LITTLE LADY, BIG SHADOW:

Margaret Thatcher, inspiration to New Labour: John Kampfner examines the curious relationship between Margaret Thatcher and the party she so nearly destroyed (John Kampfner, 17/04/2008, Daily Telegraph)

[B]ehind the simplistic attacks lies a more intriguing political reality. The Left, or at least the mainstream Left, has - for all the fury - accepted much of the Thatcher legacy.

Part of that is the inevitable passing of time, and the passage of events that are brought about only in part by politicians.
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Would, for example, the greater onus on entrepreneurship and individualism that started in the Eighties not have happened anyway, albeit at a slower pace? And the technological revolution and onset of globalisation occurred long after Maggie departed.

Still, the Britain that Tony Blair inherited had the Thatcher imprint all over it. It was an axiom of New Labour not to shake the foundations she had laid. Part of this was calculation. Like all successful electoral machines, New Labour was a construct, a coalition of different forces.

Integral to Blair's strategy was to win back the skilled manual labourers, the aspirational class that had flocked to Mrs Thatcher, with her promise to enable people to buy their council homes, and to take part in a "share-owning democracy".

Some of this was also a conversion to a value system. Indeed, Blair's programme for the 1997 election confirmed all Mrs Thatcher's free-market reforms of a deregulated, non-planned, largely privatised economy with a flexible labour market, marginalising the trade unions and local authorities, while publicly disowning Left-wing shibboleths such as redistribution.

From the "prawn cocktail" offensive under John Smith to the more sophisticated wooing of the mid-Nineties, Blair and Brown let it be known that Labour had become "the party of business". They had dumped "tax and spend" policies forever.

They were seemingly all Thatcherites now.

To get a sense of her historical importance, consider than not just every current government of the Anglosphere but most of the opposition parties--with the curious exception of the post-Clinton Democrats--and the governments of France and Germany are now Thatcherite as well.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 18, 2008 6:15 AM