Reflections of a stormy petrel

Margaret Thatcher's death has set off a great deal of noise around the world. The burden of the song, even from supposed opponents, is that a great leader is dead. Well, I have long observed that when historians call someone "Great", with few exceptions it is someone that normal men would cross the road to avoid, were it not that it would be very wholesome never to be noticed by them at all. Alexander the Great, who genuinely wanted to conquer the whole world in one enormous, open-ended war; Peter the Great, who cut off the heads of rebel nobleman with his own two hands; Frederick the Great, who won the most unjust wars in his time; and so on. Charles the Great and Alfred the Great are exceptions, and even so, Charles got the undivided kingdom of the Franks by forcing his own brother into a monastery.

But in the case of Margaret Thatcher, I doubt whether history will even ascribe her that kind of greatness. Frankly, when my conservative friends speak of Margaret Thatcher, I wonder whether we are speaking of the same person. She has entered history, it would seem, with a forged prospectus, and future historians will wonder at the power of image-making and of the will to be deceived. Let me get through the various aspects of her public image and explain why I can't take a single one of them seriously.

NOT A SELF-MADE WOMAN
Much has been made of her being a "grocer's daughter", but the grocer in question was in fact the owner of a large business and a mayor of Grantham, rich enough to send her to Oxford when that was no joke. Socially, that placed her above two of her immediate predecessors, the carpenter's son Edward Heath, and the trades unionist with no degree, James Callaghan, and on a level with the third, Harold Wilson, like her the son of a local politician. When the war came, she shifted her studies from Law - her real passion - to Chemistry; coincidentally, Law students were subject to conscription, and Chemistry students were not. She has never worked as a chemist, and unlike Angela Merkel has no research to her credit. As a young woman, she was blonde and beautiful, and, unlike her lookalike Marilyn in the famous movie, she actually did marry a millionaire - an oil multi-millionaire - which made her future secure and her political ascent a matter of personal choice rather than a necessary career. This does not deny her famous ability for hard work, but places it in proper context. She never had to work to live.

NOT AN ANTI-COMMUNIST
Communism fell because of its own internal weakness (long before Reagan's presidency, Russia was having to buy Canadian grain and the designs of outdated Fiat long out of production), and the ruling Western leaders happily took the credit. But while Ronald Reagan's arms race can plausibly claim to have sped up the result, and Reagan's distaste for "the evil empire" was a dominant feature of his life, Margaret Thatcher only talked a good game. When it came to real victims of real Communism, she was as heartless as an East German border guard. At the time when the Boat People were THE humanitarian issue of the day, and even the international left were beginning to awaken to the horror of events in Vietnam and Cambodia, she would not let one starving Vietnamese into Great Britain, and to the people who pleaded for them within her own cabinet, she gave the classical racist's answer: "Ask them why they don't take them in their own houses." Then when the Wall came down, she showed herself openly hostile to the reunification of Germany. It has since been said that this was because of her fears of an overmighty Germany in Europe, but that is nonsense. German dominance in Europe was already an accomplished fact; the arrival of seventeen million Ossis did not significantly alter that; and the East, except for Saxony, had at any rate always been the potato-fed, backward Mezzogiorno and Deep South of Germany. And we should remember that the Gorbachev of whom she said that he "is a man we can do business with" was an unrepentant, unapologetic Communist bent not on reversing, but on reforming and reinforcing the Party.

NOT A SOCIAL CONSERVATIVE
I doubt Margaret Thatcher would have opposed "gay marriage", and if she did, it would have been out of habit and not of reasoning, and she would probably have ended up being reasoned into supporting it. Her positions on social values were otherwise hardly distinct from President Obama's. She never saw an abortion she did not like; she did nothing to slow down the furious rate of divorce; she abolished grammar schools and polytechnics, introduced the GCSE, and did nothing to reinforce teachers' authority or the devastating drift towards "child-centred" education. She cut, but did not reform, the dole; in fact, since her policies saw millions committed to long-term unemployment, she could not afford to tamper with it too much (and neither have any of her successors been able to since). In my view, however, nothing did so much damage as her making common cause with the bandit and pornographer Rupert Murdoch, whose sleazy, debasing and vicious "newspapers" became the staple reading of tens of millions. Anyone who, in my view, contemplates the rise of Britain's unlovely lad/ladette culture without reflecting that these lads and ladettes had been exposed to Murdoch's pornography since earliest childhood, is simply trying to avoid facts; and the intimate relationship between Thatcherism and Murdoch is, in spite of what my Tory friends want to believe, simply a fact.

