Vol. 77/No. 17      May 6, 2013

Thatcher is widely known, alongside former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, for leading a capitalist offensive throughout the 1980s that included “free market” reforms, claims of credit for the fall of the Stalinist regimes of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and major blows dealt to the labor movement. The Thatcher government is also credited with Britain’s victorious war against Argentina to maintain its colonial domination over the Malvinas Islands.

“Thatcherism” is not a political course that can be implemented at any time — as some capitalist politicians surely would like to do today. Rather it was the response of the dominant section of the British ruling-class to a specific moment in history that Thatcher was well qualified to understand and lead. The course aimed, without success, to turn around the deepening crisis of British capitalism, reverse the U.K.’s declining world role and counter the broader decline of world capitalism in its early stages at the time. In carrying this out, Thatcher was among the more astute ruling-class figures who recognized the weaknesses of their adversaries — from the Argentine dictatorship to the trade unions and their leadership.

The fact is London’s successful 1982 war against Argentina highlighted its dependence on military and political support from Washington, whose aid delivered Britain’s victory. And the Soviet Union collapsed not primarily from external pressure, but as a result of internal weakness resulting from the counterrevolutionary course carried out by the bureaucratic caste that usurped and held political power there since the late 1920s.

Of all Thatcher’s accomplishments, only her government’s successful offensive against the organized labor movement is really significant. And while the British rulers did deal powerful blows, they failed to impose a defeat that could stifle the resistance of labor in any lasting way or push the working class off the center stage of politics.

The U.K. Thatcher inherited

As an economic recession took hold throughout the imperialist world in the mid-1970s, production stagnated and unemployment climbed in Britain, while prices rose by just under 20 percent in one year.

Thatcher replaced the policy of previous administrations with what she called “free market” capitalism: rolling back the involvement of the state in the economy, including through privatization of nationalized industries and financial deregulation.

Thatcher rejected the way that her predecessors — Tories and social democrats alike — had dealt with the unions. The Labour government of Harold Wilson had unsuccessfully attempted to hold back workers’ incomes through wage-price controls and legal curbs on unions. Union action in the late 1960s brought labor to the center stage of politics.

The 1970-74 Conservative government under Edward Heath fared no better, succumbing in the face of massive strike action by miners, construction and engineering workers. Following Heath, another Labour government similarly failed to prevent workers from pressing their interests. Some 13 million days on average were lost yearly in strikes throughout the 1970s.

The Thatcher government prepared for an assault on working people. Early exuberance crashed as steelworkers struck for 13 weeks, winning a 16 percent pay raise, and miners in South Wales forced a retreat on plans to close a number of mines.

But as the 1980-82 recession took hold, rising unemployment sapped labor’s fighting capacity and drove down the living standards of many working people.

“People’s capitalism” and “property-owning democracy” were the banners under which the government simultaneously set about creating a social base for its course. As state industries were privatized, shares were offered to private individuals, with the number of shareholders increasing from 3 million to 12 million, including higher-paid sections of the working class. Public council houses were sold to tenants at heavily discounted prices. These measures were aimed at convincing a layer within the working class to adopt a petty-bourgeois outlook with a perceived stake in capitalism and profitability. (Many of the new “property owners” lost out, their confidence shaken, following the stock market crash of 1987.)

Gov’t provokes miners strike

Some 150,000 miners downed tools, joined flying pickets to extend the strike action. They reached out and won support from trade unionists and others who wanted to fight back against the government’s attacks. Wives, mothers, daughters and sisters organized themselves into a women’s auxiliary and joined miners in picketing and traveling throughout the U.K. and internationally to mobilize support. Faced by this growing social movement, the government mobilized the cops, courts and media. In the course of the strike nearly 10,000 miners were arrested and the union’s funds were sequestered by the state.

Thatcher prepared by building up coal stocks. She rightly anticipated that labor leaders would refuse to back the miners in any meaningful way, scuttling the type of working-class solidarity that was both possible and necessary. Some openly opposed the strike; others feigned support while doing nothing.

This weakness of the labor movement was the product of decades of collaboration with the bosses by their Labour Party and the union tops. Their “beer and sandwiches” approach to the employers and governments — in the context of the post-WWII-boom when workers were winning concessions — counted for naught in a major class battle in which the very existence of the miners and their union was at stake. Above all, these bureaucrats sought to pacify working people and avoid the kind of class struggle posed by the assaults that would threaten their privileges and positions. The miners, left isolated, went down to defeat.

Through the ’90s and some years after, an “if the miners couldn’t win, how can we?” attitude was widespread in the working class. Thatcher’s successes against organized labor were singled out for praise by Prime Minister Anthony Blair, whose Labour government consolidated many of Thatcher’s gains, keeping anti-union laws that remain to this day.

At the same time a wave of strikes by engineering workers, ambulance drivers, dockworkers and on London Underground took place in 1989-90.

The 1987 stock market crash and the recession that followed exposed for the ruling class what the government had not done, and could not do, to reverse British capitalism’s crisis and declining competitiveness. Industry was leaner but not fitter. Thatcher’s economic and financial policies had made the U.K. more, not less, vulnerable — as was revealed anew in 2008.

For working people, unemployment remained above 2 million. New share- and house-holders saw the price of their “possessions” tumble. Support for the Conservative Party hemorrhaged, especially in the industrial north, in Scotland and in Wales.

In addition to the limitations on domestic economic and labor policy, the Thatcher government was unable to break the Irish national resistance. Moreover, factional divisions within the British ruling class over the United Kingdom’s relationship with the European Union provoked public government crises, including resignations of prominent government ministers. Thatcher’s opponents within her own party — whom she dubbed “false squires” — united to dump her in 1990.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home