When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain

by Robert Chesshyre

  A man from Welling wrote that the ‘nearest approximation [to the occupation of Britain] is the current one of American penetration of the economic and military front, supported politically by some of our own “Quislings”.’ A London woman commented: ‘Cultured people in this country do not consider that much of value … has ever percolated through from America to us. Noisy, pushy and ignorant American tourists are here on sufferance.’ (What, I wondered, would a Spaniard conclude about the character of the British if he took as his crucial evidence the behaviour of British holidaymakers in the Mediterranean?) A London man wrote: ‘I find Americans … intolerant, ignorant, bullying and small-minded.’ Many correspondents argued that Washington and Moscow were twin sources of evil, with Washington, if anything, the more dangerous (this view is also frequently recorded by opinion pollsters from people who simultaneously say that Britain ought to keep her own nuclear weapons). Russia’s contribution to winning the Second World War was lauded, and America’s denigrated – ‘Americans lost one in 325 of their population’, wrote a man from Essex, ‘the Russians one in eight’, as if, somehow, service to a cause could be counted by wounds. The United States was castigated for historical sins – genocide of native Americans, slavery; for social ills – crime, racism, handguns; for imperialism – Nicaragua, South Korea, Thailand (!), El Salvador, Grenada and elsewhere.

  None of these letters mentioned the 1939 Soviet-Nazi pact, the subjugation of eastern Europe, Stalin and the gulags, dissidents or secret police, Hungary 1956 or Czechoslovakia 1968, or Afghanistan. None of the writers troubled to recall the few blemishes in the British historical record – feudalism, the thumb screw, colonialism, child labour, transportation, and one or two we have in common with the Americans, like the slave trade and the treatment of indigenous peoples around the world. One writer summed up his feelings: ‘Any impartial observer of world history in the last century should conclude that, next to fascism, the single most murderous influence on a global scale is clear: the domination of America.’

  The central thrust of many of these letters was that the sins of the United States were so great that it was unacceptable to have to read anything in praise of any aspect of American life. To enjoy Disney World was to excuse slavery; to praise American generosity was to condone the murderous slaughter of the inner cities; to laud the opportunities available to the vast majority of Americans was to be callous towards the sufferings of the very poor. The United States was a seamless web of evil. Eventually, when I thought that post on the subject was exhausted, there came just one letter saying kind things about Americans – from a retired squadron leader, living in Botswana, who as a young pilot officer had watched formations of B-17S taking off each morning from British soil. ‘Five hours later I would see them limping back, fewer in number … great holes in wings and fuselages, Very lights looping off them to indicate burns and bodies aboard.’

  I was reminded by these diatribes of reading an account of an anti-imperialist seminar in Mexico City. A left-wing French intellectual was holding forth about the evils of Uncle Sam; one of his audience, having heard it before, wandered to the back of the room and looked through the window. Below in the street was a great throng. ‘Who are those people, and what are they doing in the street?’ he asked a Mexican standing by. ‘Oh,’ came the reply, ‘there’s always a crowd there. The American Embassy is round the corner. Those people are queuing for visas.’ There may not be similar crowds in Grosvenor Square, but more British emigrate to the United States than the combined total from other western European countries: were it not for Green Card restrictions, the annual migration across the Atlantic would amount to a haemorrhage of Britain’s most ambitious and enterprising countrymen. The man in the street likes the idea of a society that educates all of its children adequately; where the wrong accent is not an instant barrier; where effort will bring decent rewards; and in which open government rather than secrecy is a national presumption.

  Taking stock eighteen months after my return, I found myself inevitably making comparisons between Britain and the United States. There are, of course, aspects of both countries that a wise man would incorporate in his blueprint for a decent society. Like many who have lived on both sides of the Atlantic, I had fantasies of the perfect nation rising, like Atlantis, in the middle of the ocean. But, as it is Britain I have come back to and where my children are growing up, it is Britain I am concerned with. The United States, still growing and brimful of self-confidence, will go on making the brash mistakes that some Englishmen find so distasteful. But America will also develop and mature, creating new opportunities for its people, and needs no one to fear for it. But Britain, staid in her ways, slapping preservation orders on outmoded ways of thought and action, needs taking by the shoulders and shaking. Coming back across the Atlantic was like leaving a stiff, invigorating breeze to plunge into a stuffy, smoke-filled back room. Anti-Americanism is often the old codger in the corner’s objection to having the window opened an inch to let in fresh air.

