Thatcher's children

British democracy has rarely been in worse shape: party memberships have plummeted, election turnouts are low. Where did politics go wrong?

Simon Jenkins
Saturday September 23, 2006
The Guardian

To celebrate the millennium, the people of Norway decided not to build a dome but to ask a question. What, they demanded of a group of scholars, would Norwegian democracy be like in 100 years? Seminars were held, social scientists summoned and polls taken. The answer was not good. Most Norwegians were comfortable and disinclined to political participation. The country was more and more run by a barely changing coalition of party officials, businessmen, lawyers and journalists. Elections meant no more than an occasional job change. Democracy was atrophying and might be a passing blip, replaced by a self-sustaining oligarchy.

Norway is, if anything, more democratic than Britain, and Britain has had the benefit, for the past quarter century, of one of Europe's few recent revolutions: that of Thatcherism. In 1979, this revolution swept aside the postwar welfare settlement in a decade of turbulence. At next week's Labour party conference, delegates will greet a Labour prime minister and chancellor boasting the private sector and profit as salvation of the public realm, delivering hospitals, care homes, prisons and school administration, not to mention trains, coal, gas and public utilities. This would have been unimaginable in the 1970s. Not one cabinet member protests, no backbencher resigns the whip, trade unionists are quiescent. The impending NHS strike is astonishing only for having taken so long - and being doomed to fail. The Thatcherite settlement has survived seven general elections, three prime ministers and three economic cycles. It is politically entrenched.

Yet the revolution has not delivered public satisfaction. No poll has ever shown a majority in favour of privatisation. The 2005 election was almost entirely fought over the perceived inadequacy of public services. Nor is the government satisfied with itself, being in administrative turmoil near to nervous breakdown. Public servants are warned to prepare for what the health secretary, Patricia Hewitt, calls "continuous revolution". Private computer companies fleece it of hundreds of millions of pounds. The City pocketed £500m in fees to privatise the London Underground. Local government has been brought under central direction. The usual totems of democratic enthusiasm - party membership and election turnout - have plummeted.

Thatcherism has yielded a paradox. Ask any profession or occupation what the revolution has meant for them, and the reply is the same. It was probably more freedom for others, but for them, it was more legislation, regulation, intrusion and red tape. Nationalisation might have gone, and anyone doing business with the government grown rich. But liberation from central control has not followed. Quite the reverse. What happened to the revolution?

The answer is that Britain has experienced not one revolution but two, often fighting each other. They are reflected in the personalities of Margaret Thatcher and her "sons", John Major and Tony Blair. This curious trio of "leaders with no hinterland" proved ideal for an era that had little time for the conventions of Britain's constitution or the traditions of its establishment. Each in his or her own way tore them up and delivered Britain refreshed but perplexed into the new century.

Thatcher herself was a split political personality, a Hayekian liberal believing in a shrinking state and a Methodist nanny demanding always that "more must be done". She set out to liberate the supply side of the economy and give it confidence after decades of defeatism and misery. It was initially hesitant. Thatcher was a reluctant and late convert to privatisation - at the 1979 election she banned the word - and, even after British Telecom and the rest, refused to contemplate it for health, coal mines or trains. Not until Major and Blair was the private sector harnessed to the reform of the public one. But Thatcher had changed the climate of government. Her addiction to the TV programme Yes, Minister, was not to its humour but to its moral message: that the system would always defeat attempts to reform it unless a leader was strong. This first revolution was thus one of political will. It transformed the performance of the political economy and was rightly celebrated worldwide. It is the revolution with which the word Thatcherism is commonly associated.

The second revolution arose from the conduct of the first but led in a diametrically opposite direction, away from "less government" and towards a concentration of control. It was a revolution not of will but of power. When challenged, Thatcher did not deny that she had drawn power to her office, because extra power was needed "to smash socialism". That accreting power to smash power would always be a conceit of authoritarianism was a nuance lost on her. She and her followers centralised Whitehall, enforced Treasury discipline and regulated both the public and private sectors to a degree unprecedented in peacetime. Where state ownership retreated, state control advanced. The chief casualty was a plural constitution. British political leadership is less subject to balancing power than in any other western democracy.

The greatest triumph of the first revolution was not the conversion of the Conservative party - though the "battle against the wets" took Thatcher almost 10 years and cost much blood - but the conversion of Labour. While the Blair project was initially presented as a tactical acceptance of Thatcherism to make Labour seem electable, successive election victories saw no return to redistributive taxation, public ownership or European "social chapter" corporatism. On the contrary, Blair and Gordon Brown accepted Thatcher's analysis, that "socialism has been tested to destruction". Even as Brown now bids to lead his party, he is pushing the privatisation of health, probation and jobcentres, and insists that public investment be channelled through high-margin City institutions.

