Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds): The Politics of Thatcherism, Lawrence and Wishart in association with Marxism Today, 1983, £4.95; Nicholas Wapshott and George Brock: Thatcher, Futura, 1983, £1.95.
After three weeks of image-building for Thatcher in the media during the election campaign, who on the left would willingly open a book featuring her photograph in full colour striking a statespersonlike pose and surrounded by a discreet border of Tory blue? Worse still, its authors are Deputy and Assistant Features Editor of the increasingly Thatcherite Times and its simple title Thatcher is qualified by the publishers as 'the major new biography'.
Fortunately Nicholas Wapshott and George Brock [illegible] a well-written, straight and not uncritical account of the Prime Minister's political career. It puts the record straight on the family [illegible] to her character, [illegible] and relevant account of her early influences, her education and entry into politics, and [illegible] quite clearly how little her [illegible] Tory Party leader and then Prime Minister owed to her own intellectual and political talents: rather, she was the beneficiary of Edward Heath's abrupt and unanticipated fall from office and the collapse of his support in the party. In the absence of a more obvious Crown Prince or Princess, she was rushed in to fill the vacuum [illegible].
[illegible] account of the Thatcher Government of 1979-83 and the political basis of Thatcherism — which the authors largely dismiss as 'style' — and its relationship to traditional Tory Party politics. The book's discussion of [illegible] policy and in particular of the Falklands [illegible] restricted [illegible] superficial reportage with [illegible] serious consideration of the political issues involved or their longer-term implications.
The same [illegible] be levelled at The Politics of Thatcherism. Over the period since 1979, Marxism Today has published a wide range of articles on the implications of Thatcherism by writers drawn from diverse sections of the left, many from well outside the traditional orbit, politically as well as organisationally, of the Communist Party. [illegible] of the key articles, several substantially revised to take account of changed circumstances, are included in this volume. In [illegible] analysis, The Politics of Thatcherism is essential reading.
Falklands Factor
The weakest section by far is the one on the Falklands Factor which brings together an extremely rightist piece by Eric Hobsbawn arguing that the left must 'recapture patriotism' with an article by Tom Nairn characteristically trenchant in his assertion that 'the real England is irredeemably Tory' and that the creation of a 'new national-popular idea' must go hand in hand with the break-up of Britain. In the middle is Robert Gray, the tone of whose contribution can be gauged by his speculation about the ways in which the left must 'begin to think more concretely and creatively about national identity and national interests' (p279): 'What,' he asks, 'constitute the legitimate interests of a Britain engaged in progressive social changes along the road to socialism? What sort of military forces would be needed to protect those interests?' (p279). What, one might reply, about putting the horse in front of the cart? Radical thinking is required if the left is to win popular support for a working class policy on international questions. But this will not be provided by such 'soft options' as trying to steal the made-to-measure suits of the bourgeoisie a la Hobsbawm, or indulging in abstract speculation à la Gray. Nor I suspect would Nairn's celtic fringe alternative really fit the bill if his meaning was more fully spelled out.
Fundamental Trends
The most thoughtful and fundamental contributions on the changing configuration of British politics are provided by Andrew Gamble and Stuart Hall. Both have two essays in the book — one each on the Tories and one each on the SDP. In 'Thatcherism and Conservative Politics' which has been almost entirely rewritten from two earlier essays, Gamble provides a concise account of Thatcherism as a doctrine and as practical politics and asks how it relates to traditional conservatism. He traces the continuities with the Heath Government: both, he argues, were concerned with forging a new conservatism appropriate to the intersection of Britain's economic and political decline and the onset of world recession. But while Heath retreated from social market doctrines because of the scale of unemployment and working class resistance they created, returning to a more traditional dash for growth, Thatcher has held firm. In this sense, Gamble argues, Heath represented a last attempt to operate within the post-war social democratic consensus (though it did not appear so at the time) while Thatcher — in the context of a world situation admitting of less room for manouevre — represents a decisive break. 'The Impact of the SDP' is a less substantial piece more at the level of good speculative journalism largely analysing the deficiencies of the party in relation to its stated objectives rather than providing a rounded materialist analysis of its dynamics and role.
