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.