NOT A DEMOCRAT
She drained local authorities of prestige and authority (read Simon Jenkins' THE NATIONALIZATION OF BRITAIN), and consistently worked to leave only one power in the State. The most inglorious and damaging of this long chain of petty usurpations is the abolition of the Greater London County Council, a piece of utter administrative and organizational folly that gives the lie to any notion of her being a prudent or adroit administrator, and that left one of Europe's largest cities (and Britain's capital, not to mention her showpiece to the world) under the administration of 33 squabbling local councils under the co-ordination of a few unelected and faceless bureaucrats appointed by her. And why did she do that? Because the London City Council, led by a rather extreme Labour faction, taunted her by such stunts as posting the daily sum of unemployed on the Council buildings, facing the Houses of Parliament, where she could see them. They could not do anything against her, but she abolished them because she did not like what they were saying. Democracy is something else.

NOT A SOUND-MONEY WOMAN
Thatcher threw out the best of Keynesianism, but kept the worst. It all began with the frenzy of privatization, where people were effectively given money for nothing under the guise of shareholdings into privatized companies and banks. That was the beginning of the orgy of debt that has lasted ever since, backed by inflated property equity. To be fair, Thatcher only started this chain of horrors; it took, for instance, the supposed Labour man of the people John Prescott to conceive of increasing house prices by destroying tens of thousands of perfectly viable homes in unfashionable areas.

NOT A NATIONALIST
Whatever his feelings about trades unions or the working classes, no sincere nationalist would have allowed the destruction and outsourcing of enormous parts of British manufacturing, including strategic ones such as shipping. Compare and contrast with the behaviour of French governments of both sides during this period: who is it who still has a car industry, shipyards, and so on? Indeed, even the armed forces that gave her her signature success in the Falklands were, by the end of her period, suspect of no longer having the strength for another such campaign.

NOT A STRONG LEADER, AND NOT PROOF AGAINST TURNING
Many of us who did not know the background felt that she was at her best after the Brighton bomb outrage of 1984, when, woken out of a sound sleep by the explosion that killed many of her friends and colleagues, she was seen, one or two hours later, not one hair out of place, telling the journalists assembled in the cold and fearful night: "Of course the conference goes on". She looked the very image of defiance against terror, and I think even those who, like me, hated her guts, felt like clapping.
Yet within a year she had agreed and signed the Anglo-Irish agreement.
As the furious Ulster Protestants pointed out at the time, this was a deal that gave the Republic of Ireland what they had claimed, and Britain refused, since 1922: a legitimate part and a lawful role in the affairs of the North. It was ineffective, because a government-level agreement could not stop the Provisional IRA, who were, whatever individual contacts there might be, nearly as much at war against Dublin as against London; however, it is was an absolutely central precedent in what happened later. The North Irish peace agreements are generally credited to her successors, Major and Blair, but the whole secret negotiation that led to them was justified by the existence of the Anglo-Irish agreement.
Margaret Thatcher had form in this area. Back in the seventies, her supporters were among the few who would back Ian Smith's minority government in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe; but it was the Thatcher government who persuaded the Rhodesian whites to effectively surrender, to the vast surprise of a watching world. And while nobody could object to the principle of majority rule, the results of that deal have otherwise been mixed at best, and suggest that not enough trouble had been taken to think what should be done to prevent tyranny in the future of Zimbabwe. But, above all, it was Margaret Thatcher who signed the Treaty of Maastricht.
I repeat. It was Margaret Thatcher who signed the treaty of Maastricht.
Even to those of us who favour a united Europe, this monster of a treaty, which probably nobody has ever read in its entirety, was a rather dubious object. I would imagine that a Nigel Farage or an Ian Duncan-Smith would not even have considered signing it, and would have let it be known. Margaret Thatcher signed it; and - which is what really can't be rationally explained - went on to act as though she had not, interjecting "NO" in every European political debate, without reflection and indeed without much political action. That is ultimately why Sir Geoffrey Howe and her other ministers decided they had had enough. They may not have been overfond of Europe and Europeans, but they did not see why they should go on defending a policy that went against what the Prime Minister herself had signed, and seemed no better than the essence of capricious futility.

