England: Seven Myths that Changed a Country â 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 âThe Good Old Daysâ, Thatcher described the lessons of a childhood growing up in the Lincolnshire town of Grantham with a list including âcleanliness is next to godlinessâ and âtremendous prideâ in the country. âWe 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,â she said. âAll of these things are Victorian values. They are also perennial values.â27
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 centuryâs 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 âVictorian valuesâ during Thatcherâs time in office, he concluded: âIn 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 1984â85 â her âenemy withinâ â who would have the stronger claim.â28
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 â 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 âthe homilies of housekeeping or the parables of the parlourâ, saying they âwould save many a financier from failure and many a country from crisisâ.30
Matthew Parris, a newspaper columnist for The Times, was once a Conservative MP and before that worked in Downing Street as Thatcherâs 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 âfine lacework of British opinion, prejudice and sentiment, as flimsy and as persistent as gossamerâ found in those letters.31
Talking to us for this book, Parris says: âShe 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, âthere we are, he thinks so too.âââ But he also explains the nuance in this caricature of Thatcher.
Download
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
Room 212 by Kate Stewart(4150)
The Crown by Robert Lacey(4139)
Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing(3891)
The Iron Duke by The Iron Duke(3676)
The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang(3566)
Killing England by Bill O'Reilly(3487)
Joan of Arc by Mary Gordon(3295)
Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe(3103)
I'll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson(2866)
Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness(2781)
Hitler's Monsters by Eric Kurlander(2762)
Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography by Thatcher Margaret(2708)
Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Murder of Lord Darnley by Alison Weir(2697)
Darkest Hour by Anthony McCarten(2674)
Blood and Sand by Alex Von Tunzelmann(2631)
Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum(2492)
Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell(2428)
The One Memory of Flora Banks by Emily Barr(2377)
Book of Life by Deborah Harkness(2307)