Why Blair was better than Thatcher

Winston Churchill received a State Funeral in January 1965 while Lady Thatcher received a Ceremonial one last month. With these precedents in mind, surely Tony Blair, on his death, should be considered for a Ceremonial Funeral himself?

It may seem a little premature to speculate about Tony Blair’s funeral arrangements in the month of his sixtieth birthday. But it certainly isn’t unreasonable. No, Blair cannot claim to have been Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. But in most respects, he was a more successful Prime Minister than Lady Thatcher was. Consider:

1. Popularity when in power: Blair and Thatcher both won three election victories each. Thatcher’s majorities were 43, 144 and 100. Blair’s were: 179, 167 and 66. Both leaders saw their share of the vote decline in each election but it is clear Blair’s majorities were larger on average. Blair was also notably more popular than Thatcher while in power if you look at opinion polls. Labour were rarely ever behind in the polls during the first half of Blair’s time in office (1997-2002) and were never very unpopular. Thatcher’s Tories were usually behind in the polls during her tenure (despite her election wins) and she was one of the most unpopular Prime Ministers on record in 1980-81 and 1990. Popularity isn’t everything, of course. However, the enduring nature of Labour’s poll lead under Blair, surely suggests he was doing something right.
2. Peace in Northern Ireland: The peace process (such as it was) got nowhere under Thatcher. Under Major, progress was made, the main achievement of his largely disastrous premiership. This stalled, however, largely because of Tory dependence on the Ulster Unionists for parliamentary support. Thanks to Blair and the late Mo Mowlam, the Good Friday Agreement has left a legacy of peace which has endured to this day. It is one of the greatest achievements of any British Prime Minister.
3. A decade of prosperity: admittedly, Blair inherited a better economy in 1997 than Thatcher did in 1979. Despite this, Thatcher’s policy of monetarism wrecked the UK economy in the early 80s and had it not been for North Sea oil, it might not have recovered. After an unsustainable boom, the economy was again on the slide when Thatcher left office in 1990. Blair deserves credit for overseeing a golden age of prosperity and growth for a full decade.
4. Crime: Crime more than doubled during the Thatcher years. It fell by over 40% under Blair and Brown. Even David Cameron admitted this, making a nonsense of his own “Broken Britain” claims in the 2010 election.
5. Homelessness: This also doubled under Thatcher, largely because of the catastrophic Care in the Community scheme. Homelessness fell under Blair.
6. The NHS undeniably suffered under Thatcher and undeniably benefitted from the extra expenditure of the Blair years. Customer satisfaction surveys confirm this.
7. Minimum wage, devolution, civil partnerships: The Blair Government oversaw all these changes in the face of Toy opposition. Unlike under Thatcher, the UK became a more tolerant, civilised place. And there was no New Labour equivalent to the Poll Tax.
8. Thatcher became eccentric in her later years in office referring to herself with the royal “we” (as in “We are a grandmother”) and publicly bullying her colleague, Geoffrey Howe. There are no such accounts of bad behaviour from Blair.

Conclusions.

Of course, not everything about the Thatcher years was bad and everything about the Blair years good. On the issue of Iraq, Blair was at least as divisive as Thatcher. Thatcher achieved great victories in the South Atlantic. Reducing union power was undoubtedly necessary but too brutally done. Thatcher changed the UK more towards how she wanted it in her eleven and a half years than Blair did in his ten. Spin and rivalry with Gordon Brown too often hampered Blair.

However, surely the measure of a great leader is in what they achieved for their nation? Under Thatcher, crime rose, unemployment soared, the NHS declined, homelessness and rioting proliferated and society grew more selfish and violent. Under Blair, the opposite to all these things happened. And peace in Northern Ireland was achieved.

Ultimately, Blair wins hands down.

Reasons why the Left still hate Lady Thatcher

It’s a fact: Lady Margaret Thatcher remains one of the most reviled – as well as the most revered figures – in British politics today. That this is still the case, a full twenty-three years after she left office and when she has long since retired and is reported to be in a state of frail poor health, does in some perverse way mark something of an achievement. Did anyone hate Clement Attlee with any ferocity twenty-three years after he ceased to be PM after all (this would be in 1974)? Will anyone still be cursing David Cameron’s name in the late 2030s? It would seem unlikely.

Cristina Odone writing in the Daily Telegraph this week suggests two reasons why those on the Left might still hate Lady Thatcher, a figure the  late Tory MP Julian Critchley used to refer to as “the Great She Elephant.” http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/cristinaodone/100203198/two-reasons-why-the-left-hates-lady-thatcher/

Unfortunately, neither of her explanations really cut the mustard.

“First, she disproved Labour’s favourite myth: Tories appeal only to toffs,” Odone writes. “She led her party to win three general elections on the trot, and she didn’t need a military coup to do so.”

This would be convincing only if Thatcher had been the first Tory leader to command widespread working class support. In fact, to have been as successful as they had been the Tories must have been garnering the support of the lower orders since the age of Disraeli. Leaders as diverse as Lord Salisbury, Stanley Baldwin, Sir Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan were winning substantial Tory election victories with substantial working class support long before Thatcher first came on the scene.

Electoral envy might explain some of the hostility to Thatcher at the time, true. She won parliamentary majorities of 43, 144 (a post-war Tory peak) and 102 in the 1979, 1983 and 1987 elections, after all. But left-wing anger over this would have been partly eased simply by the fact Labour have done so much better since. Blair won Labour majorities of 179 (a post-war peak for any party), 169 and 66 in 1997, 2001 and 2005 respectively.

