Those of you who turned up on these pages expecting to see the next instalment of my series on the USA deserve an apology and one is being given unreservedly. I had to switch attention to that little island set in the wilds of the turbulent North Sea because historical happenings, apart from the giant sea billows washing up on her shores, are rocking the place, threatening to throw it into the sea of history.
In 1979, the Conservative Party under the unlikely Margaret Thatcher, the chemistry graduate turned lawyer, trounced the Labour Party under the leadership of Jim Callaghan and took over power with such a comfortable majority that the Labour Party was kept out of power until 1997 when Tony Blair led the Labour Party out of the political wilderness within which they languished for eighteen desolate years. Within this period of time the Conservative Party had the rare opportunity of building Britain in her own image and during this time nobody grasped that opportunity more than Margaret Hilda Thatcher, the humble green grocer’s daughter who not only went to rub shoulders with the dyed in the wool owners of the land in the rarefied cloisters of Oxford University but went all the way to the palace of Westminster from where like Oliver Cromwell, the man who beheaded a crowned King of England, she ruled majestically if not imperiously. For all of eleven glorious years as far as her supporters were concerned or eleven tragic years if you were at the sharp end of her right wing rule, she reigned supreme, longer than any Prime Minister in the twentieth century and quite probably longer than any Prime Minister will ever rule over Britain again. To say that Margaret Thatcher, at the height of her powers was larger than life is to be guilty of an understatement. Even though Britain was a democracy and as far as can be determined is still one, she was only nominally so as long as Thatcher was in charge because she imposed her iron will on her party, her government and her country in a way that nobody could do or tried to do since then. And yet she came within a whisker of losing it all as early as 1982 when her policies had been dismissed as incompatible with the interest of her seething electorate. Then, fate in the shape of the deluded military government of Argentina came to her unlikely rescue. Several thousand miles away from Britain, a tiny island off the coast of Argentina and known as the Falkland Island in Britain but Malvinas to the Argentines was claimed definitively by the Argentines. The island which was occupied by a few British sheep herders was claimed by the Britons as British territory. Thatcher elected to lift the impasse by sending what she described as a task force to the South Pacific to throw off the Argentine military from the Falklands. The British, ever dreaming of military glory, even if it was in the course of a minor military expedition against a third or even fourth rate world power, rose up as one to support troops. In the end, the British armed forces imposed their will on the demoralised and badly equipped Argentines and Thatcher became an overnight heroine who was able to snatch an unlikely victory from the jaws of impending defeat and consolidate her rule which went on for another eight years or so.
Thatcher attained the height of her powers in the period after the Falklands adventure and so all those born in Britain in the seventies can be dubbed Thatcher’s children as they grew up in a country which was a virtual dictatorship. As with all lower middle class persons who had climbed the ladder of social and in the case of Thatcher, political success, Margaret Thatcher was an incurable snob, one who looked down on those beneath her social status which was the overwhelming majority of Britons and craved the approval of those of her natural superiors that occupied the social space above her. Being part of this elite group was to be superhuman and worthy of worship. An entry to this elite group was to be purchased with hard cash so that the more money you had or had access to, the more virtuous you were within society. These were the only people who were making any tangible contribution to success within the country as far as the Thatcherites, the fanatical political and economic supporters of Margaret Thatcher and of course she herself were concerned with.
The cornerstone of Thatcher’s policies was private enterprise, the more private, the better and so, all public enterprises electricity, railways, airlines and virtually anything that could contribute to the economy were privatised and run on a strict cash and carry basis. Those who could not for any reason compete within the hostile environment were simply left behind, to be trampled underfoot by those who because of one reason or the other could leverage on their talents, whatever they were, to make as much private money as they could. The new mantra that was the hallmark of the Thatcher regime was the refrain that selfishness was good because it created wealth. The new goddess was wealth, never mind how the wealth was acquired.
