Vol. 15 No. 24 · 16 December 1993
pages 7-8 | 3856 words
Let them cut grass
Linda Colley
- The Downing Street Years by Margaret Thatcher
HarperCollins, 914 pp, £25.00, October 1993, ISBN 0 00 255049 0
It was an extraordinarily long premiership – indeed the longest of the century by a considerable margin. In part, this was because the Opposition was divided, its members seemingly incapable of suppressing their personal disagreements and policy differences so as to co-ordinate and concentrate their attack. But the premier’s longevity was also due to a high degree of political professionalism and ruthless single-mindedness. Critics were shut out of the Cabinet and state patronage was exploited in an unprecedentedly partisan way. Favours were distributed to those sections of the press which supported the regime. Direct taxes on wealth were reduced in favour of indirect taxation, hurting the middle and lower classes, but beguiling the wealthy. The resulting dissatisfaction, in Scotland, the big cities and among intellectuals, was neutralised by the vagaries of the electoral system.
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Letters
Vol. 16 No. 1 · 6 January 1994
From Keith Flett
Although it is nowhere mentioned in her review of Margaret Thatcher’s The Downing Street Years, (LRB, 16 December 1993), Linda Colley is clearly a supporter of the Marxism Today theory of Thatcherism. She talks of the ‘success of a certain kind of right-wing populism’ for example. Success? Electoral success certainly. But this was only the first chapter of the Thatcher mission. The rest, with help from Professor Norman Stone and others, was about restoring a sense of British greatness. In this Mrs Thatcher, in her own terms, failed almost completely. She did not succeed in breaking the trade unions, in pushing down wage levels or in raising the level of profit. When she was deposed as PM Britain remained, as it was when she came to office, a country in crisis.
Finally, Colley makes no mention of the challenges from the enemy within, in Mrs Thatcher’s demonology often bearded men with unacceptably left-wing views like myself, which so undermined her rule. She did not expect the miners to take a year to beat in 1984-5 and she had no conception of the forces of popular protest which she unleashed by pushing ahead with the Poll Tax. That indeed is a conundrum which historians might ponder. How could this great populist manage to introduce one of the most unpopular pieces of legislation this century?
Keith Flett
London N17
