[lbo-talk] Thatcherism

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Fri Apr 16 10:07:48 PDT 2010


Doug, quoting John Gray:

'Thatcher's economic revolution was meant to go along with something like a social restoration. Instead, it led to Britain as it is today, a society obsessed with the idea of personal self-realisation, more liberal in sexual matters, less monocultural and less class-bound, more insecure and more unequal.'

She made a great play of mocking the idea of a job for life as outmoded, but then was surprised that the corollary of that was that there was no marriage for life, either. When breadwinners lost their jobs, families broke up. Market societies tended to undermine the very institutions they rested on, like the family, the nation state, government.

As to what position one ought to take in regard to those things, I think it is different in different circumstances. It was right to oppose the pro-family policies that Mrs Thatcher put forward (like the anti-gay legislation of 'Clause 28'). But in more recent times there has been a lot of anti-family legislation, that, for example, gives the social services greater right to break up families and take children into care, which is pretty illiberal.



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