The Once and Future Margaret Thatcher

As a Yorkshireman whose ancestors were Derbyshire coalminers, who grew up on a council estate and whose entire extended family were rock-solid Labour supporters, I weep at the extinction of our mining communities – the salt of the earth as Harold MacMillan said. But I scream abuse at my TV set as it brings me one ex-miner after another, one leftish politician after another, and one historian, sociologist, journalist or commentator after another telling me that Margaret Thatcher caused that extinction. For that to be the truth it has to be the case that if Margaret Thatcher had never existed we would still have a thriving coalmining industry. And the leftists who appear to believe this are the same leftists who are now forcing one power station after another to be closed down because, they say, the nasty coal they burn produces so much CO2 it is frying our planet. So who exactly do they think would be burning all the coal produced by these still thriving communities if Margaret Thatcher had never existed?

And who exactly do they think would still be buying the cars of a still-thriving British Leyland if Margaret Thatcher had not privatised it? By what miraculous process would a nationalised, tax-payer-subsidised, incentiveless BL have produced cars of a quality the world wanted and at prices the world was prepared to pay. And if the left believed that it could indeed have done so, why did they not re-nationalise our motor industry on coming to power. And the same goes for every other ‘manufacturing industry’ that the entire left-leaning commentariat accuses Margaret Thatcher of having destroyed.

The left is now broadly divided into two halves: the establishment left majority who recognise that nationalisation, far from being the solution to the weakness of our industrial sector, was actually the cause of it; and the anti-establishment left minority who still believe that state control and state funding is the answer to everything – in short who have still not grown up from the Marxist or quasi-Marxist idealism of their youth and would indeed like to see everything nationalised again – as long of course as we do not actually burn any of the coal our glorious reincarnated miners produce.

 If the problem ended there things would not look too bad for us, since there is zero chance that the anti-establishment left minority will ever again be a significant political force in this country. But the trouble is, it doesn’t end there. The establishment left now recognises that the red flag cannot lead it to victory, so it marches instead behind the green flag of environmentalism, human rights, women’s rights, poor rights, squeezed middle rights, disabled rights, gay rights, youth rights, old rights, employee rights, unemployed rights, public sector workers’ rights, and any other rights it can think of. They may have abandoned nationalisation, but they have not abandoned the application by other means of state objectives to business activity. As James Delingpole says in Watermelons, scratch the green away and you see the red bleeding hearts underneath: fundamentally these people are still motivated by feelings of guilt about their own country’s relative wealth and its imperial, class-ridden past. For them its still a war against every surviving vestige of that past. We built our wealth by polluting the world’s atmosphere with CO2, their reasoning goes, so it is we who must pay the price of stopping polluting it so that the poor parts of the world we exploited in our imperial days can build their own wealth by polluting it like we used to do. The extraordinary thing is that the very same people who think like this accuse Margaret Thatcher of having destroyed our manufacturing industry and call for policies to revive it – provided they only use wind power presumably.

Margaret Thatcher was our first female Prime Minister but devoted her entire energy to doing what she believed was right for the country as a whole, not to fighting the feminist cause. To me this was just part of a consistent thread to her character: she believed in individual action, not words. It is no coincidence that she was a scientist. Matthew Parris made a deeply revealing comment on her: “Her political philosophy was entirely uninteresting”. In other words, while the rest of the political class with its PPE and legal training debated endlessly about the meaning of political life; the analysis of opinion polls and the development of policies to sway them, she simply saw through all the verbiage to the root problems stopping people building better lives for themselves and concentrated on fixing them. She would have seen very clearly that much of the feminist agenda was an exercise in slogan-shouting about misogyny and obsession with statistics, and that she herself was living proof that only by believing in themselves individually and fighting and winning in their own walks of life would women advance. How great it would be for our womenfolk if our political world was full of Margaret Thatchers and not, as it sadly is, of Harriet Harmans.

In fact, how great it would be for all of us if our political world had just one Margaret Thatcher. Just as she destroyed the choking post-war statist, corporatist consensus that was destroying our economy, we now suffer an equally choking post-Thatcher consensus that is destroying it again. This is the consensus of political correctness, of which the destruction of our international competitiveness and of our household budgets by deluded green energy policies is just one facet. You see signs of it everywhere you go – preoccupation not with getting on in life by making yourself as valuable to your fellow men as possible, but with demanding recognition of your own status, stroking your own ego, and demanding public concern for your own interests and needs.

