Book Review

Barometer of political weather

Thatcher and Sons: a revolution in three acts

Britain has a fine tradition of scholarly journalism. In each generation there exists a small proportion of the political commentariat who periodically gather up the treasure buried in their old notebooks and synthesise it to capture an era, a premiership or a big theme. Jenkins' forte is running an argument and he is on top form in Thatcher and Sons.

Winston Churchill famously said of Joe Chamberlain (who never made it to No. 10 though his son, Neville, did) that he made the political weather. Central to Jenkins' thesis is that a combination of Margaret Thatcher and changes in world politico-economics so changed the scope, nature and practices of government in the UK that John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have been trapped in that new weather system ever since, as have the parameters and the language of mainstream British political competition.

Nigel Lawson, when Chancellor of the Exchequer, said much the same thing in 1988 when he told a think-tank audience that over the past nine years, the Thatcher governments had "transformed the politics of Britain - indeed Britain itself - to an extent no other government has achieved since the Attlee government of 1945-51 ... [which] ... set the political agenda for the next quarter of a century. The two key principles which informed its actions and for which it stood, big government and the drive towards equality, remained effectively unchallenged for more that a generation, the very heart of the postwar consensus."

Was Lawson right in 1988? Is Jenkins correct in 2006 to claim that "At the 2005 election all three major parties subscribed to the Thatcherite consensus. Nothing suggested reversion to the status quo ante 1979." At one level they are both right. Nobody, apart from a few voices on the Labour Left, is now pressing the case for a restoration of trade union power to late Seventies' levels or urging a widespread nationalisation of today's "commanding heights" of industry. The argument is about the level and intrusiveness of regulation and the priorities within the 40 per cent of national wealth that is pre-empted for public purposes. And that figure of plus or minus 40 per cent is crucial.

For, in Lawson's 1988-vintage analysis, the pursuit of equality may have given way to the promotion of opportunity, but the state has hardly shrivelled any more than its share of the country's resources has diminished over the past 20 years. Indeed, as Jenkins so eloquently describes, the Blair/Brown state is far more intrusive in the life of the country than Thatcher's or Major's was. Hardly an aspect of our existence is free from the blight of performance indicators and targets. Britain may no longer be a nation in which trade union leaders or chairmen of nationalised industries flourish, but no more do local or other public authorities, whose powers have shrivelled for generations with the big exception of Scotland, whose Executive and Parliament are now free to shape all Scottish policies bar defence, foreign policy, macro economics and social security.

Back to that 40 per cent of Gross Domestic Product which the state, in one form or another, pre-empts. Where Mrs Thatcher differed from Blair/Brown, and now from David Cameron, is that she wished it were nearer 30 per cent - that is, closer to American rather than Western European levels. One of the reasons she felt she had so much left to do when her Cabinet colleagues and her backbenchers brought her down in 1990, was that in 11 years of power, she had not been able to turn the National Health Service into an insurance-based system or even to abolish the BBC licence fee which she likened to taxation without representation. Real-time politics had trumped ideological instincts.

There is, however, a new consensus in 2006 and it's labelled "40 per cent". David Cameron at his party conference prevailed over the minimalist-staters who urged a dash for substantial tax cuts. Blair/Brown, with often different emphases, wish public services to be so swish that the middle classes, who obsess them and their political calculations, will continue to be willing to pay the levels of taxation required to keep Britain a 40 per cent nation. In this sense, they are Clement Attlee's children as well as Margaret Thatcher's sons. The world in which they breathe and plot is a hybrid of both the Attlean and the Thatcher "settlements". The political competition of the 2009 or 2010 general election, therefore, will be between three parties and three leaders vying for who can best fuse the legacies of 1948 and 1988.

All this and more one finds explicitly or implicitly in Simon Jenkins' tour de force, plus the big bonus of his concluding cry for a new and true devolution of real power outwards even as far as the parish councils. For right at the end of the book, the hard-headed political analyst-cum-polemicist gives way to a communard romantic - a very Jenkins-like hallmark.

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