LASTING AND MALIGN IMPACT ON BRITISH SOCIETY

When I first returned to England after many years abroad, I found another country to the one I had left behind. A country given over to the extremes of wealth and poverty. And what is more, I found another society, one in which compassion and empathy for one’s compatriots, were words from a dead language. Thatcherism had taken firm root 

The new defining characteristic of society in England was callousness: a shocking indifference to the material sufferings of one's fellows - or even worse; a nasty pleasure in their sufferings, for the new understanding (assiduously propagated by Thatcher and by every government which has followed her) was that poverty is indicative of a grave moral disorder on the part of its sufferer. Poverty must therefore be punished . . . by inflicting further poverty on its victims.  

That despicable creature, that loudly self-declared Christian and arch-hypocrite at the head of the so-called "welfare reforms" during the Cameronian period, I. D. Smith, was for long the supreme embodiment of this vicious, smug, hateful outlook. Extraordinarily, it has since taken a government claiming the label “Labour” to surpass him.

That the Tories did not win the July 2024 general election has done nothing to modify the prevailing view in England that poverty is merely indicative of fecklessness or laziness, rather than the consequence of high capitalist and corporatist policies having been diligently applied for the last 45 years.  

The many structural problems which afflict Britain’s economy are both the cause and - in part - the consequence of Britain’s social ills. A downward spiral of socio-economic ills commenced with the access of Margaret Thatcher to Number 10 in 1979. That political event was the great watershed in our country’s post-war history. It was Thatcherism that taught us the beguiling sins of greed, of self-centredness, of turning our backs on our fellows, of denying community, of grubbing after material advancement at the expense of our individual and national spiritual health. Without exception, every government since those of Thatcher has been modeled (broadly speaking) in her image. They have all been committed to neo-liberal economic policies, and all can be defined as corporatist. These defining economic characteristics have become ever more pronounced with the rise of economic globalism throughout this period. 

Post-Thatcherite society in the United Kingdom is not only a consequence of high capitalism and corporatism; it is their driver. Evil has fed upon evil, and each urges the other to ever greater excesses of wickedness and greed and selfishness and flint-hearted unconcern for the material suffering of others. In a real sense, we have been conditioned to view social compassion as something that only losers and the far left feel (and we dismiss the far left’s concerns as hypocrisy); we have been socially recalibrated, so that we regard poverty as something always self-inflicted. Worst of all, we have been taught (if we are not poor, or sick, or out of work ourselves), to view those who are poor, or sick, or out of work, as possessing no value as human beings. In fact, many people in Britain today have been taught to revel in that most spiritually sickening of all emotional states: a smug pleasure at others’ sufferings.

“Smug,” because if we are fortunate enough to be in full-time work that pays us a living wage, or retired with a comfortable private pension, we do not count our blessings and thank God; we think instead, “What a fine fellow I am, and what a useless, feckless, lazy shirker that loser Joe Bloggs is, because he hasn’t got a full-time job that pays him a living wage, or a comfortable private pension.”

We give no thought to the structural economic causes that bring about poverty; to the fact that our economy and society are caught fast in the malign grip of corporatism. What is happening in Britain today, under its high capitalist, corporatist economic model, is that our governments are making us over in the Brazilian image, aiming at achieving an impressive economic growth rate (as measured by GDP), but with only a small class of super-rich growing ever richer, and an ever more numerous class of people finding life a financial struggle, people for whom even full-time work is no guarantee of financial salvation. Britain is well on her way to becoming another BRIC economy. I am reminded of what I became used to seeing in South Africa on my most recent visits: with almost 50% of the potential workforce unemployed, young men run forward at red traffic lights to wash your gleaming four-by-four’s windscreen, in return for a few near-worthless Rand (for in true BRIC economy fashion, the rich in South Africa continue to grow richer, even as the poor become poorer and more numerous). 

The prevailing view in England (a view that the present so-called Labour government has done nothing to moderate) is that the receipt of social security (Benefits) must hurt the recipient, and humiliate him, and alienate him from society. Indeed, for I.D. Smith, Minister of Work and Pensions under Cameron, joblessness and poverty were entirely the fault of their victims; a sign that God Himself had damned them. Such a view still prevails in England. This is naked Thatcherism, untrammelled by social conscience. This is the triumph of high capitalism and corporatism: that it de-sensitises the human spirit to others’ suffering, and inculcates the most sickeningly ugly sense of inflated self-worth and smug self-congratulation on the part of those who enjoy good fortune.  

Whether Tory or neo-Labour, every government since those of Thatcher has clung to the same neo-liberal economic consensus, unwilling to offer this consensus the least challenge, unwilling to consider the least structural reform to the economy. And every government since those of Thatcher has sustained the same view of social security: that it is more a punitive device than a model for the relief of poverty. I am sickened by what society in Britain (but particularly, in England) has become - as witnessed by the governments it keeps placing in power, and is likely to be placing in power (Reform UK) in the next general election: this latter is set to be more vicious, more extreme, more nakedly hate-filled even than the last few Tory governments were.