Iron Britannia

by Anthony Barnett

  So too did Margaret Thatcher and she campaigned on the need for measures to be taken. She offered ‘change’. She saw the expanded role of the state and the ‘relentless pursuit of equality’ as the explanation of the British sickness, and promised an assault upon the ‘progressive consensus’ of the 1945 welfare state.5 But while she has tried to cut back the role of the state in civil society (while increasing military expenditure), Thatcher nonetheless also considers it an essential part of her task that she should govern. ‘Govern what?’, one might ask, and the answer is to govern firmly. While Thatcher concurs that something is wrong, it is not the archaic nature of British sovereignty or the country’s institutional traditions that she regards as being in need of transformation. Rather, she believes that they are not being exercised enough. Thatcher does not comprehend that Parliamentary rule needs to be reconstructed democratically, she thinks that it only needs to be applied With resolution and consistency for all to be well. In her view, what is missing is a lack of nerve and moral fibre. Thus she has, ironically, got closer to grasping that there is something wrong in ‘the way’ that Britain is governed, than those who simply blamed the unions, isolation from Europe, the role of sterling, etc. But Thatcher’s solution—her gimmick—is that what is needed is ‘real’ British government. Her wing of the Tory party desires what it regards as a ‘return’ to home-made leadership that bears the once formidable impress of quality, ‘Made in Britain’.

  Such an approach ensured that a great deal less was actually made in Britain. 1980 saw the greatest-ever one year decline in British output.6 Deindustrialization, a massive increase in unemployment, a surge in the export of capital, the regressive reform of taxation and decrease in real wage incomes—these might all have some rationality in terms of the peculiar structure of British capitalism, one dominated by the City and multinationals. But the combination was hardly designed to ensure electoral popularity. Hence the miraculous advent of the Falklands for Thatcher.

  During the South Atlantic crisis, another issue more plausibly vital to British sovereignty cast an ironic light on the ensuing military battle. It illuminated the way the Falklands served to divert attention from the realities of the British economy—a diversion Thatcher positively welcomed when she spoke at Perth. One of the conventions of the EEC’s procedures which had reassured the British on entry in 1973 was the so-called Luxembourg compromise. This was understood to be a crucial safeguard which meant that no member state could have its vital interests over-ruled by a majority vote of the others. Thatcher’s government used the Luxembourg procedure as an instrument with which to veto Common Market business unless the UK got its way. But in the midst of the Falklands crisis, the major EEC states adroitly shattered the British presumption. They voted through agricultural price increases over the protests of the UK representatives, who claimed this was against the rules. To no avail: the UK’s domestic sovereignty was decisively violated, as Europe decided upon a rise in British food prices against the wishes of London. Already committed in the South Atlantic, Thatcher could not afford to be belligerent on two fronts. This was fortunate, as a conflict with the EEC would have pressed on the country’s genuine economic weakness. So when she was asked in Parliament whether she ‘would continue to want Britain to be a member of the EEC’, Thatcher’s response was: ‘I am suggesting that we do not dash into any hurried conclusions before we have had time to think these things out’.7 There are some wars, it seems, you do not enter lightly.

  Unlike the dash to the South Atlantic. It can be argued that Thatcher was a prisoner of events (in that she might not have survived either a motion of censure or an enquiry if she had not gone to war), while in a larger sense Parliament’s Churchillisrn thrust her into a demonstration of her ‘Iron’ capacities. Certainly she could not have successfully grabbed the mantle of Churchill single-handed, such a deed would have been fiercely contested by his other inheritors. But that said, she did not need time ‘to think things out’; it was the kind of issue she had wanted all along. If Galtieri was obliged to gamble on an invasion for reasons of domestic politics—under imminent threat of a general strike and faced with outspoken opposition—then what was political necessity for him was a godsend to his British counterpart. And not merely because the Falklands were a spectacular diversion from the economic indices and the rise of the SDP. Equally important was the opportunity for a display of pure ideological fortitude. The nothingness of the islands gave Thatcher perfect scope for action. Not a part of Europe, not integral to the Cold War, not even of economic consequence—the Falklands were a perfect stage for the exercise of Principle because they were so utterly removed from the complications of substance. Here, at last, was a way of showing ‘who governed’ to general admiration, in an antipodean nowhere that could be isolated by hunter-killer submarines. Just as Mao said because the Chinese people were poor and blank, beautiful pictures could be drawn upon them; so the blankness of the Falklands allowed the ‘lessons’ of Thatcherism to be projected onto them with perfect clarity.