Nor did Blair seize only on the first Thatcher revolution. He seized the second as well. In opposition, he had deconstructed the old Labour party and won for the leader untrammelled control of patronage and policy. In office, this process became a near-parody of elective monarchy. Blair's aide, Jonathan Powell, told the civil service in 1997 that they should expect less Magna Carta, rather "a change from a feudal system of barons to a more Napoleonic system". The accusation by the outgoing home secretary, Charles Clarke, that Brown was a "control freak" (strange from Clarke) was greeted with amen across the public sector.

All utopias contain the seeds of their own descent into autocracy. Thus the quest for a privatised Britain ironically led to a more regulated one, in which political activity has come to seem ever more curtailed. This, in turn, invites another revolution, as if to resolve the contradictions of the first two. The public sector, as reformed over the past two decades, is greeted with unprecedented dismay by opinion polls. A restless upheaval envelopes every Whitehall department and "policy silo", as each one seeks to follow the latest Blair initiatives or Brown target, bereft of any ideological compass.

When viewed in the round, Thatcherism's conduct of the public sector is one of extraordinary ineptitude: the poll tax, rail privatisation, on-off hospital autonomy, school testing, computer procurement, farm subsidies, family tax credits. Private finance, said to be "the only game in town", is startlingly expensive. Blair's quest for service delivery through "e-government" is as elusive as his quest for democracy abroad through e-war. Labour's most treasured creation, the NHS, is forced to find upwards of £12bn to pay for a computer system it does not need and must cut swaths through hospital services to do so. To all this, Thatcherism seems to have no answer.

The Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, pointed out Thatcher's vulnerability to revolutionary paradox. She and Marx both saw synthesis in economic progress, a classless society and a utopian withering-away of the state. Both quests failed. The dictatorship of the proletariat - in Thatcher's case, of the bourgeoisie - entrenched itself and defied synthesis. Blair's coalition of private money, rightwing newspapers and executive discretion saw half a million extra civil servants hired to run the state. How could this square with any withering?

The past three years have seen a half-hearted search for a new synthesis, even a "third revolution". The decline in political participation, especially among the young, has been replaced by "just-in-time" activism, galvanised by such second-revolution reforms as the centralisation of planning decisions, the erosion of university autonomy or hospital closures. Politicians such as John Reid, Ruth Kelly and David Miliband have offered speeches and pamphlets on what they call "the new localism". Even Brown has made forays into the language, if not the practice, of decentralisation. While various attempts to refashion local democracy have fallen by the wayside, the British body politic senses that both revolutions have now run out of steam.

Britain was 10 years ahead of Europe in Thatcherism, but is 10 years behind in resolving the battle between localism and central control. It is not just in Norway that the democracy question is being put. It was put, and answered, in Denmark and Sweden in the 1970s, in France in 1982, and in Italy and Spain in the 1990s. (Britain asked it nervously in Scotland and Wales in 1998.) In these cases, pressure from below led to constitutional decentralisation. As a result, Britain today has the fewest elected representatives per 1,000 voters anywhere in Europe. Despite its mayor, London government alone is said to have 10 Blair appointees for every one elected official.

You do not have to be a rabid localist to see a link between public dissatisfaction with public services and the paucity of local accountability. British politicians assert it, as did Blair in opposition and as does David Cameron, probably with equal insincerity, now. Politics talks the localist talk, but never walks it. Without being forced by a mandate to devolve the constitution, politicians will never surrender control. The great test of devolution, freeing local democrats to tax themselves to improve their services, is abhorrent to leaders of all British parties. Centralism's greatest bogey is the "postcode lottery", just as it should be what democracy calls local choice.

Young Britons now view the Thatcher era much as older ones did the bipartisan welfare state. They take it for granted. They never knew a Britain sliding towards the bottom of every league in Europe. But they do wonder "what next?" Unless Britain follows Europe down the path to a revitalised devolution - not just decentralised administration - its public services will remain demoralised and its politics atrophied.

One certain prediction is that rising wealth will not lead to rising contentment with autocratic rule. Prosperity and leisure will give citizens a greater desire to control their immediate environment, in every sense of the term. Thatcherism promised them more power and delivered them less. In the words of the film, it has left them increasingly mad as hell. But as the Norwegians warn us, inertia may close outlets for anger and replace self-government with oligarchy. Democracy is not automatically entrenched in rich societies. Its institutions must be constantly refreshed or they will die.