You hear it every time that irritating public address voice in Sainsbury’s makes a “Colleague Announcement” – it clearly never occurred to the managers who designed it that stroking their employees’ egos by calling them “colleagues” rather than “staff” risked irritating the customers without whom they wouldn’t have a job at all. Countless hours are spent in offices everywhere dreaming up fancy sounding titles for secretaries, filing clerks and receptionists and other ways of making them feel that they are rather special. Maybe that is why so many nurses and so many teachers seem to be in danger of thinking that their status, conditions, views and interests are far more important than those of their patients, pupils or parents.

This is part of a wider pattern of chronic misapplication of management time on buzz words and trendy ideas that just don’t matter. Our very language has become permeated by idiot management-speak and sales-talk as a result. The word “problem” has almost disappeared from our language because a generation of management trainees has had it bashed into its head that the more positive-sounding “issue” is to be used instead. Ditto the ridiculous “going forward” for “in future”. Somehow these and countless other instances of the emaciation of our language have crossed from the management training course into our schools, universities and media, in all of which the pollution is now rampant. We seem to be beginning to use language not as a way of communicating clearly, but as a way of displaying our fashionable political correctness and sales patter ability.

Indeed, fuzziness now seems to be preferred to clarity. In my youth I heard the expression “In terms of” only occasionally, and always used in its correct sense – e.g. to denote a measure of value. Now I hear it hundreds of times every day, used, usually utterly redundantly, as a conjunctive, introductory or linking phrase when the speaker can’t be bothered to think of the right words to use so resorts to it in a sort of “You know what I mean” kind of way. As often as not he ends up sounding as though he doesn’t really know what he means at all, and probably often doesn’t. Some BBC announcers cannot get through even the shortest piece without using it repeatedly.

Another similarly rampant trend in the BBC (and politicians too are guilty of all these sins) is the deliberate attempt to speak in the way they, in their patronising way, imagine northerners or southern chavs speak, in order to butter them up and keep them happy to shell out the licence fee. Thus no BBC announcer ever says he is sitting or standing any more; he is always sat or stood. They drop T’s and H’s for the same toe-curlingly patronising reason. And of course a generation has been taught to say “Haitch” not “Aitch” because their teachers thought it would stretch their brain muscles to breaking point to have to learn that H has to be sounded in words but not in the name of the letter. Hilariously, I heard the other day a man drop every H in every word beginning with that letter in his speech but then say “Haitch”. The common factor in all this is fuzzy-minded political correctness throwing an inconsequential haze over real meaning and over what really matters.

You see it also in the fact that even our most distinguished writers – Times Leader writers no exception – now routinely write the most appallingly bad grammar in their desperate attempts to avoid male personal pronouns. My use of them in these paragraphs would have been massively edited to get rid of them, mixing plural verbs with singular subjects to avoid saying “him”, “his”, “he” or “man”. This is obsession with politically correct form, not with substance – anyone with half a brain knows that they are shorthand for “him/her”, “hers/his”, “she/he” or “woman/man”, written this way for reasons of brevity, not acts of discrimination or misogyny. In fact it is the crude mangling of grammar to avoid it that smacks of misandry. I wouldn’t mind betting that if a journalist chose habitually to use female rather than male pronouns on the same basis (as she would be perfectly entitled to do) no female editor would mangle her grammar to remove them.

You see it in the demands of gay people to be allowed to “marry” when in fact there is not one jot of difference, other than in the name, between what civil partnership and marriage give them if both are carried out in a registrar’s office (and if there is it could be put right very quickly and easily and without controversy). And whether they can marry in church is a matter only for the church, not for government. It is pure symbolism. Pure ego. Obsession with form rather than substance.

I could go on with many other examples of rampant political correctness. You see it by the truck load in all the arguments about taxes, benefits, immigration, European Union, defence, aid, education, health and safety, banking etc. Margaret Thatcher saw it and cut through it. The classic case was over apartheid in South Africa. While others marched in the streets, waved their banners and demanded sanctions, she quietly worked with de Klerk to make it politically possible for him to release Mandela and bring it to an end. I am surprised not to have heard the defeat of apartheid listed along with the defeat of Soviet Communism in her list of achievements. de Klerk was her South African Gorbachev.

