Was Thatcher really a neoliberal?

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Margaret Thatcher is back in the news. But it is not her admirers on the Right who have put her there. It is our new Labour Prime Minister, whose diagnosis of our country’s ills seems to be that Britain was on the right path up until 1979, when the Conservatives got into power and precipitated ‘40 years of neoliberalism’.

There is no shortage of faults with this diagnosis that one could take issue with, but I want to focus here on one in particular. And it is this idea that Thatcher was some sort of unreconstructed neoliberal.

Of course, one could take exception with the term itself, which appears to mean all things to all men on the Left – a sort of shorthand for any position which is broadly supportive of free markets, free speech and a free society, or which is sceptical of the nostrums of statist economics.

But let’s contend with a more generous interpretation of neoliberal for a moment – that it denotes a privileging of liberty over all other values in politics; a preference for the individual right at the expense of community duty; a political philosophy which knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. In the strange retelling of history that Burnham and his ilk entertain, Thatcher was the very apotheosis of this sort of neoliberalism, and they invariably point to her remarks during a 1987 interview that ‘there’s no such thing’ as society as evidence of a shallow, materialistic worldview, the damaging consequences of which we are living with today in the form of a more selfish, more divided and ultimately less prosperous society.

These are problems which should preoccupy us all. But my new book, ‘The Ownership Society’, shows why it is entirely implausible to attribute such a neoliberal worldview to Thatcher. She believed deeply in communities, and in the personal obligations that extend beyond the pursuit of one’s own desires. What she hated was the idea that ‘the community’ was some benevolent force that stands apart from us all and onto which we could transpose all our responsibilities and duties to one another.

Thatcher argued that we should look at society as a ‘living tapestry of men and women and people’, and that ‘the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and… to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate’. No form of community or society or government could do anything, she continued, ‘except through people…It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour’. She despised the tendency among some on the Left to elide government, which operates unavoidably through compulsion, with community, the lifeblood of which is voluntarism.

Ultimately, Thatcher believed that the essential counterpart to freedom was responsibility, and that a free society was only sustainable in the long run if it was built upon people taking ownership for the problems that they and their fellow countrymen and women collectively face. She knew that constantly looking to the state to address these problems for us would breed a culture of irresponsibility that would ultimately lead to the loss of freedom, as we unlearned the ability to support ourselves and became evermore dependent on government. Surely, looking at the condition of our country today, she was correct.

She believed, in other words, in the ‘Ownership Society’ of which I write. And this was not a merely economic or material vision. If wider home and share ownership would give more people a stake in the economy, this was only a means to an end of giving people a psychological stake in the society and culture to which we all belong. ‘Economics is the method’, she averred; ‘the object is to change the heart and soul’ – to render people more likely to take responsibility for themselves, for their loved ones and for their neighbours. And in this, her perspectives were much more influenced by the teachings of the Gospel than Friedrich Hayek or Ludwig von Mises.

Isn’t it curious that a whole range of conservatives – in these columns, John Redwood, outgoing CPS Director Rob Colvile, John Cowpe and Lord Howell and indeed myself – have all recently returned to this idea of ownership for political inspiration? Why is that? I think it is in part because a fundamental choice that Thatcher presented to the British public has reasserted itself today: between a society organised from the bottom up on the principle of personal ownership, and one ultimately designed and managed from the top down, on the basis of state direction.

Conservatives are returning to that idea of ownership because of a palpable sense on the Right that, in their decision-making, politicians have persistently preferred the top down vision of society to the bottom up one. And so the state has grown, along with the sentiment that every social-economic problem is a nail for which the government is the most appropriate hammer. That almost fifty pence of every pound generated by the economy is consumed by the government is the political and economic manifestation of this. But the moral manifestation is markedly reduced opportunities for free expression, and so human flourishing.

Ownership – the propensity to take responsibility – is what enables a society to be both free and virtuous at the same time. It makes a society in which the state plays a small role in people’s lives possible. Its relevance is timeless.

But as Thatcher wisely put, politics is to apply ‘enduring principles to changed circumstances’. My book is an attempt to do that – to make the case for the Ownership Society in a Britain of falling homeownership for the young, rising tax burdens, diminished national self-confidence and an epidemic of incapacity and worklessness.

I advocate for the most transformative repatriation of responsibility in our country’s history – away from the state and towards individuals, families and communities, and with the government playing a proactive role to create the conditions for its own absence (a ‘Cincinnatus state’, I call it). Its material basis would be an extensive diffusion of property ownership, such that millions more British people would have the opportunity of a stake in our economy and society. It would see the government moving from sole provider of first resort to one source of provision within a far more pluralistic model of social support, alongside a systematic devolution of fiscal responsibility. And in doing all this, the Ownership Society would create the conditions for government to focus on those functions that only it can discharge, and to deliver them more effectively.

It is clearly true that culture shapes policy. But as Thatcher pointed out, policy can also affect culture. Statecraft is soulcraft – unavoidably so. And if those on the Right wish for a more dynamic and enterprising economy, they must build the moral and cultural soil in which such an economy can grow. That soil is a culture defined by a commitment to personal ownership. It has been scorched by successive governments who have sought to grow the size of the state, but it can be restored.

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