Celebrants of the Thatcher era
often point to the fact that she won three successive General Elections, even
though many of her government's policies were highly unpopular, leading them to
claim that these electoral successes were a sign of her inherent
"greatness". Any such claims though, overlook the obvious fact that
the Conservative "brand" and most of its various constituency MP's
were far more popular individually than Margaret Thatcher was as a national
party leader. Even her more favourable standing today, some 20-odd years after
she left finally office is thought to be due to the fact that her modern
successors are so dire in comparison to her, in terms of their personalities,
their ideas and their convictions, rather than reflecting a general desire for
the country to return to a more "Thatcherite" era. In fact, the only
recent politician to have come close to achieving Thatcher's political stature
has been the New Labour leader, Tony Blair, who successfully managed to
re-package and re-cast many of the earlier free-market, monetarist policies of
Thatcher for a new generation of British voters. Blair's and New Labour's great
illusion was to convince a vast majority of the electorate that what "walked
like a duck, quacked like a duck and looked like a duck", was in fact
anything but a duck; and with much of the country desperate for a change after
18 years of Tory rule, most of us missed the fact that rather than being dead,
Thatcherism had just been revamped for the 21st century.
In a funny sort of way, had
Margaret Thatcher been a police officer and her two greatest
"successes", the Miners Strike and The Falklands Conflict been law
enforcement operations, then the chances are that they would have been thrown
out of court on the basis of one of them being a case of deliberate
"entrapment", whilst the other was the result of her own sheer
personal vanity. According to some historians, with the previously mentioned
Ridley Plan in place, it has been suggested that Thatcher purposefully and
wilfully picked a fight with the NUM, knowing that they and their leadership
would willingly oblige, bearing in mind that not only their jobs, but the lives
of their communities were at stake. Like poking a highly irascible guard-dog
with a sharp stick, Thatcher and her ministers picked the time and the place
for their defining battle with the Trade Unions, confident that their newly
introduced Employment Acts, the secretly collected coal stocks; the highly
discriminatory benefit rules; and the thousands of highly motivated police
militia's that had been put on standby at highly attractive pay rates, would be
more than sufficient to effectively crush any union opposition to the
government's plans.
Bearing in mind that such events
tumultuous events took place before the dawn of the internet and the
24-hour-a-day news that it allows us today, most of us were informed by the
same MSM that exists today, The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Daily
Mail, The Express, The Sun and The Mirror, most of which had a strong
right-wing bias, simply because of their owners personal and commercial ties to
the Conservative Party. So it was never going to be the case that the general
public were told the whole truth about the causes of the Miners Strike, only a
politically slanted version of the truth, one where the Miners and their causes
were bad; while the government and their reasoning were good.
Although nobody would suggest
that unionised labour should have the right to usurp a democratically elected
government, modern thinking suggests that consensus, rather than conflict is
the equitable way to move forward. Unfortunately, neither Thatcher, nor the
Miners leadership of the time were in any mood to compromise, even if that had
been the right thing to do. It goes without saying that the most successful
European economy, Germany, has built much of its economic and social success
around consensus politics, in the country and in the workplace, something that
Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill were obviously unwilling to do, perhaps
suggesting that both in their turn were completely unsuitable for their roles
and for the times that they lived in. It is often an unknown fact that in
reality Arthur Scargill had little power to hold a national ballot amongst
Britain's coalminers, simply because he had no right to demand one. Apparently,
under the terms of the NUM's rules, each region operated as an individual
representative body, meaning that any strike ballots were supposed to be held
locally, not nationally, as was being commonly reported by the UK's MSM of the
time. It also appears to have been the case that just like in the best spy
novels of the time, the Thatcher government and its allies were more than
content to use police and security service personnel to both infiltrate and
monitor various branches of the NUM, whilst at the same time individual members
of the Conservative Party were reportedly carrying out their own covert
operations against the miners, in order to guarantee the government some form
of winning strategy. Clearly then, Margaret Thatcher was determined not to
suffer a similar fate to her political predecessors, of having her government
brought down by elements of Britain's Trade Union Movement, some of the same people
who would later go on to nominate and support Tony Blair, first as Labour Party
leader and then later as Prime Minister.
