The Death of Thatch

I’m a bit of a musician on the side. I spent most of my career as an entrepreneur and in finance. But my heart and mind are in music and always have been. Online I ‘hang around’ with fellow musicians, artists, creative types generally. It was only on the day I graduated from University that it dawned on me that I didn’t actually know any of my fellow finance, business and economics students – all of my mates were graduating the next day on arts courses.

I kept a low profile when Margaret Thatcher died. Everyone I knew was busy uploading real-time exultations and bitter resentments to virtual forums, via state-of-the-art optic networking on their gleaming iPads, none of which would have been possible without infrastructure investment, privatisation, marketing and free markets. I lay low for a few days, remembering all too well the bitter contempt with which I held Mrs Thatcher when I was a teenager: Back in the day when there was no room for misinterpretation – this woman and her party were clearly evil, hell-bent on destroying jobs, industries and livelihoods. The thing is, I grew up. I actually took time to understand both sides of the argument. And ultimately, I had to leave behind such childish certainties. But I did so with a heavy heart because now my politics will always render me beyond the pale among my musical and creative brethren.

I therefore thought I’d jot down some thoughts about my journey across the political spectrum.

I became 'politicised' at a very early age. At 13, I was marching for CND, Amnesty, anti-Ba'ath Iraq, War on Want etc. Our art teacher would gather devotees to his classroom and tell us how it was and we teenagers unquestioningly adopted views that chimed with our naturally rebellious instincts. It all seemed so obvious - Thatch was a war-mongering hater of working people, you should just redistribute from the rich to the poor. Measures like abolishing the wages council and fair rents could only mean one thing - the woman was patently evil. These views were reinforced by a wave of cool alternative comedians that I worshipped, the musicians I looked up to, the academics and media commentators on the BBC programs I watched and in the newspapers I read.

What I didn't appreciate at the time was that almost all of the people espousing these views - Guardian leader writers, alternative comedians, politicians, media stars and to some extent musicians, had largely benefited from an education system and financial background very different to my own. It is fair to say that few of them had known the kind of poverty, bad schooling, lack of aspiration, benefit dependency, long term unemployment or “doing without” that I grew up in and around.

Smashing the grammar school system meant that I attended a comprehensive school. There, I suffered indifferent to bad teaching and went from being a confident, over-achieving kid who was gifted at Music, Maths and English to an emotionally stunted, self-loathing underachiever with no self-confidence and O and A level grades to match. I scraped a place at University and, free from the tall poppy culture that pervades in sink schools, I began to thrive. I found the student politics - after my years on the 'front line' - a bit embarrassing - where did all these screeching, angst-filled, smartly-dressed activists who ate - let alone had heard of - things like polenta, pesto and grissini? I'm not sure many of them had actually met a poor person before. The poor were there to be 'educated' so that they didn't read The Sun, didn't have socially embarrassing views on immigration and joined the front line, albeit in a role which was always subservient to their intellectual betters - patronised but never empowered.

I studied Econometrics - statistical economics. Aside from student journalism, it became my passion. I put way too much effort and time into it - largely because I was utterly focused on proving my parent-baiting economic theories right. These ideas were somewhat woolly, but basically involved giving money to poor people, proving everything I believed – that Thatch's economics were evil and wrong, that supporting rust bucket industries was some kind of rational economic theory, and that jobs needed to go to where the workers lived, not the other way around. My econometric thesis was the culmination of this. The subject was the North-South divide. Almost 100% of the literature was in agreement - it was so obvious. You just spent the money created in the South on jobs in the North. Job done.

Needless to say, I didn't find anything like what I expected. In fact, it emerged again and again that every trite, lazily received opinion I had about economics was entirely wrong. Giving money to poor areas and people was just a distortion, albeit one that could be perpetuated according to pork barrel politics and proximity to vital marginal constituencies. As I could see in my own family and community, if you just pay people to do nothing, it's pretty hard to resist accepting this as a way of life. I had my own experience of this when, after University, I was jobless for almost a year. There simply did not seem to be any jobs in advertising, publishing, journalism, broadcasting and many other fields I wanted to join. There were plenty of low-level jobs I was prepared to do, but the local benefit office decided I was entitled to full unemployment or supplementary benefit and I was grateful and then lazy - filled with self-pity that the world wasn't beating a path to my door. Funnily enough, years later I met many people who did manage to secure jobs in advertising, publishing, journalism, broadcasting and other fields. It seemed that their godparents, uncles, next door neighbours, parents' contacts and so on managed to get them something called an internship, after which, they had been offered a job. Naturally, their success was entirely due to how wonderful and special they were, not their connections or social class. Or internships.

In time, I had to accept that I had never even tried to understand what Thatch was all about. I had been completely and utterly wilfully and lazily blind to the economics of free markets. I just swallowed what the cushioned left had told me. My epiphany happened just as Mrs T was being booted from office and I embarked on a lifetime of having to tolerate the sneers, assumed superiority and total uncoolness of supporting free market economics.

It's interesting: For all the hatred and bile that Mrs T attracts, I'm not aware of many on the left who actively campaign to subsidise uneconomic industries, to hand back national power to trade unionists, who advocate reintroducing foreign exchange controls, who would prefer mortgage lenders to avoid lending to the poor as much as possible, who would reverse the privatisations of the Thatcher era, who have any clue how we would have gone from being a bankrupt international laughing stock to a successful free market economy that attracts immigration and companies from all over the world, who would increase income tax to levels where high earners either leave or give up. Mrs T's crime it seems is not that she was right, but that she dared to disturb the cosy decline of Britain. Being a conviction politician is noble in an Atlee, but is sneered at in a Thatcher. After all, how dare a grocer's daughter get so uppity? Well both were very great Britons in my book. RIP Mrs T.

{reprinted from an article first published in 2013]