fraud, the collapse of more than 650 S&L companies – and a bill of $1.4 trillion, to be met by the taxpayer. In 1988 a report from the General Accounting Office, Sweatshops in the US, noted that another feature of the Gilded Age had returned, partly because of the official mania for deregulation: reasons cited for the reappearance of sweatshops included ‘enforcement-related factors, such as insufficient inspection staff, inadequate penalties for violations [and] weak labour laws’. But since the victims were penniless and often voteless workers, rather than middle-class mortgage-owners, the Reaganites blithely left them to the market’s tender mercies. Nor did they complain when the deregulatory zeal of Reagan’s Federal Communications Commission enabled a tiny and ever-shrinking group of large corporations to control most of the nation’s media enterprises – even though this concentration of power thwarted their professed desire for greater competition and choice.
The trouble with the Conservatives, Evelyn Waugh once said, was that they never put the clock back, even by five minutes. He could not have made the same complaint about Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, both of whom had a single-minded mission to free the capitalist beast from the harnesses and bridles imposed upon it during the previous half-century. In January 1983, when the television interviewer Brian Walden suggested that Thatcher seemed to yearn for ‘what I would call Victorian values’, she replied: ‘Oh exactly. Very much so. Those were the values when our country became great.’ Delighted by the cries of horror her remarks elicited from the liberal intelligentsia, she returned to the theme in subsequent speeches and interviews. As she explained:
I was brought up by a Victorian grandmother. We were taught to work jolly hard. We were taught to prove yourself; we were taught self-reliance; we were taught to live within our income. You were taught that cleanliness is next to Godliness. You were taught self-respect. You were taught always to give a hand to your neighbour. You were taught tremendous pride in your country. All of these things are Victorian values. They are also perennial values. You don’t hear so much about these things these days, but they were good values and they led to tremendous improvements in the standard of living.
Margaret Thatcher had a hostility to organised labour that would have won the respect of any grim-visaged Victorian mill-owner or coalmaster – as did Ronald Reagan, even though (or perhaps because) he himself was a former president of the Screen Actors’ Guild. ‘I pledge to you that my administration will work very closely with you to bring about a spirit of cooperation between the President and the air-traffic controllers,’ Reagan promised PATCO, the air-traffic controllers’ union, shortly before polling day in the autumn of 1980. But there was little evidence of this spirit when its members went on strike the following August: the new president announced that they would all be sacked unless they returned to work within forty-eight hours. More than 11,000 duly received their pink slips, their leaders went to jail and fines of $1 million a day were levied on the union.
Margaret Thatcher waited slightly longer for her own showdown. A thirteen-week strike by steel-workers in 1980, which ended with no obvious victor, convinced her that she must remove unions’ legal immunities and outlaw secondary picketing before turning the full armoury of state power against militant labour. Besides, other preparations had to be made. The union she most dearly wished to destroy was that of the mineworkers, who had brought down the previous Tory government in 1974 and were now led by the Marxist Arthur Scargill, but a lengthy pit strike could be resisted only if coal stockpiles were high enough to keep the home fires burning for the duration. So, as her biographer Hugo Young reported, from 1981 onwards the National Coal Board was ‘given every financial and other encouragement to produce more coal than anyone could consume, and the Central Electricity Generating Board given similar inducements to pile up the stocks at power stations’. At the same time the police were equipped with new vehicles, communications equipment, weaponry and body armour. When the National Union of Mineworkers went on strike in 1984, a year after Thatcher’s re-election, the government was ready for a long and bloody war.
With a belligerence that unnerved even some of her Cabinet colleagues, she described the miners as ‘a scar across the face of the country’ and likened them to the Argentine forces whom she had routed in the Falkland Islands two years earlier. ‘We had to fight an enemy without in the Falklands,’ she declared, in her best Churchillian style. ‘We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty … There is no week, nor day, nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their supreme confidence in themselves, and lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.’ That autumn, when the IRA bombed a Brighton hotel where she was staying, she used the atrocity as further rhetorical ammunition: murderous terrorists and striking coal-miners were both conspiring ‘to break, defy and subvert the laws’. For Margaret Thatcher, the miners’ eventual and inevitable defeat represented nothing less than a victory of good over evil.
The prime minister could not claim the credit which she undoubtedly felt was her due, however, since throughout the dispute she had insisted that the war against ‘the enemy within’ was being prosecuted by the National Coal Board rather than Downing Street. The pretence fooled nobody – least of all the chairman of the NCB, who after one meeting at No. 10 complained to a reporter that ‘I have weals all over my back, which I would be happy to show you’ – but she felt obliged to maintain it, having often expressed her vehement dislike for government intervention in industry, or indeed in anything else. Even those branches of the state that enjoyed almost universal acceptance, such as public education and the National Health Service, appeared to Thatcher as quasi-Soviet abominations. ‘As people prospered themselves so they gave great voluntary things,’ she said in one of her many nostalgic eulogies to Victorian England. ‘So many of the schools we replace now were voluntary schools, so many of the hospitals we replace were hospitals given by this great benefaction feeling that we have in Britain, even some of the prisons, the Town Halls. As our people prospered, so they used their independence and initiative to prosper others, not compulsion by the State.’
This was Margaret Thatcher’s own version of trickle-down economics. Despite her notorious comment that ‘there is no such thing as society; there are individual men and women, and there are families’, she had limitless faith in the social conscience of the rich and might even have endorsed the mystical credo issued by an American coal-owner, George Baer, during the 1902 miners’ strike: ‘The rights and interests of the labouring man will be protected and cared for – not by the labour agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests in this country.’ Since God, in his infinite wisdom, presumably had similar influence over those who control the White House, he must have changed his mind during the middle decades of the twentieth century: from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal of 1933, which laid the foundations of a rudimentary welfare state, through Harry Truman’s ‘Fair Deal’ to Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Great Society’, the consensus was that even a prosperous capitalist nation should protect its weaker citizens – and its natural resources – against the depredations of the rich. To Thatcher this may have seemed tantamount to Communism, but it was also accepted by many conservatives. As the American author William Greider points out:
The ideas and programmes that formed the modern welfare state originated from the values of the right as well as the left, from the conservative religious impulse to defend the domain of family, community and church against the raw, atomising effects of market economics as well as from the egalitarianism of anti-capitalist socialism. The welfare state was, in fact, an attempt to devise a fundamental compromise between society and free-market capitalism.
It was a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency. ‘We are all Keynesians now,’ he explained.
By the 1980s, however, God had apparently become a champion of laissez-faire again. Whereas Margaret Thatcher’s twentieth-century predecessors mostly kept their Christianity to themselves, her own ‘crusade’ – as she often called it – was thoroughly religious in both content and style. Her father had been a Methodist lay preacher, and in her memoirs she proudly acknowledged the influence of a stern Christian upbringing: ‘I believe in “Judaeo-Christian” values: indeed my whole political philosophy is based on them.’