No doubt many would look back on
the years of our country's industrial unrest, with the lights going out, the
rubbish not being collected, factories being forced to work a 3-day-week and
the dead not being buried; and would come to the conclusion that Thatcher was
right to crush the power of our apparently out-of-control Trade Union Movement.
Most of us who lived through that period believed that to be the case, largely
because we either believed the distorted truths that were being published in
most of the MSM of the time, because we didn't agree with the often strident
and confrontational politics of some of the more high profile union leaders, or
because we simply didn't believe the stark warnings of some within the TUC
movement that the Thatcher regime was not only intent on the wholesale
de-industrialisation and privatisation of Britain's manufacturing base, but
would go on to create the basis for one of the most unequal, divided,
mistreated and surveilled societies in Western Europe, if not in the world.
That other great event of
Margaret Thatcher's period of office was undoubtedly the Falklands Conflict,
which not only cost hundreds of lives on both sides of the conflict, but also
cost millions of pounds to both country's economies. Britain's overall attitude
to the Falklands was generally one of indifference; and although a minimal
amount of expense and resources were spent on the islands, as per their status
of an Overseas British Territory, it was only when the Thatcher government came
to power in 1979 that events began to transpire that finally brought these
faraway windswept islands fully into the British public's consciousness. As
part of a large scale financial reorganisation of the Armed Forces, including
the Royal Navy, the Thatcher administration planned to withdraw HMS Endurance
from the region, leading the ruling military junta in Argentina to believe that
the UK had little strategic interest in the islands. In the same year, 1981,
Thatcher and her ministers also introduced the British Nationality Act, which
reduced the rights and entitlements of the Falkland Islander's, further adding
to the Argentine leader's belief that any military seizure of the disputed
territory by their Armed Forces would be largely ignored by a British
government, 8,000 miles away in London.
Serious miscalculations by
successive governments, lead by both James Callaghan and later Margaret Thatcher
almost guaranteed that a highly unpopular Argentine military junta would
attempt to seize the islands at some point in time, in the hope that Britain
would simply shrug its shoulders, or agree to negotiate away the island's
sovereignty, rather than send its naval forces halfway across the world.
Clearly, those avid supporters of the cult of Thatcher would have us believe
that the "Iron Lady" had absolutely no idea that a planned withdrawal
of HMS Endurance and a proposed downgrading of the Falkland Islander's
citizenship status would result in an Argentine invasion, which as it turned
out happened to be a fatal miscalculation by the supposedly "great"
British Premier. As she was to prove on a number of occasions, in other areas
of government policy, it was often her own personal conceit which lead to
instances of conflict and adversity that might well have been avoided; and
proven to be a whole lot cheaper, had she been a little less dogmatic.
With
hindsight, it is perhaps also worth remembering that despite the distances
involved, our own Armed Forces, who are some of the very best in the world; and
with some of the best equipment devised, were not actually facing a similar
professional army, but rather a rag-tag collection of poorly lead conscripts, who
had little interest in conquering anything, never mind a collection of
windswept islands in the South Atlantic. This is not to diminish or undermine
the role of our soldiers, sailors and airmen who risked and occasionally
sacrificed their lives to restore the principles of international law; and
protect the rights of the Falkland Islander's to self-determination over their
future rights. All too often our servicemen and women are called upon to pay
the price demanded by the policies of some or other misguided British
politician, who have little knowledge of or interest in the "cost in
British blood" that their adventurism will require, as we have
subsequently discovered to our cost in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Although
Britain was right to confront the Argentine Junta, over their illegal military
seizure of the Falkland's in 1982, a "great" political leader would
never have allowed a foreign state to believe that our country was so weak, or
so unprincipled, in the first place.
No comments:
Post a Comment