1972 – I remember a lecture hall at Essex University packed with striking miners and students who had occupied the university to provide a base for picketing of coal imports coming in at local ports. Arthur Scargill spoke about their historic struggle and the importance of the student worker alliance.

Two years later, amid further mass trade union opposition Tory Prime Minister, Edward Heath, calls a general election centred on Who Rules Britain, the Tories or the Unions. He loses.

1985 -The miners had been on strike for a year to stop the closure of many pits but were forced back without a deal. In a few years over 150 mines were shut, tens of thousands of jobs were lost and whole communities destroyed.  Thatcher dubbed the Scargill led union as ‘the enemy within’. She had prepared carefully for the strike, stockpiling coal and reorganising the police into a national anti-strike force. From the start the goal was to eradicate Heath’s defeat.

On the left we had organised mass solidarity with the miners, including internationally, but the capitulation of Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party who refused to support Scargill and effective state repression made it difficult to win. Thatcher also actively fomented the divisions between the Nottingham miners who did not come out and the rest of the union

At the time Scargill often repeated this statement: the working class need a leadership as effective as Thatcher’s is for the ruling class.  He may have got some other political issues wrong – particularly later – but the miners’ leader was correct on this. He put his finger on the most important legacy of Thatcher. 

Her leadership fundamentally shifted the relationship of forces between the capacity of the labour movement to defend and build on the gains made in the post-war settlement and the power of the ruling class to completely restore its preferred level of profitable exploitation.

the number of stoppages across the UK peaked at 4,583 in 1979, when more than 29 million working days had been lost.; in 1990, there were 630 and fewer than 2 million working days lost, and they continued to fall thereafter. Thatcher’s tenure also witnessed a sharp decline in trade union density, with the percentage of workers belonging to a trade union falling from 57.3% in 1979 to 49.5% in 1985. In 1979 up until Thatcher’s final year in office, trade union membership also fell, from 13.5 million in 1979 to fewer than 10 million

Wikipedia

Reagan/Thatcher led a ruling class counter offensive

Alongside Ronald Reagan, Thatcher formed part of an international ruling class offensive against working people.  Full employment, welfare provision, substantial state ownership of key utilities and infrastructure, Keynesian policies to mitigate the negative effects of the capitalist economic cycle and a degree of co-management of the economy with strong unions  – all these features of the post war settlement were subject to a fierce and relentless attack over the decade of Thatcher’s rule.

The ideas of reactionary economists like Hayek with strict monetarist policies were adopted as the ‘common sense’ of government which was crudely compared to a household budget. Public spending and particularly welfare provision were defined as creating dependency and sapping individual enterprise. One of her axioms was – there is no such thing as society. 

What Thatcher understood well was the political and ideological weakness of her opponents. Labour never really had a vision or an alternative narrative.  They colluded in the ‘taxes are bad’ mantra and had already attacked the power of the trade unions when Callaghan was prime minister just before Thatcher.  She also understood that you needed to back up your ideological positions with material changes so people did not just see all this individualism as mere abstract ideas. 

Selling off council houses was a master stroke from this point of view. Millions of working class people were given an amazing one-off deal. They acquired their own houses at a knock down price and an asset that in many areas would increase in value. 

The removal of this huge amount of social housing had been a major cause of the housing crisis ever since.  There was no obligation or money available to replace the lost social housing.  However as a way of getting support from a significant part of the working class for a distinct period of time it worked well.

Selling off the family silver

As part of the same ideological offensive Thatcher organised a massive sell off of nationalised assets and utilities – electricity, gas, British Rail, British telecom, water and so on.  I remember how hard it was to get your head around seeing adverts about the services and products you had never thought as commodities to be bought and sold like washing machines or cinema tickets.  You got your electricity or gas and it was the same everywhere and it all worked well enough without worrying too much about it. There was none of the false competition or ridiculously complicated contracts we see today.

The selling of shares (the famous Tell Sid campaign) was paraded as producing a share owning democracy which would include ordinary people. Again the material back up for this was the fact that tens of thousands of workers in these sectors were awarded number of shares.  After a few years after ordinary punters had sold on their shares for a useful windfall there were few visible signs of these ordinary shareholders but the individualist ideology was stronger. 

Selling off public assets – along with the bonus of North Sea Oil and Gas – allowed the government wriggle room in its public spending. Clearly private capital was the big winner but the government coffers were filled for a while.  Unemployment figures were massaged by the government allowing millions to claim sick pay. Consequently, Thatcher did not resort to the extreme austerity meted out by the Cameron/Osborne government.

Although mass unemployment soared under Thatcher it was regionally concentrated in those areas mainly outside the South and South East where the older heavy industries were being left to flounder by the state.  Economic growth was stronger compared to today’s anaemic rate. The Big Bang changes in the City which digitalised trading and spurred growth in the financial sector benefited some and increased employment in these areas.

Thatcher the nationalist

The Falklands War with Argentina helped revive the fortunes of Thatcher when her policies had not won much popular support. Once again the Labour party’s complete alignment with Thatcher over the war meant that she was given a free ride even when it was clear that she had ordered a hit on an Argentinian ship (the Belgrano) that was not threatening the expeditionary force. Again, she understood this political reality and exploited it to the full. 

Thatcher was never in favour of withdrawing from the EC customs union and economic area – in that sense she was not as irrational as her heirs in the Tory party or Reform – but she played hard ball with the EC on Britain’s contributions to the EC budget.  She was backed by a supine mass media and it helped burnish her nationalist aura.  Russian leaders had dubbed her the Iron Lady for her belligerence as an ally of Reagan against the Eastern bloc.

Today we still see her legacy.  Trade union membership is down to around 6 million. Capitalist companies still enjoy a fairly unregulated environment. Even if all the provisions of Labour’s labour law reforms are implemented bosses in this country are still freer to exploit that in most European ones.

As she remarked, her greatest legacy was that Tony Blair’s three term government hardly touched any of her big reforms to the economy. Unions will still be much less free to organise and operate compared to the 1970s.  Apart from British Rail none of the privatised companies are going to be brought back into public ownership by the Starmer government.  Her line on keeping taxes low is still echoed by Rachel Reeves. Despite the radicalisation to the left shown by the Green surge and the Corbyn/Sultana new party, the labour movement has still to reverse the heavy defeats imposed on them by Thatcher.

Another date – 31 March 1990 – Trafalgar square

I remember standing in the rammed square seeing thousands of anti-poll tax demonstrators clashing with the police. Bare-chested youths chucking scaffolding poles, charging police horses, a fire started in the South Africa building.  Before this we had seen one of the largest ever civil disobedience campaigns as people were fined and sent to prison for refusing to pay a grossly unfair tax.

The tax took no account of your income nor the value of your house. Thatcher never recovered from what has been dubbed as the Poll Tax riots.  The tax was withdrawn, her reputation terminally wounded inside her party with the woolly Geoffrey Howe giving her an unlikely coup de grace in a parliamentary speech. She was gone by the end of the year. Even the Iron Lady was vulnerable to mass action – something socialists should never forget.

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