  ‘Enterprise’ has become a loaded word in Britain, almost interchangeable with Thatcherism. Enterprise is part of Thatcherism, certainly, but Thatcherism is an ideology which has been applied to matters that ought to lie outside the market-place, like university research and race relations. It has an intellectual purity which offends common sense. Many who ‘fail’ are not equipped to compete, and their failure is not due to some deep moral flaw or inadequacy which is susceptible to exhortation or bullying. That most over-borrowed of Hamlet’s notions is perfectly applicable to Mrs Thatcher – there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in her philosophy. Where she is hated – as in Skelmersdale and Easington – it is not for her advocacy of enterprise, but for the limitations to her compassion and for her hectoring style. The tilt of her head, the glint in her eye, the tone of her voice unite to tell those who dare quibble with even the small print of her beliefs, ‘Nonsense, you have got it quite wrong.’ By being such a person, she damages the cause she espouses, like the dogmatic, self-righteous schoolteacher, whose pupils instinctively reject his lessons, valuable though they might be. Among the lasting consequences of Thatcherism will be harsh divisions between the uncaring and the uncared-for classes.

  The Revd Deryk Evans told one of his congregation in Skelmersdale to stop taking her spiritual temperature all the time – ‘You only take your temperature when you are ill.’ If that is an accurate perception, Britain indeed is ill. By early 1987 taking the national temperature, addressing what the Victorians called the ‘condition of England’ question, had become an obsession, ‘HOW FAR HAVE WE SUNK?’ asked the Spectator. In the Daily Telegraph, Lord [Jo] Grimond wrote: ‘Creeping disillusion rises like mist from the stagnant waters that surround us. Drugs and violence are spawned by vexation, boredom and disappointment.’ The Conservative editor of the Sunday Telegraph, Peregrine Worsthorne, wrote of ‘the country’s frightening collapse into barbarism’, and suggested that, outside economics, Thatcherism may be a cause rather than a cure of our national ills. Whatever your politics, there was plenty of saloon-bar evidence by the beginning of Mrs Thatcher’s third term that things weren’t what they used to be. A health administrator said to me: ‘The last eight years represent an abrupt turn in British social history. We have run out of steam in a process that began in the early nineteenth century – the drive to improve public health, education and housing.’ He added: ‘A country can thrive either on its natural resources, which we have been squandering, or by selling things abroad. We are fast becoming a nation of bric-à-brac dealers who live by selling our junk to one another.’

  People who wrote to me at the Observer after a series of articles I had written on aspects of Britain tended to an elegiac tone, decrying what they saw as an erosion in national decency and personal standards, and looking back wistfully to a vanished era of higher personal and moral standards and greater social cohesion. Their targets were various: a GP was disgusted by patients who skived off work; a Ford export
manager had watched the disintegration of the car industry ‘with a growing state of despair as we tore our industries apart via industrial anarchy’; the many correspondents who saw the ‘yob’ as a menacing symbol of national decline. Each age has looked back with nostalgia. In 1802 Wordsworth wanted to turn the clock back 150 years:

  Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

  England hath need of thee; she is a fen

  Of stagnant waters.

  Milton himself had feared that ‘an age too late’ might ‘dampen my intended wing’. We as Britons believe instinctively that there has been an erosion in human stature: our politicians are not what they were; our policemen are more corrupt; there are not so many of ‘the old school’ about; those who teach our children are puny mortals set alongside the characters we remember from the classroom. Even where there has been a measurable improvement, as in sport, we still contend yesterday’s men were giants: can there be a modern soccer player to compare with Stanley Matthews?