We need a complete political revolution to decontaminate our society of this choking miasma of political correctness. Where is the Margaret Thatcher who will lead it? UKIP’s Farage makes many of the right noises, but while he might well have her courage and determination, he does not give confidence that he has her clarity of mind or purpose. He also shows signs of being too willing to indulge in opportunism and political bandwagon-jumping. But maybe he will perform a kind of John the Baptist role, destroying the Tory vote to shock the Tories into realising that they must bring forth within their own ranks a new Thatcher to rid them and us of this stultifying virus.

What Will the Islamo-Fascists Use for a Ladder if they Realise Their Dream

Interesting isn't it how the Islamo-Fascists find it essential to use Western democratic freedoms as a stepping stone to pursue their dream of re-building the Caliphate and - ultimately - destroying Western democracy. What will they use for a ladder if they ever achieve their dreams? Or do they seriously believe that the world will then be so perfect that they will then never need to fight for or run from anything again? Do they seriously believe that the non-Islamo-Fascist part of the world is just too dim to see what they can see - that life can be made just perfect by killing anyone who can't see it?

It's Not as Simple as That Vincent

Vincent Cooper writes today for The Commentator asking, essentially, whether Enoch Powell was right, and whether we should be outraged that a European bien pensant elite is showing contempt for democracy by inflicting mass immigration on national electorates who do not want it. This is a bit too simplistic for two reasons.

The first is that electorates are free to vote for parties that promise to stop immigration, but consistently fail to do so, presumably because they sense either that the ones who do offer it are dangerous people or that they lack the ability to govern well across the spectrum.

The second reason is related to the first one. One European electorate once did vote in a party that promised to protect the national ethnic culture from alien incursions - Hitler's Nazis - and look what that resulted in. If Vincent Cooper is right that the policies of Europe's political elite reflect distrust of national democracies, they might well say that it is not without good reason.

Vincent is also wrong in his assumption that there is anything new in the distrust of electorates by political elites. It is surely precisely because unrestrained democracy can be extremely dangerous that it is accepted throughout the western world that the will of the majority has to be subject to constitutional restraints. The US founding fathers recognised that and went to great lengths to build the necessary checks and balances into their constitution. The really tough questions therefore are not whether the democratic national will should be constrained, but exactly how, in what way, and by whom should it be constrained.

It's not just about immigration - massive though I agree that issue is and urgent thought the need to address it is; it's just as important, surely, to find some way of forcing politicians to stop shamelessly buying votes by handing out cash not on the basis of need or of objective justification but on the basis of voting power - e.g. Cameron's refusal to stop giving handouts to people just because they are old regardless of how wealthy they are. I agree with Vincent that democracy is in grave danger, but not only because voters are often ignored; it's just as often because they are too much pandered to against the national interest.

Working out a system which gets only the juice out of the democratic orange without squeezing out the blood too is the greatest challenge of our age.

I do agree with Vincent though that handing the power over to the tossers in Europe is not the answer.

2DayFM: Morons Broadcasting to Morons

When radio stations target morons as their audience and employ morons to provide them with the kind of moronic crap that appeals to morons, sooner or later intelligent, sensitive people get destroyed by it.

Hindsight Shows that Monet was Wrong Even in His Premis

We hear a lot now about how the attempt to achieve European Union has ended up being more likely to cause another European war rather than prevent one as it was designed to do, but surely the very idea that the nations of Europe are intrinsically likely to go to war unless they unite is itself completely without foundation.  It might have looked that way to Jean Monet and co in the immediate aftermath of WWII, but what they failed to take account of was the fact that WWI and WWII were basically the result of imperialism: of European nations each determined to have their share of the global imperial cake.  European imperialism is now stone dead, and nothing is going to bring it back.  The Cold War could of course have become another hot European war, but Soviet communism is also now stone dead and it was NATO, not European Union, that killed it (indeed, given that the Cold War was always at its heart Russian imperialist ambition with a communist mask, its end too was the spluttering out of the last ember of European imperialism).