In no country had trade unionism been as advanced as Britain. Indeed the birth place of trade unionism was Britain, if only because she was the first industrial nation on earth. The earliest unionists fought, as they did later on in the USA and other places, a long and bitter struggle for recognition within the work place. That struggle included a fight against inhuman practices which the early industrialists insisted were necessary for them to make profit. Indeed it was not until the Labour movement was able to use her weight in number and the stern determination of their leaders to win concessions such as the eight hour working day and half-days on Saturday, within which they could just manage to live as human beings in the midst of the industrial wasteland in which they lived.
Thatcher was well aware of the need to break or at the very least limit the powers of the unions. And this she did with a ruthlessness which bordered on sadism. One of the most powerful unions was the Union of Mineworkers led by Arthur Scargil and represented thousands of coal miners. Miners were one of the first groups of workers to form a union and had power and experience on their side. In order to succeed in her economic plan, the mine workers had to be not just subdued but humiliated and broken completely. In a war of attrition and sheer government bloody mindedness, this is what happened and the victorious Thatcher, winner of everything in her view went on to change the face of Britain, seemingly forever.
The children who were born in the seventies grew up in Thatcher’s Britain and knowing nothing else for eleven of their most fertile formative years imbibed Thatcherism with their mothers’ milk. Simple arithmetic shows that this group of Britons are now in their late forties to very early fifties and you can see that these are the people who have taken over the Conservative Party at this time. Liz Truss their acclaimed leader is forty-seven and was born within a few months of her soul mate, the first black person to be made Chancellor of the Exchequer and also the person to hold that office for the fewest number of days, thirty –eight, with the exception of Ian Macleod, who was in office for only thirty days before he had to surrender the post after a terminal heart attack. His supporters can point to this unfortunate incident as an excuse for the extreme brevity of his tenure in office. Kwasi Kwartey has no such excuse to hide behind as he was simply fired unceremoniously for what can only be described as a catastrophic performance. There are those who blame the colour of his skin for the abrupt termination of his appointment but there are objective reasons to reject this assumption.
In the first instance Kwasi himself has never had to confront the blackness of his skin. As one of the children of Thatcher, the only consideration he was brought up to accept was competence and he had this in abundance. Son of immigrants from Ghana but born in London in the very year that Thatcher assumed the leadership of the Conservative Party, he has lived on the abundance of his talent all his life. A scholarship to Eton meant that he rubbed shoulders with the sons of aristocrats and leaders of society from a very young age. His brilliance took him to Cambridge, once again in a very competitive scholarship, one which he amply justified by coming away with a double first in classics and history. He even had the time and mental acuity to win the Academic challenge, one the most demanding quiz competitions in the world, in the colours of Cambridge. His exploits continued on the other side of the Atlantic this time to Harvard, again on a scholarship and from there, he took a Masters’ degree before coming back to Cambridge for a brilliant and well deserved doctorate. For his whole life therefore, he was an honorary white and could not have had the opportunity of any social or other intercourse (his wife is unapologetically white)with another person except of course another freak cut out of the same cloth as he was. It is quite clear that the whites with whom he has cohabited all his life would not have confused him with the black bus driver they come across occasionally or the black lady who performed some such menial task for their comfort. The termination of his glittering appointment can therefore be described as an unfortunate accident, one which is not likely to define his career. He is therefore likely to accept this setback with the equanimity which in Britain is called a stiff upper lip, associated with the upper class toffs of which he is certainly one.
When Liz Truss announced her cabinet only a few weeks ago, I pointed out that all her cabinet appointments were made, not on the basis of any ethnic diversity but because of the colour of their political background. It has now become clear that all that mattered was their implacable devotion to their own warped Thatcherite values which launched the fabulous career of Margaret Thatcher, their common step mother. What they did not quite realise is that it is these same policies which caused her deputy, the urbane Geoffrey Howe to stand up in parliament one day to denounce her so roundly that she had to resign. Given the tenor of the times, it is jot unlikely that the Truss tenure is not going to last the number of months which her step mother had in years to provide any leadership to her beleaguered country. Time will surely tell.