This unpleasant abortionist creep, who can't hold back from connecting opposition to abortion with Fascism, nonetheless agrees with me that it is specifically opposition to abortion that has fuelled the rise of the conservative movement. (History disproves her pathetic claim in that area: Fascism, and Nazism even more, were into free love, sexual licence, the abortion of inferior children, and euthanasia - all the dear, sweet, progressive programmes that re-surfaced in American universities - where Hitler had been widely popular in the thirties, after being briefly bombed into silence by American bombers in the forties.)

Marcotte misses the point that the Tea Party is a deliberate attempt to do what "fiscal conservatives" have been itching to do for years, which is get the anti-abortion majority to forget about such "divisive" causes as abortion and concentrate instead on such "uniting" matters as tax cuts for the rich. There are two forces in the general area of the GOP whose long-term aim is to defang the anti-abortion movement and co-opt its membership for their own political purposes: old-style party hucksters such as Karl Rove, who despise Christians and anti-abortionists pretty much as much as Democrats do, and the Murdoch empire, which is built on pornography and based on a debased view of human nature that could not survive a moralized society. The Rove Republicans have been trying for decades to ride the anti-abortion tiger without conceding anything substantial to it. The Murdoch group is smarter. Part of Rupert Murdoch's animal cunning, base but clever in its own way, is not to try and create movements himself. The British newspaper owners, his predecessors, tried that in the 1930 election and were destroyed, shamed and ridiculed by the professional politician Stanley Baldwin. Murdoch and his people keep an eye on popular movements and, when the time is right, co-opt them. Then they use their formidable financial and organizational power to direct, penetrate and corrupt them so that, whatever happens, the real interests of the Murdoch group are never harmed and always promoted.

These interests amount to two things: weakening corporate taxation and taxation on rich individuals - the whole Murdoch group is one enormous, matchlessly brilliant tax evasion operation designed in order to evade as much British, American and Australian taxation as possible - and insuring that their pornographic populism is never put under serious scrutiny. In doing so, they are quite willing to make some quite remarkable alliances. In Britain, for instance, Rebekah Wade, when editor of the original Murdoch porn sheet, The News of the World, took up with great enthusiams the cause of an anti-paedophile campaigner. This from the press group that has done more than everyone else put together to sexualize every corner of British life, which has made parents so used to smut on every page that they left it around for their children to read (literally - I saw that with my own two eyes, in umpteen British homes, in the eighties and nineties), and from which pre-teen girls learned to idolize softcore models such as Samantha Fox. But it makes sense in two important ways: first, Sara Payne, the movement's leader, is quite frankly an ignorant woman whom Rebekah Wade found easy to manipulate (Payne was shocked, poor creature, to find that she too had been on the phone-tap list of her dear friend Rebekah); and second and more important, it gives any possible sense of revulsion at the sexualization of society a focus and a limit. Child rapists, of course, are the lowest of the low; to focus and concentrate on them the disgust that in other ages was felt for pimps and whores of every sort offers a cheap salve to the violated conscience of natural man - and, even more, woman - in sexual matters. This, of course, is nothing but good news to the biggest pimp the world has ever seen, the inventor of the Page Three Girls, the exploiter of "reality" shows. It also, as a side effect, offers journalists in general a steady source of monster stories. In a sense, it is the ideal Murdoch compromise: the Murdoch media get to carry on untroubled with their appeal to the crotch, at the same time as they get to posture as moralizing campaigners. Really, if homicidal child rapists did not exist, Murdoch would have had to invent them.

