Anti-moderniser rage amongst my fellow right-wingers is stoking up nicely. They know where Dave and his liberal-left gang of anti-Thatcherites went wrong - they reneged on the promise to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.
If they’d stuck to their guns, UKIP would have swung its weight behind Tory candidates in winnable seats. Dave would have been in No. 10 by now, waving two fingers through the window at Clegg’s dwindling band of disgruntled, deluded, besandalled weirdies.
Well, maybe. But the problem with that scenario is that many of the uncommitted voters who turned Tory this time probably wouldn’t have done so if Dave had campaigned on a red-in-tooth-and-claw anti-European, anti-immigrant, anti-public sector berserker ticket from the start.
I’d have loved it, of course, as would many of my fellow rightist frothers. But I doubt if it would have resulted in any more seats for the party: it may very well have had the opposite effect.
Like it or not – and I really don’t – the majority of British voters are middle-of-the road quiet-lifers who haven’t experienced any form of genuine sacrifice or hardship. (Before you get in a self-righteous tizzy, I include myself in this category.) We’ve never really gone without through lack of money. We may not always have been able to afford the cars or clothes or holidays we wanted – but we’ve never done without them entirely.
The problem is, most of us don’t even have a clue what sacrifice or hardship might actually entail. Not always getting the latest drugs known to medical science on the NHS? Not receiving an automatic inflation-busting salary increase? Having to buy a car without a passenger-side airbag? Staying in a three star rather than a five-star hotel on holiday?
Knowing this, our three main political parties lied to us throughout the election campaign. They all know that huge cuts are on the way: if not, the international markets, the scent of blood powerful in their nostrils, will come after Britain with a relentless will to destroy not seen since Norman Lamont had to slink out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992 after wasting billions trying to keep the pound at a level acceptable to our European enemies – sorry, I meant “allies”, of course.
Brown’s nonsense about waiting until next year to make cuts was a fantasy promise: it’s not his decision to make. Cameron’s promises to increase spending on the NHS, Education, the Police and Greenery were simply ridiculous. The LibDems… oh, who cares!
There will be swingeing cuts in every area of public life, with job losses to match. Much better to use money to cut the private sector some slack in the hope that its inherent energy will boost the economy.
So, why didn’t our would-be rulers come clean? I think the Second World War is the key. (No, please, stay with me.) When Mrs. Thatcher won in 1979, the war had been over for 34 years: many of the people who had lived through it were in their fifties and sixties. Their children – people like me, in our twenties and thirties at the start of the Thatcher era – had been brought up on tales of sacrifice, hardship and heroism ringing in our ears: WWII still formed the main backdrop to our lives. While many on the left sneered at our seeming obsession with Britain’s heroic role in saving the world for democracy, and at our quaint, unrealistic hankering to be a respected world power once more, many of us felt ashamed of what this country had become - the economic sick man of Europe, militarily weak, strike-infested, blackmailed by arrogant, nihilistic, union leaders, bled dry by a bloated public sector, and eventually forced to go cap in hand to international bankers for poor-relief.
It used to be hard to convince young folk just how low the UK had sunk by the end of the 1970s. I think they’re now starting to experience it first-hand, and it’s about to get a lot worse.
Thatcher tapped into our sense of shame brilliantly – and our hunger for something better. She convinced us that Britain wasn’t actually ungovernable. Unions could be defeated. We could be prosperous once more. And we could again matter in the world. Labour were offering more humiliation: the Liberals were a meaningless joke. (Some things really never change.)
People who were proud of what they – or their parents – had achieved in the war, and those who wanted Britain to play an international role once more, knew exactly who to vote for in 1979. The Falklands War, the defeat of the miners, increasing prosperity and our role in overthrowing Soviet communism all confirmed the wisdom of our choice. Thatcher gave us our pride back, and we kept voting for her. In many ways, she was a war-time leader.
For most people under 50, the war doesn’t mean much any more (except for the need to apologise for bombing Dresden, of course). Millions of our fellow citizens come from countries uninvolved in WWII, and many of them see any form of military intervention by the British as a war crime in any case. As for the international stage, we’re America’s puppets, wasting the lives of our troops in foolish foreign adventures that have nothing to do with us. Sacrifice is for mugs: we could all have enough if the government just took money away from bankers and redistributed it. There doesn’t need to be unemployment: the state could employ three million more people – it just needs to get rid of nuclear weapons and offer lots of “green” jobs and everything’ll be hunky-dory.
Of course, this “magical” thinking existed in 1979 – it fueled the unions and their employees in the Labour Party – but the majority of us knew it was nonsense. Now the majority of the under-50s seem to take it for granted. They’ve had no direct contact with forbears who proudly did their bit, or went without, or simply pitched in when the going got tough, or who actually fought to save this island. When Britain was on its knees in 1979, that war-time spirit, that sense of somehow all being in this mess together (apart from the unions and the Labour Party, of course) came in pretty handy. We placed our trust in a strong leader with a sense of urgency and purpose, and she turned things around.
By the time Mrs. Thatcher’s own party kicked her out, we had learned some important lessons. Glutinous sentimentality about “society” and “oppression” was no substitute for hard work and practical measures. The state didn’t owe us a living. High taxation stifled enterprise and made us all poorer. There were no rights without responsibilities. We were each responsible for balancing our own books, just as the state needed to balance its books. Saying “no” to Europe’s faceless bureaucrats actually worked.
Of course, thirteen years of Labour has untaught all those valuable lessons. In fact, the Thatcher era is seen as one of pointless, avoidable suffering rather than a time when we rolled up our sleeves and started rebuilding a broken country.
And most of us no longer want to hear about sacrifice or doing our bit or going without (unless, of course, we’re on a diet or a charity fun run).
Financially, it is about to hit the fan quite spectacularly – far worse than the early 1980s - and there’s going to be a lot of unpleasantness for an awful lot of people. Left-liberal magical thinking – ridiculous, unsustainable promises to ring-fence vast areas of public spending - won’t be much use. Given that most of us no longer have the example of the war to stiffen our sinews, it’s hard to identify a source of intestinal fortitude (after all, whatever we have to do to keep the country and ourselves from bankruptcy won’t have anything to do with “justice” or “fairness” or “saving the planet” or “inclusiveness” – or any of the other left-liberal buzz-concepts). Maybe we’ll just do what the deluded, tax-dodging Greeks are doing, and take to the streets to demand that reality be suspended.
Our other main problem is that Parliament appears to be a warrior-free zone these days.
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