  But if the pedagogy is designed for the general erudition of the British public, the point is being driven home with peculiar force against Thatcher’s enemies in the Conservative Party. The rise of Thatcherism signals an interesting mutation in the political direction of the main ruling-class party. Thatcher’s sword may have cut leftwards only, but it has done so from a point so far on the right that its initial victims have been in the centre and top of the Tory Party itself.

  Just before her election, Thatcher distinguished herself from her Labour opponents and Conservative predecessors thus: ‘I’m not a consensus politician or a pragmatic politician, I’m a conviction politician.’8 The difference is more than one of style, and even that is important. The form of dominance she offers is novel not only in terms of government since 1945, but also vis à vis the Conservatives and the long hegemony of Baldwin. It is interesting to compare her to Churchill himself. The old warrior would have looked askance upon the evangelical grocer’s daughter. Especially, perhaps, upon the way that she conducts war. Criticizing the American approach to international conflict, Churchill stated,

  The British mind does not work quite in this way. We do not think that logic and clear-cut principles are necessarily the sole keys to what ought to be done in swiftly changing and indefinable situations. In war in particular, we assigned a larger importance to opportunism and improvisation, seeking rather to live and conquer in accordance with the unfolding event than to aspire to dominate it often by fundamental decisions.9

  This is a wonderful description of Albion’s perfidy by one of its master practitioners. Bluff, opportunism, the subordination of all principles to the national interest of the moment: Churchill was describing the pragmatic flexibility of force and fraud by which the Empire was made and which has confounded so many people around the world.

  Thatcher, with her insistent emphasis on the governing principles of her foreign policy, is not exactly the true inheritor of Churchill’s bellicosity. But nor was Churchill merely what the Thatcherites would term a ‘wet’. That aspect of his legacy in which pragmatism is all, was characteristically summed up by Macmillan: ‘In the long run, and for the common good, the umpire is better than the duel.’10 (It was a justification for his ‘soft’ policy towards the unions.) While Macmillan took the pragmatic wing of the Conservative wartime policy to its logical conclusion, Thatcher has taken off on the other wing alone. How far will it fly?

  When Thatcher gained the nominal leadership of the Conservatives in 1975, her front-bench was overwhelmingly hostile, having initially supported Heath. It took Thatcher two years even after she won the 1979 election, to bring the cabinet fully under her control and that took all her considerable skill and contempt. Her general attitude towards her senior colleagues is apparently summed up by her description of the cabinet as ‘my blue bunnies’.11 When there were signs of rebellion in the hutch, she moved promptly. The turning point came in September 1981. To understand its full dr
ama, the history of the Heath years must be recalled. He had originally pledged to remove the state from day-today economic matters. But after his initial setbacks, he reverted to a more activist stance in what was dubbed his ‘U-turn’. With Thatcher in office, the Left feared an immediate, savage assault on the working-class institutions which would outdo Heath’s, while the media commentators waited with cynical smiles for her Heath-like return to more pragmatic and sensible policies after an initial brush with reality. Both groups were disconcerted. Whereas Heath had set out to renovate the traditional British patrician class in a European context and to reinforce its perspectives with a more intelligent globalism, Thatcher set out to replace the old paternalists altogether, with their attachment to ‘consensus’ policies and social welfare. This, indeed, seems to have been her prime task, and so she cautiously backed away from union showdowns she might lose, in particular with the miners, without abandoning her objectives.

