England: Seven Myths that Changed a Country – and How to set them Straight by Baldwin Tom & Stears Marc

Author:Baldwin, Tom & Stears, Marc
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2024-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

Victorians on speed

Under the headline ‘The Good Old Days’, Thatcher described the lessons of a childhood growing up in the Lincolnshire town of Grantham with a list including ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’ and ‘tremendous pride’ in the country. ‘We were taught to work jolly hard. We were taught to prove yourself; we were taught self-reliance; we were taught to live within our income,’ she said. ‘All of these things are Victorian values. They are also perennial values.’27

The economic creed of Thatcherism was portrayed as a restoration of the laissez-faire she claimed had made Britain such a powerhouse before the twentieth century’s experiment with big government. One of the most interesting historians to write about this time was Raphael Samuel. Although a member of the Communist Party, he never agreed with those Marxists who insist that everything is always determined by economics. Instead, he was fascinated by cultural ideas of England. Assessing who really stood for ‘Victorian values’ during Thatcher’s time in office, he concluded: ‘In terms of family solidarity, the dignity of work, the security of home, or simply the right of the free-born Englishman to stay put, it would not be the Prime Minister but the miners defeated in the strike of 1984–85 – her “enemy within” – who would have the stronger claim.’28

That strike, measured by working days lost as well as the fury it attracted, was the biggest industrial action in British history.29 There was fierce fighting between pickets and police, breakaway unions among miners and deep wounds cut into many working-class communities especially across the North and Midlands from which some have never recovered.

Through most of this period, however, Thatcher was supported by sections of the working class. This was not just because of popular policies like the sale of council homes but also because she seemed to stand for these ethics of the small town, her grocer father and the Methodist town chapel she attended as a child – rather than the aristocratic hunting lodges, banking houses or high churches of other Tories. In a speech to the City of London, for instance, Thatcher made no apology for preaching ‘the homilies of housekeeping or the parables of the parlour’, saying they ‘would save many a financier from failure and many a country from crisis’.30

Matthew Parris, a newspaper columnist for The Times, was once a Conservative MP and before that worked in Downing Street as Thatcher’s correspondence secretary. He has described how his job for her was to summarise the thousands of letters she received, saying the prime minister was sustained by the ‘fine lacework of British opinion, prejudice and sentiment, as flimsy and as persistent as gossamer’ found in those letters.31

Talking to us for this book, Parris says: ‘She was really looking for evidence that people agreed with her. She would read everything I gave her with a pen in her hand so that she could underline things she liked, as if to say, “there we are, he thinks so too.” ’ But he also explains the nuance in this caricature of Thatcher.

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