The threat in Europe now is not of general war but of localised ethnic conflict caused by cross-boarder racial and cultural admixtures resulting from earlier imperial episodes going all the way back to ancient times, the Balkan wars being the latest and nastiest examples.  European Union does nothing at all to reduce that threat - indeed, by opening boarders and making the admixtures even more widespread, it ramps it up considerably.  Yes, it can be argued that ambition to board the EU gravy train might persuade some states with ethnic-bashing tendencies to behave themselves and improve their democratic and human rights credentials to gain admission, but events in Greece suggest that in the absence of German willingness to keep pouring them vast amounts of free gravy for eternity the lid is likely to be blown off the pot with even greater violence and should never have been put on in the first place.

In short, the very idea of an intrinsic European tendency to war requiring elaborate supra-national structures to suppress it is itself surely plain wrong.  Had Monet lived to see the end of the Cold War he might well have come to recognise that himself and abandon his crazy idea of European Union.

Can somebody please explain to me why Angela Merkel

..... thinks German taxpayers will suddenly become happy to fund the PIIGS eternally AFTER Eurozone fiscal and political union? Like, it's not OK if their own elected politicians decide to give their cash to the Greeks, but it will be OK if an unelected Eurozone quasi-government decides to do it?  Am I missing something here?

Bank Bonus Culture the most God-Awful Corruption on a Massive Scale

It’s a pity that Ed Miliband is seen as the leader of the campaign against the bankers’ bonus culture, because that gets it presented in the media as a battle between left and right, with David Cameron portrayed as just indulging in a bit of tactical banker bashing to avoid losing too many  votes to Labour or the LibDems rather than as having any genuine problem with the bonus culture.

But he should have a problem with it shouldn’t he?  A big problem.  And so should we all.  There is something profoundly troubling about it, regardless of your politics.

Just look at the facts.  The top brass of any big bank are paid huge basic salaries at the end of every year regardless of how well or badly the bank has performed in that year.  Those salaries are so great that after just a few short years they could easily retire with pension pots big enough to allow them to live in total luxury wanting for nothing that any normal person in their wildest dreams would crave for for the rest of their lives.  Jobs paying salaries like that should surely be something that their occupants hug themselves in disbelief at their good fortune in having been able to land, and in which they work like crazy to demonstrate that they are worth every penny of the money and should most definitely never be sacked for less than first-rate performance.

But is that what they do?  No, what they do is persuade their boards to write them quite staggeringly large bonus cheques on top of those mammoth salaries because, it seems, it should not be they who should be worrying about being sacked and losing their huge salaries if they don’t perform, but their boards and shareholders who should be worrying that if they don’t give them surreal bonuses as well they will walk, and the bank will immediately implode for lack of anyone with the right skills to run it.  The board members are only too ready to approve the bonuses because they are all on the same bonus gravy trains and look forward to ever-more obscene amounts of bonus money themselves as they climb up the ladder.  God knows why the shareholders don’t put a stop to it.  Maybe a lot of them, being big institutions, are controlled by people on similar huge bonuses themselves.  And maybe the rest either just can’t get organised about it or have been brainwashed into believing that their investments really are best served by the bonus culture.

The whole thing just stinks of the most God-awful corruption on a massive scale.  What is truly scary about it is the implication that the ability to run big banks successfully is only to be found in people who will not do it unless they are allowed regularly to stuff their fists in their multi-million pound tills and pretty much take from them as much as they like, on top of what are already quite staggeringly generous basic salaries.  In other words, if that is true, it means that our financial services sector on which we have allowed the health of our economy to depend so critically is in the grip of people of extremely dubious morality. 

But of course it cannot be true.  It is a self-evident con.  The people can only carry out their threat and ‘walk’ to other banks if there are out there banks willing to give in to their threats and pay them.  It should be a relatively simple matter for shareholders of the world’s top banks to get organised and call their bluff, leading either to their backing down or to there being one hell of a lot of unemployed former bank top brass forming queues outside head-hunter offices.  In truth, there must surely be no shortage of first-rate people who are both fully competent and prepared to work their socks of as big bank top brass for an extremely generous salary alone, standing ready to be sacked if they do not deliver value for money.  If there aren’t, we are all in deep trouble, for it means we cannot survive without tugging the forelock to a bunch of amoral, ruthless bastards.

If the shareholders can’t or won’t get organised to do anything about it, then governments will have to do the job for them.  Sooner or later, if things go on as they are, the Tory party’s resistance to attempts by Merkel, Sarkozy and others in the EU to do battle with the financial services sector is going to be seen not as defending the UK’s interests but as conspiring to help a bunch of spivs to keep shafting us all.