  That said, there is no doubt that, despite BMWs and the wine bars, Britain is suffering from a national malaise. Most people, like my letter-writers, know this, and deplore whatever facet of the malaise that affects them most. Britain did lose an empire, and did fail to find a role, but yearning to go backwards is fruitless. When Harold Macmillan died in December 1986, the period of his premiership was cast as a golden age, but at the time many who were idealistic had demonstrated against the ‘Supermac’ era as the hated culmination of ‘thirteen years of Tory misrule’. What we do need is an injection of the values that have been branded as ‘wet’ by those – like City sharks – who find them inconvenient. I returned to a country devoid of moral political leadership. Ancient Lord Hailsham, dressed up like something from Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, occasionally sounded the alarm – ‘We have betrayed the young because we have not taught them spiritually. We have left them with nothing to believe in, nothing to be proud of, nothing to hope for, nothing to seek.’ The Church of England, no longer the Conservative Party at prayer, discovered the deep despair of the inner city, and, to the fury of the government, broadcast the reality. On Merseyside and Wearside, people who had not darkened the door of a church in years turned to bishops David Sheppard and David Jenkins – castigated on the right as meddling clerics – for leadership. The politicians responded with their own moralizing. It is cheaper, of course, to throw morality at a problem than money.

  I suspect that many decent people are opting out of the moral struggle. They may have given up their personal ambitions because the price was too high but still feel powerless to assert publicly the principles they believe in against the prevailing climate. The British reward system has perverted values – the 25-year-old money trader earning his tens of thousands knows deep down that he is not ‘worth’ that money – and the media propagate a spurious reality which washes like a rolling tide through the minds of readers and viewers. The real sins of television are not the current affairs programmes that embarrass the government – the song and dance about these in a land where free speech is supposed to prevail is nauseous – but in the mind-numbing game shows and the escapism of the soap operas. The glossy American ones – ‘Dallas’, ‘Dynasty’, et al. – reduce life to a progression of snakes and ladders. In one episode a character loses a wife or a deal: two episodes later he’ll win a better wife and a better deal. Our home-grown ‘EastEnders’ is a catalogue of verbal violence and hatred. Whenever I have watched it, I have never seen anything other than people snarling at one another – lovers, spouses, fellow drinkers, business partners – or actually fighting. Mary Whitehouse monitored two ‘EastEnders’ episodes and found four assaults or attacks and the entire cast involved in continuous bitter argument. ‘All this made absolute nonsense of the codes of family and children’s viewing which the BBC has published,’ she said. For once I must agree with Mrs W!

  Is it surprising that – two generations after the 1944 Education Act – the Sun sells over four million copies a day? Its essence was succinctly encapsulated by the New Statesman – ‘big breasts, “Britain is best” and “Bully bites head off budgie”.’ The real gap between the two Britains could perhaps be most accurately arrived at by separating those who read the Sun from those who deplore its existence. The New Statesman concluded its analysis: ‘[the Sun] is the profane and bitter anger of the working class against those who set themselves up to tell them what to think and what to do’. The extension of middle-class values – which post-war liberals expected would happen by example and osmosis – was aborted by the ‘them’ and ‘us’ gulf that runs through the heart of these divided islands.

  The right, being so in the ascendancy, has grown arrogant in its haste to pooh-pooh uncomfortable facts, like the deep inequalities of health between rich and poor, which time, nutrition and medicine have done little to erode. A Daily Telegraph reader, applauding the demise of the Health Education Council, wrote: ‘Surely we do not need an expensive report to tell us that the poor, with their likely disadvantages of inferior diet, housing and general discomforts are more likely to die earlier and contract diseases than those who are better off? [Assertions] that this situation is unacceptable in a democracy are difficult to understand.’ The poor, as ever, are always with us. At best, commentators do not believe the facts, dismissing them as the twisted work of the derided servants of the ‘nanny state’, like social workers: at worst, they don’t care. In a society of ‘haves’, the ‘have-nots’ can rapidly become objects of derision, taunted for their poverty and inadequacies. Writers on the new right are witty and plausible, and they undoubtedly hold the high ground, but their logic often does not stand scrutiny.