The alliance with the Tea Party is a broader matter, but there are some points in common. The heart of it is to deviate, twist and corrupt an existing popular movement so that it works to the advantage of the Murdoch media. The popular groundswell against paedophilia had been going on for a couple of decades when Rebekah Wade took it up, as a natural and humanly inevitable reaction to the stated desire of Sexual Revolution theorists and publicists to sexualize children. (In Denmark, the age of consent was abolished in 1968 and only restored - as a result of some such groundswells of public opinion - in 1978; for ten years, child sex and child pornography were legal in one of the most prosperous and respected countries in the world.) Likewise, the movement against abortion, a despised fringe factor in the seventies, has been slowly picking up strength decade after decade until at present a majority of Americans declare themselves pro-life at every poll. Marcotte, the doctrinaire abortionist, calls it a "moral panic", but anyone without her blinders ought to realize that moral panics don't last three decades and don't pick up strength over that period. Certainly it could no longer be treated, either by the GOP or by Murdoch, as a noisy minority.

The Tea Party certainly started as a grassroots movement; but the Murdoch media pimped it from the beginning, and it is really remarkable to what an extent not only basic views, but talking points and intellectual fads they originated (such as the demonization of the little-know eighty-year-old academic Frances Fox Piven) spread like oil slicks across the whole movement right; and how even such an utterly compromised Murdochista apparatchick as Bill O'Reilly, whose sexual shenanigans should have put him beyond the pale long ago, remains a guiding light of sorts. Forty years ago, Murdoch's animal cunning identified an enormous gap in the market - the conservative/populist area; and the feeling that Fox-TV pundits are the ones who "speak our language" has since then increasingly blinded conservatives to the debasing, manipulative and mafia-like characteristics of Murdoch and his empire. Mere gratitude that someone noticed them has co-opted them into the Murdoch camp, with the inevitable corrupting results. Remember, this is a guy who managed to find enough "friends" in the Vatican to get himself awarded a Papal medal, at the same time as he published some of the most Jack T.Chick-like Church-bashing in the mainstream media.

And the Tea Party has been amazingly effective in drawing attention away from the scandal of abortion and to the obsession with tax. Some of its leaders have openly said that conservatives ought to stop pressing on "divisive" issues such as abortion. Never mind whether this is a representative view or not; the mere fact that it has been said and publicized means that abortion is no longer the central issue - that it is in play, one of many things on which conservatives may agree or disagree. And this is only the beginning. In actual fact, however "divisive" anti-abortion views may be, no opponent of abortion has ever done has been so recklessly divisive and socially and politically irresponsible as the Tea Party's successful attempt to blackmail the Senate and the Administration into not raising taxes at a time when that is desperately necessary and any sane "conservative", including Margaret Thatcher, would have. I have a suspicion that one reason why we haven't heard a lot from Sarah Palin in the last few weeks is that she is quite happy to let Michelle Bachmann and the other idiots run after this hare and compromise themselves in the long term. Any serious presidential candidate cannot indulge in this of idiotic rhetoric, on pains of being found out one day after taking the oath of office. You can bet your life that the next Republican President will raise tax (remember Ronald Reagan and "read my lips"?) with the subdued approval (subdued because nobody will want to draw attention to their duplicity) of the Republican Party and of selected Tea Party leaders; and those tea-partiers who stick to the anti-tax hysteria out of misguided principle will suddenly find themselves isolated and reduced to fringe specimens. Thus do party politics, especially in the age of Rupert Murdoch, work against integrity, whether right or wrong.

The true believers have been told that the purpose of the borrowing limit blackmail was to hurt the hated Obama presidency. As a matter of fact, it has hurt the Tea Party, by isolating it from a considerable area of Republican moderates and from any Democrat. But the hysteria about tax is necessary for long-term reasons that have nothing to do with the economy and everything to do with the corrupting use of party politics. As while abortion is something that generates its own disgust and its own opposition, to try and move at least a large mass of conservatives away from thinking against abortion, the propagandists had to offer them something equally emotionally involving and more short-term. The budget battle, which was a disaster for the USA, served to blood the Tea Party in an actual political battle, which will from now on dominate their imagination. And as the anti-tax hysteria rages, abortion moves further and further from the centre. And if the stock markets of the world crash and America loses power to China, what does Murdoch care? His corporations, insulated from stock marked concerns by a very peculiar property structures, are not apt to suffer; and he has spent decades flattering and supporting the coming Chinese superpower in the hope of being allowed a place at the table. As I keep saying, Murdoch is cunning. It's his only quality. And Mademoiselle Marcotte ought to thank him on her knees: he has managed to set the anti-abortion cause back at least twenty years. Had there been a Murdoch around in nineteenth-century America, there would still be slaves today.