  In the summer of 1981, the effects of economic deflation began to alarm the ‘wets’. Lord Thorneycroft, Chairman of the Conservative Party, suggested that there should not be an Autumn reshuffle. This was seen as a move to protect the old guard’s numerical majority in the Cabinet. Thatcher was apparently annoyed. In September 1981, Thorneycroft was removed as Party Chairman and replaced by one of her associates from the back-benches, Cecil Parkinson, educated at a state school. Lord Soames and Sir Ian Gilmour were dismissed. James Prior, who was the ‘wet’ Secretary of State for Employment, was shunted off to Northern Ireland—a graveyard of political careers—and replaced by another self-made Thatcherite, Norman Tebbitt, who began to draft anti-union laws. The Mail and the Express gloated over the fall of the ‘grandees’. Thus, far from softening her policies in mid-term, Thatcher reinforced her original partisan direction. Gilmour said that she was steering the country straight onto the rocks (not a reference to the Falklands) and called for an amelioration of her relentless deflation. One commentator concluded: ‘The old Tory establishment must know now, if it did not know before, that it faces ultimate liquidation at Thatcher’s hands if she stays as Leader.’12

  The war in the South Atlantic may now have ensured Thatcher’s predominance. Lord Carrington, the patrician Foreign Secretary, resigned after the Junta’s take-over, to the delight of the bellicose MPs. More important, Britain’s ultimate victory appeared to vindicate Thatcher’s adamantine, anti-consensus politics. A discernible shift to the right took place in the Conservative Party as a result of the war. Immediately after the surrender at Port Stanley, the Financial Times’ political editor concluded, ‘The Tory grandees are on their way out’.13 The rightwards movement might well continue, and he noted ominously, ‘The Prime Minister’s views on law and order, for example, have yet to be given full expression’. A week later The Times agreed, ‘The old guard have largely been routed’.14

  If this is indeed the case, then the Falklands crisis will have made a historic contribution to Britain’s domestic politics. In class terms, Thatcher represents the self-made, ideological believer in country and capitalism for whom exchange and the market have precedence over manufacture. Under her leadership, petty-bourgeois militancy has taken over from the old, semi-cultured, patrician elite. Has the governess now taken over from the squire? The question might seem an odd way to address the Falklands War for those who are not British. Yet within the UK it is a recognizable interpretation of the dispatch of the Armada. The country house has at last been captured. But it has not been stormed by an aroused rabble of gardeners, against whom it was well fortified. It has not been taken over by the disgruntled servants, who have always been closely policed. It has not been seized by a radicalized scion of the mansion who had the misfortune to be repelled by its inequality and attracted to theory. It has not even been overrun by the proletariat, who are kept a good distance away. Assault from all these likely quarters had been foreseen and was defused. Instead, the pillar of rectitude and narrow-mindedness, the governess whose loyalty had never been questioned, who naively believes in the whole thing and regards it as virtuous, has decided to run it herself.

  Twenty years ago it was argued that the historic origins of the British crisis lay in the stultification of its bourgeois revolution by a capitalist aristocracy at once landed and schooled in world dominion.15 There may be much in the argument that needs to be up-dated or corrected, certainly in so far as it presumed a model of ‘proper’ bourgeois revolution on the European mainland. It would be more accurate to say that capitalism is necessarily a system in which economic power does not rule directly. It therefore never finds a completely coherent, organic expression of its dominion in any country. The economic ‘democracy’ of capital, its necessary freedom to accumulate competitively, will always ensure that its institutions of legislation and of executive political power are independent of, as well as subordinate to, money. Nonetheless, the central argument remains compelling. Historically dominated by financial capital located in the south, whose millionaires always outnumbered industrial barons, the British state was animated by those trained in an imperial rather than a domestic role, and in ledgers and fields rather than in factories. The result has been a marked absence of a recognizable bourgeois political class in any dominant sense—at once practical, realistic and—yes—businesslike.