Cristina Odone’s second explanation is even less credible:

“Secondly, she’s a woman. The party that pays lip service to equality and feminism is, behind the scenes, deeply misogynist.”

This seems pretty rich when you compare the Tory record to the Labour one. Labour today has far more women MPs than all the other parties put together. Even during Thatcher’s time in office, the ambitions of other women politicians were kept firmly in check. Even today, with the notable exception of Theresa May, the Tories – unlike the party of Deputy Leader Harriet Harman, Yvette Cooper, the Eagles and Diane Abbott – remain firmly a party of men. Margaret Thatcher remains the exception that proves the Tory rule.

There is nothing outlandish about the hostility many on the Left and Right feel towards Lady Thatcher. Her regime arrogantly destroyed a fifth of the nation’s industrial base in her first three years in office. Elected off the back of a poster campaign attacking Labour’s record on unemployment, she proceeded to increase the levels of unemployment threefold. She brought the NHS to the brink of destruction. Crime more than doubled under her watch while Rupert Murdoch was allowed to gain a fatal toehold in British society. Homelessness and rioting, for so long distant memories, made a major return under Thatcher. The Poll Tax, the horrendously jingoistic aftermath of the Falklands bloodshed, the brutal suppression of the Miner’s Strike, the culture of greed and selfishness perpetuated by the government and the pre-eminence of the stock markets which would prove so fatal in 2008.

These are just some of the reasons, Lady Thatcher will never be forgiven by a significant portion of the UK population.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/01/margaretthatcherM

Book review: Bang! A History of Britain in the 1980s by Graham Stewart

Make no mistake: 1979 was a very long time ago. Let’s not have any of this “it seems like yesterday” nonsense. If 1979 really does seem like yesterday, there is something seriously wrong with you.

Despite its name, this book actually begins in 1979. It is now 2013. The same amount of time has passed since 1979 as had passed between it and the end of the Second World War in 1945. When the same amount of time has passed again, it will be 2047. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to find things have changed a fair bit. In 1979, you wouldn’t have been reading a blog on your phone, a laptop or anywhere else,

Consider:  in 1979, the Labour Prime Minister (a man born before the First World War) was still at ease sitting round the Downing Street table with leading trade union figures. This was a time when some such union leaders spoke openly of Marxist revolution in Britain and believed this was apparently a realistic prospect. Leading Labour figures like Tony Benn spoke of nationalising almost all of British industry to enthusiastic, mostly male, smoke-filled Labour conferences.

Flash forward to 1990 when this book ends and things start to seem a lot more familiar. Not the same but a lot more like now. Seventies fashions had lost their grip.  Nobody had iPods yet but they had Walkmans at least and CDs were already replacing vinyl.  Mobile phones were still rare and huge, but they did at least exist. Channel 4 was now on air and a small minority could now watch BSkyB (although a common joke of the time was that the average person was more likely to get BSE – the human form of mad cow disease- than BSkyB). EastEnders was on.

Meanwhile, strikes were a rarity. The SDP had been and gone. The Labour Party, although still firmly out of power were also a lot more recognisable. Behind the scenes, Peter Mandelson was hard at work. The smoke-filled conference halls were gone. Neil Kinnock, although never a popular figure with the public, was smartly dressed and in command, a far cry from the decent but scruffy Michael Foot. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, then in their late thirties were advancing fast up the Labour ranks. New Labour was on its way.

In my view, the 1980s transformed Britain more than any other peacetime decade in the last 150 years, except perhaps for the 1960s.

Much of this is doubtless due in no small measure to the personality and politics of Margaret Thatcher, who Stewart seems rather a fan of. I am rather less keen. The Lady was undeniably a fine war leader and by the Eighties, union power clearly needed curtailing.

But this was a bad decade for the British economy. Before the ‘Winter of Discontent’ wrecked Labour for more than a decade, the Callaghan Government had been doing a fine job of pulling the UK back from the oil shock, the ‘Barber Boom’ and the errors of Wilson’s final two years. But Callaghan’s gains and those made by the discovery of North Sea oil were squandered by Thatcher’s Monetarist experiment. Soon more than a fifth of the nation’s industrial base had been wiped out forever and high unemployment hung over the rest of the decade like a curse.

This was also the decade where the unrestrained power of the markets took hold and Rupert Murdoch was permitted unprecedented media power by the Thatcher Government. Both of these problems should have been addressed later by Major, Blair or Brown. But the Lady (as the late Alan Clark would lovingly refer to her) is the original source of responsibility here. Crime soared, the health service suffered and homeless levels rose unforgivably under Thatcher. A simple comparison of how the UK fared under her watch and that during Tony Blair’s decade (1997-2007) is damning.

By 1990, she had grown tremendously in confidence to the point of mental instability. Having seen off the ‘Argies’, the miners and Labour (three times: under Callaghan, Foot and Kinnock), she seemed convinced of her own infallibility. She even began speaking about herself using the royal “we” (famously: “we are a grandmother”).

But when she linked her destiny to that of the hated and ultimately unfair Community Charge (or “Poll Tax”) even the Tories recognised she had to go. John Major secured one more win for the Tories in 1992. But twenty-three years on, the Tories have not recovered from her fall. No Tory leader since Major has won a General Election.

This is a slightly badly structured book with hard going chapters about monetarism rubbing shoulders with those about pop music and the singles of Madness. But it’s a story worth retelling especially if you want to terrify your left-leaning children before they go to sleep.

Just remember: don’t have nightmares.