A documentary is just starting on UK’s Channel 4 TV (Saturday 13th April, 7PM), entitled “Margaret: Death of a Revolutionary”.
My interest was piqued when I saw that Channel 4 was showing a documentary about Baroness Thatcher – their news channel is skewed so far to the left that it defies belief, so I was curious to see what they would have to say about Britain’s post-war saviour.
But it was the description of the programme in my Sky TV guide that really affronted me:
“Martin Durkin presents his radical thesis: that Margaret Thatcher was a working class revolutionary, and that she believed capitalism was in the interests of ordinary people, not the toffs.”
Everything wrong with the British left-wing encapsulated in one sentence.
Where to start?
Why is this a “radical thesis”? I think that we are supposed to take this line of nonsense as a piece of magnanimity from the left – that the holier-than-thou leftists among us are willing to grant that maybe Thatcher was (albeit misguidedly) trying to help the less fortunate in society, and not just the “toffs” (don’t get me started on that word) that we all assume were the only people she really cared about.
What nonsense.
Of course Thatcher believed that capitalism was in the interests of the ordinary people. Because it is. This isn’t a “radical thesis”. The ignorant left may have accepted the nonsensical trope that capitalism benefits only the wealthy Monopoly-men style captains of industry and the “toffs”, but the rest of us sure haven’t.
We of sound mind know that capitalism (as opposed to corporatism, which is entirely different, and which Thatcher promoted no more than any other British politician) inevitably helps the “ordinary people”.
And did the person who wrote the programme description lose their mind? Who does he think the Right-to-Buy scheme benefited? The “toffs” weren’t the ones living in state-owned council housing, who were suddenly given the opportunity to buy their houses and move into the ranks of the middle class. Who did the deregulation and privatisation of failing state-owned industries benefit? Yes, wealthy people who had money sloshing around and could afford to snap up shares did well, but so did many middle-class people, as did the whole population who no longer had to deal with fuel crises and substandard products.
Yes, of course Margaret Thatcher believed that capitalism benefits “ordinary people”. Because it does. Nationalised, state-owned industries sure didn’t benefit us. Three day working weeks didn’t benefit us. Power cuts, garbage piling up, dead bodies laying unburied, industrial unrest, the country being run by the unions, none of these things benefited us.
And Channel 4 has the nerve to present their quirky notion that maybe Thatcher had the interests of “ordinary people” at heart as a radical thesis. That in fact perhaps Margaret Thatcher, the grocer’s daughter from Grantham, wasn’t actually in the pocket of the landed gentry and the “toffs” after all.
I despair of the left sometimes.
Semi-Partisan Politics 