  Thatcher’s own intellectual guru, Sir Keith Joseph, recognized this, when he suggested that one source of Britain’s economic problems was that it ‘never had a capitalist ruling class or a stable haute bourgeoisie’.16 But the Thatcherites themselves have hardly filled the gap. The contest between them and the ‘wets’ for the leadership of the Conservative Party and the nation will not resolve the structural weakness. It is a struggle between a supra-bourgeois and a sub-bourgeois stratum; between stricken patricians and overconfident arrivistes. It is important to note the limits as well as the significance of this shift, one which has only altered the balance of power within the same class bloc. The squire may have been superannuated, to return to the metaphor, but he is still allowed to poke the embers from the comfort of his armchair. He has not been ejected, nor has the house been burnt down. In particular, Thatcherism has if anything invigorated the relationship with the City and its foreign investments which are so lucrative for those with money at a time when the country as a whole is in recession.17

  The domestic-transformation of the Conservative Party helps to explain a paradox, one which puzzled a number of foreigners. Why, after the UK has given away territory many times its own size since 1945, should it baulk and strain at the Falklands, islands remarkable for their insignificance? As if to underline the contrast, when the Navy set sail for the South Atlantic, the Queen flew to Canada to sign the formal assignation of that country’s sovereignty into its own hands. Because Canada’s dominion status was historically early, residual powers over its constitution had remained in London. The ceremonial events of the new, 1982 Constitution were boycotted by Quebec, while the document itself ignored the just claims of the Indians with whom the Crown had originally treatied. All the same, the celebrations were a further symbol of that peaceful handover which has been much touted as the acme of British reasonableness or even proof of the British civilizing mission, despite innumerable armed interventions. Indeed, negotiated relinquishment has functioned as a retrospective vindication of the British Empire. For even when it has been a consequence of duress, implemented to prevent a military debacle, final agreement has always helped to incorporate some of the local elite and head off subsequent hostility, thus preserving many British economic interests. The only outright failure was in South Yemen. It was hardly sufficient to undo the image of a historic and elegant transition.

  Yet now the best part of the Royal Navy has been dispatched to prevent Argentina from retaining that which it has already been offered implicitly, namely sovereignty over the Falkland Islands. The response is further evidence of the decline of the ‘patricians’ and a step that helps eliminate their influence. For it was the British mercantile gentry
(such as Macmillan) just as much as the public school reformers like Attlee, who had overseen and manipulated the ductile transfer of sovereignty around the world. They bowed to the winds of change, and this helped Britain to retain disproportionate influence as its economic power waned. Perhaps their most outstanding representative was Lord Mountbatten, a relative of the Royal Family, Allied Supreme Commander for Southeast Asia during the Second World War and the Labour appointed Governor of India, who presided over the sub-continent’s independence. Although no one should underestimate its recuperative powers, Lord Carrington, the architect of the Zimbabwe settlement, was probably the last representative of this caste to wield independent influence from high office. He resigned from his post as Foreign Minister after the 3 April Falklands debate, in which his policies were denounced from both sides of the House of Commons but never defended by his Cabinet colleagues. The tenor of his own statement in the House of Lords—which also debated the Falklands on 3 April—was noticeably different from that of Thatcher’s. Their Lordships were saddened rather than enraged. Meanwhile, in the ‘other place’, Poujadists of imperialism took command of foreign policy, and this may come to be seen as one of the more significant aspects of the Falklands affair.

  It was not completely fortuitous that the Falklands should have suddenly precipitated a conflict between the Thatcherites and the wets. Surprisingly enough, the islands have been a matter in which the Prime Minister took a personal interest. The standard uninformed view at the beginning of the crisis (which I also shared) blamed the problem on the uninspired approach of the Foreign Office. Edward Pearce, a leader writer for the Daily Telegraph put it as follows. All would have been well, and Argentina would not have dared an invasion, if Britain had made it plain that it would literally stick to its guns in the Falklands. On the other hand, ‘Had we been ruthlessly soft instead of soft in the fair-minded and gentlemanly way we prefer, the Falklanders would have been told that time was up, grants for resettlement in New Zealand were available …’. However, as he imagined it, the Foreign Office tried to bluff. Its representatives talked about leaseback, in their ‘maddeningly unassailable way’, which Pearce thinks Thatcher is right to detest. The Foreign Office thus occupied ‘the worst of all possible worlds’.18 We now know that this explanation, which blames the ‘wets’ and sees Thatcher as coming to the rescue to salvage British pride, is wrong.