Where Gamble's mode of analysis is that of the theoretically informed Marxist historian, Stuart Hall's leans more heavily on Gramsci and the new Marxist cultural studies of which he has been a pioneer. In 'The Great Moving Right Show', Hall shows how, on a range of issues, it has been the themes and issues of the new right which have spoken most directly to the social practices and lived ideologies of very large numbers of people, including crucially working class people, whose traditional party allegiances have been eroded in the post-war period. Thatcherism, in particular, by distancing itself from the authoritarian and inadequate aspects of the welfare state, has colonised a radical terrain with reactionary weapons. In 'The Little Caesars of Social Democracy', Hall considers the implications of this for the SDP, concluding that while the party may make transient gains from the secular declines of the Labour and Tory Parties, their actual policies do not have the same fundamental appeal as the radical anti-statism which Thatcherism has constituted as its ideological image.
Changing the Terrain
Hall's analysis is developed in the editors' introduction co-written with Martin Jacques which argues that Thatcherism 'is not finally [illegible] Rather it [illegible] in terms of the [illegible] failure in [illegible] It [illegible]' (well they had to [illegible]!) 'in shifting the terms of political debate. It has provoked a rupture [illegible]' (p13). Now in a [illegible] the [illegible] of Thatcherism lies precisely in its attempt to halt the prodigious decline in Tory support in the [illegible] — and to [do?] this it must necessarily work on a more fundamental terrain than simply electoral politics. But this is in no way separable from the party's electoral fortunes. The whole history of the Tory Party is that of a party geared to winning, an aspiration to which all considerations of ideology and doctrine are entirely secondary. Had Thatcher lost in 1983, which without the Malvinas war would have been a real possibility, there is nothing to suggest that she would have avoided the fate of all Tory losers.
And this underlines a problem in the high level of abstraction at which the main analytical articles in the book operate — a problem exacerbated by the general sensation of timelessness induced by the non-chronological mixture of articles written before the Malvinas war with others written after or revised in the light of its effects. Somehow, and with honourable exceptions like the excellent and provocative shorter articles by Lynne Segal and Martin Kettle on the sexual division of labour and law and order respectively, contributors fail to grapple with concrete questions or tangible lines of advance.
Lack of Strategy
For all the light that can be cast by Gramscian analysis of the forms of hegemony to which Thatcherism aspires, it no more provides a direct guide to action for socialists than the labourism or economism it derides. And whatever the value of historically locating Thatcherism in relation to the traditions of Toryism, on its own this is not enough. The real problem about the book is that it is left to rather unsophisticated Communist Party propagandists to attempt to graft elements of an anti-Thatcher strategy for the left onto the theoretically sophisticated analyses discussed above.
This is clearest in Jon Bloomfield's article which concludes the book and is worth quoting at length. Bloomfield explicitly rejects the idea of working in, or affiliating to, the Labour Party and asserts: 'There are large and clear political spaces on the British left waiting to be filled. There are opportunities for the Communist Party and others to take. Briefly stated, the left urgently needs a party which sees its main priorities as the development of mass struggles on the issues of unemployment, peace, democratic rights, anti-racism and women's liberation, the encouragement of links and alliances between these struggles and movements in a non-opportunist manner, and the application of Marxist analysis and organisation to these struggles, along with the stimulation of extensive Marxist discussion and debate,' (p338).
Apart from the omission of any mention of struggles around the control and organisation of the economy (presumably to avoid the remotest possibility the author may fall into the trap of economism) this ritual incantation is notable only for its vacuous timelessness. It could have come straight out of the 1977 edition of the British Road to Socialism: so much for the radical impression of Thatcherism on all aspects of political life!
What is, above all, notable about the book's strategic conclusions are their lack of radicalism in relation to the depth of the tasks implied by its analysis: 'A protracted, and arduous task lies before the entire left in swinging the people away from Thatcherism and onto a road of democratic peaceful advance. It can be achieved, provided the left blends its socialist vision with realistic estimates of the present situation and there is the utmost unity and co-operation among all the progressive forces and movements' (p339) is how Bloomfield concludes his article; hardly a high note on which to end such a book. Hall and Jacques in the introduction similarly conclude that what is required is, first, the 'transformation of the labour movement' (p16) by which they appear to mean 'a major political, social, cultural, ideological renewal' (p14), and second, 'the construction by the labour movement of the broadest possible set of alliances against Thatcherism involving, in the initial instance, possibly quite modest objectives' (p16). Hardly the kind of clear and confident line of advance that is likely to convince waverers that there is an alternative as Thatcher embarks on her second term of office.
STEVE KENNEDY is a member of the Editorial Board of International.