  I have before me an article in the Daily Telegraph by Norman Stone, Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, which argues that the crisis in British science will not be cured by money. It carries a characteristically new rightist headline – ‘BRAINLESS TALK ABOUT THE BRAIN DRAIN’ – with its ill-concealed sneer at anyone ‘wet’ enough to worry about the issue. Professor Stone uses three of his four columns to provide an entertaining account of how James Watt, Thomas Arkwright and Jethro Tull made their contributions to society without the first notion of what pure science was about, how the Cavendish Laboratory scraped by, and how the only general benefit from the American space programme has been the non-stick saucepan. Having put whingeing scientists thoroughly in their place, confirmed the prejudices of his £75,000-a-year City readers, and made it intellectually respectable not to care that British science is being driven into the ground, with one sentence he throws his argument into reverse: ‘We must accept nowadays that science is much more complicated than in the past and requires money.’ With one bound, our hero is free. Real life is not so easy.

  One doesn’t have to swallow all (or even most) tenets of Thatcherism to advocate capitalist enterprise as the most efficient engine to drive society and create the surpluses needed for collective action and for protecting the unfortunate. The records of nationalized industries and the attitude of state and local government bureaucrats demonstrate the inefficient way forward offered by the alternatives. But how do we translate that realism into action? Enterprise is bred into Americans: the kid brown-bagging groceries in a supermarket on a Saturday morning may well be the son of successful, rich parents. How many privileged youths in Britain learn the fundamentals of enterprise from the bottom up? Young Americans working their way through college see nothing wrong in service, be it ever so humble. It gives them a grounding in the creation of wealth and close contact with less privileged or less gifted citizens, which stands them in good stead both in their careers and in everyday life. The director of a British enterprise trust said that when he visited schools he asked pupils if they had ever done anything ‘enterprising’, like repairing bicycles for money or selling home-made cakes. It was rare if more than one in twenty put up a hand. In an American school there was only one kid who didn’t shoot up his arm.

  In Britain, we have instil
led in us the notion that enterprise is exploitive: one man’s profit is made at another man’s expense. The idea that it might create another man’s opportunity didn’t occur to me for many years. When John Bloom, the one-time washing-machine tycoon and pre-Thatcher Thatcherite, was a national serviceman at a remote RAF base, he chartered buses to take his fellow erks for Saturday nights out. What appalled me then was that, instead of splitting the cost amongst his comrades at arms, Mr Bloom made a profit on the deal. But, if he had not had that motive, a large number of bored teenagers might have spent Saturday cooped up in the Naafi drinking tea. And, although there are people who would have arranged the bus for nothing (and even borne the loss if someone had failed to pay up), there are, sadly, not enough such citizens to go round.

  During the 1987 election campaign, we were constantly told that Britain was top of this or that league table for productivity, growth in employment and industrial efficiency. With three million unemployed, sixteen million in ‘poverty’, with the run-down, filthy inner cities, the lengthening hospital waiting lists, the physically depressing schools, the manufacturing output still below the level of eight years earlier, the rapidly widening balance of trade deficit on manufactured goods, common sense should indicate that the statistics, if not entirely a sham, are widely misleading. An understanding of the fundamentals of commerce and manufacture is growing; a schoolchild is more likely now than twenty years ago to be taught something of the economy of his own country; the concept that work has an objective – usually the satisfaction of a customer – beyond a wage for the worker is gaining ground; more people are breaking free of large, stultifying employers and doing something for themselves. But it will take a yet greater change in outlook and effort before the British society and economy will be regenerated in the manner in which Americans daily make things happen by responding urgently and automatically to necessity and opportunity, if you mention an idea at a dinner party,’ said one former British diplomat in Washington, ‘by noon the next day three of your fellow guests will have done something about it.’